Foreign Policy

The recent protests in Iran, as well as Hezbollah's political defeat in Lebanon days earlier, are the result of Barack Obama's speech in Cairo on June 4.Such nonsense was actually reported by the Washington Post Tuesday.At this time, it appears the real Obama Derangement Syndrome is creating a nexis between anything good that happens anywhere on the planet to some presidential deed (h/t Hot Air):

During an interview with President Obama, Harry Smith asked about recent criticism by Dick Cheney and President Bush: "Leon Panetta intimated that the former Vice President was playing politics with national security issues. The former President has intoned his own displeasure with some of your policy changes. I think they feel like some of the things that you've done, in fact, are treacherous."…

Contrary to the claims of many liberals, at least some of Iran's anti-government protesters are anxious for Barack Obama to lend American support to their cause. An Iranian student interviewed on CNN’s American Morning on Monday pleaded for the world, and President Obama by name, to become more active in assisting the protests against the Islamic regime in Tehran: “International community....…

Obama and Neda: same struggle!Who says Pres. Obama isn't backing the Iranian uprising strongly enough?  Why, supporters of the struggle have chosen to immortalize Neda, the young student reportedly slain by the current regime, by creating a poster of her in the style of the iconic Obama poster made famous during his presidential campaign.Might that have been CBS's subliminal message this morning…

It struck me, in reading this AP dispatch from Tehran by Nasser Karimi and William J. Kole, that the political and media establishment has, in the two decades since the death of the very visible Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, allowed Ali Hoseyni Khamenei, his successor as the Supreme Leader of Iran, to fade comfortably into the background, while still pulling all the meaningful levers of power in…

Boy, the press can really do the nitty-gritty detail work (also saved here) when they set their minds to it (graphics at right via West Coast Outpost):

Question: How do you water down the possible significance of a statement by an Iranian diplomat?Answer: Wait for an AFP journalist to revise a previous raw report.A short unbylined dispatch from the wire service reported that the diplomat "apparently misspoke" when he said that Iran has "the right to a nuclear weapon" not long after the incident occurred. (Dictionary.com tells us that "Used…

The L.A. Times is parsing math.If you were to not read Josh Meyer’s June 17 article very carefully, you might think that 90 percent of the weapons recovered from Mexican cartel raids originated in the United States:The report by the congressional Government Accountability Office, the first federal assessment of the issue, offered blistering conclusions that will probably influence the debate over…

Some attention has been paid to the fact that the microblogging service Twitter had decided to push off its scheduled maintenance Tuesday morning as the situation in Iran became steadily more embroiled in conflict. As it happened, Twitter was a major source of information coming out of that repressed society as news was happening. Twitter had, though, scheduled a few hours down time just when…

[Update, 9:00 pm EDT: Audio and video clips added.] President Obama isn't nearly liberal enough for HBO's Bill Maher. On Tuesday’s Situation Room on CNN, Maher repeated the focus of his rant on his show last Friday night about how Obama hasn't been adequately aggressive. When Wolf Blitzer asked what he was most disappointed about with President Obama, the HBO host went into full denial mode: “…

There was a tell-tale moment during Ed Schultz's repugnant rant on today's Morning Joe. In the course of alleging that Dick Cheney wants Americans to die in a terrorist attack, Schultz boasted: "I got a lot of support when I said that on the Ed program, I got a lot of support overnight when I said it again." [H/t reader Melody and Mitchell Blatt.]Translation: the ratings-starved Schultz will say…

The CBS Early Show continued its usual fawning over Michelle Obama as co-host Harry Smith declared: "They couldn't come from more diverse backgrounds. One grew up in Chicago. The other grew up with a silver spoon...this new royal odd couple, the First Lady and the Queen."Correspondent Sheila MacVicar reported on the First Lady’s relationship with the Queen: "It’s a friendship that began in April…

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann suggested that President Obama’s speech in Cairo may have been responsible for the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections which occurred a few days after the speech. But as Olbermann discussed the possibility that Obama had a hand in the results, he neglected to inform viewers that the apparent 71 out of 128 seats won by…

Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine reading a New York Times column not written by a conservative that claimed "the forces for decency, democracy and pluralism" in the Middle East "have a little wind at their backs" due to the policies of former President George W. Bush?Neither did I, but much to my surprise, such was said by Thomas Friedman in his most recent piece entitled "Winds of…