Paragraph four is the requisite "to be sure" graf, which explains that there is absolutely no reason why anyone should care about whether or not these two dudes like each other, while also justifying the writing of an article asserting otherwise.

There is, of course, no obligation for presidents to keep in touch with their predecessors, and there is no evidence that Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush bear any ill will toward each other. But their relations do seem particularly awkward — or, more precisely, nonexistent.

How to explain this non-issue? Well, George Bush broke this country in many ways, and Obama is fond of pointing out that he cannot personally be blamed for the terrible things Mr. Bush and his Republican Congress did, which is very rude of him.

But this entire piece is actually about the insane notion, popular on cable news channels and among Republican operatives, that President Obama should've actually thanked George W. Bush in Obama's sad speech announcing the pretend end of the pointless war that Bush started under false pretenses.

There is an obsession among these pundits and operatives with getting Obama to "admit" that he was "wrong" about "the surge." This petty grievance thrives because an entire class of people who were dreadfully wrong about everything desperately wish to be told that they were, in the end, right. About anything. It has nothing to do with any actual analysis of war strategy or evaluation of the conditions in Iraq today.

So, yes, Obama mentioned Bush in his speech, and said Bush loved the troops. Was that enough?

The White House declined to discuss the thinking behind that language. But Bush loyalists on Wednesday were more than a little miffed by it.

“I’m curious why he mentioned President Bush at all if he wasn’t going to give him credit for the surge,” said Gordon Johndroe, who was spokesman for Mr. Bush’s National Security Council. A former top Bush speechwriter and strategist, Peter Wehner, said the mention of Mr. Bush “was at best pro forma; at worst, it was patronizing.”

Our president is so rude to the man who granted him the privilege of trying to figure out an end game to a horrible, open-ended war, started for no discernible reason!

Only the next morning, as confusing early news reports that many observers initially disbelieved began to sink in, did it become clear that McCain had tapped the little-known first-term governor of Alaska. And almost immediately, it also became clear just how impetuous his selection of Sarah Palin was -- how little McCain and his team had actually known about the 44-year-old, and how little she knew about the world.

Not that it mattered. Palin was an instant political and cultural sensation -- and she's proven to be an enduring one, too. But as we mark the second anniversary of her national debut, it's worth remembering just how arbitrary the whole thing was. The only reason anyone knows Sarah Palin's name today, the only reason she's become a media and marketing powerhouse, the only reason she's become the most sought-after endorser in Republican politics, the only reason she up and left as governor in the middle of her term, and the only reason she might run for president in two years is because of the gut call made by one 72-year-old man.

Every four years, when it comes time for a presidential nominee to pick his or her running mate, we are reminded -- over and over -- that the decision is important because the running mate may soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency. And the months leading up to the pick are filled with media commentary about the potential electoral implications of every person thought to be on the running-mate short list.

But Palin's story shows how all of this can miss the mark. She and McCain never came particularly close to winning the White House, and for all of the attention she received, it's doubtful her presence cost (or gained) the GOP ticket a single state in the '08 election. But look at the role she's playing in politics today. The real significance of a running-mate selection, then, is simply that it marks the introduction of a new force into the political/media mix -- a force that could have a major and unanticipated impact on the country's future.

Palin is the most extreme example of this, since she was so thoroughly unknown and because she generated such strong personal reactions from voters. If McCain had opted for Pawlenty instead, Palin's presence in national conversation would probably be limited today to a handful of bloggers trying to draw attention to her -- and being met with a wall of indifference.

But even a well-worn pol can morph into a new force if he or she is chosen as a No. 2. The example of Dick Cheney leaps to mind. Politically, Cheney was an afterthought in the summer of 2000, when he headed up George W. Bush's V.P. search team. After his term as George H.W. Bush's defense secretary ended in 1993, Cheney had set out to run for president in 1996, but his utter lack of charisma yielded poor reviews and he worried about the implications of his daughter's sexuality, which wasn't yet public knowledge. So Cheney took a pass, moved to Texas, and racked up a fortune as Halliburton's CEO. His days as a candidate for office were over -- until Bush put him in charge of the V.P. hunt.

Spying an opportunity to jump back in the game, Cheney recommended himself to Bush. Ultimately, Bush's decision came down to Cheney and one other man: John Danforth, a former Missouri senator and ordained Episcopalian priest whose political moderation was fast becoming archaic within the GOP. At the time, it seemed as if Bush was picking between two boring white guys, and when he chose Cheney, he was saluted by the press for adding "gravitas" to the ticket by choosing a wise, seasoned party elder.

Of course, Cheney proved to be something far different as V.P., amassing and exercising extraordinary influence, especially during Bush's first term. In essence, Cheney seized on the vacuum created by Bush's inexperience and hands-off style. It's pretty much unimaginable that Danforth would have shared Cheney's obsessions with executive power and Middle East militarism, much less the backroom savvy that Cheney demonstrated in pushing his agenda.

Indeed, the most consequential foreign policy and national security voices in the Bush administration  belonged to Cheney loyalists, many of whom owed their slots to him: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith and John Bolton, to name a few. How different would Bush's brain trust have been with a different vice-president? And how differently might that brain trust have responded to 9/11? It's all the consequence of one midsummer decision by Bush in 2000.

Other recent running-mate picks have proven momentous. Take Michael Dukakis' decision to team up with Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. A conservative Democrat from Texas, Bentsen had briefly -- and disastrously -- sought his party's presidential nod in 1976. But by '88, at the age of 68, his White House ambitions seemed a thing of the past -- and they would have stayed that way had Dukakis instead chosen John Glenn, his other V.P. finalist.

But on the national stage in the fall of '88, Bentsen delivered one of the most memorable lines in American political history, his "you're no Jack Kennedy" rebuke of Dan Quayle. Bentsen's presence did nothing to help Dukakis in November, but he emerged from the race as something of a Democratic folk hero, his stature elevated in the same way Mario Cuomo's had been by his electrifying convention address in 1984. That, in turn, made Bentsen an unlikely White House prospect for 1992 -- especially when every other big name Democrat refused to enter the race, scared off by George H.W. Bush's post-Gulf War popularity. Had Bentsen wanted it, he very likely could have secured the '92 nomination, though he too passed on the chance to run. Still, he wouldn't have even been an afterthought had Dukakis not picked him, of all people, to join the '88 ticket.

To be sure, not every running mate turns into a star or assumes a mighty policy-making perch. Jack Kemp's stint as Bob Dole's No. 2 in 1996, for instance, was utterly unremarkable: Dole plucked him from the political sidelines that August, and Kemp promptly returned to the sidelines when the election ended, his reputation neither enhanced nor ruined. It was as if he'd never run at all.

Still, as Bentsen showed in '88, Kemp could have emerged as a new force in politics. The unparalleled visibility that comes with running on a national ticket gave him the opportunity. He just did nothing with it. Not so with Sarah Palin, though. She's been a phenomenon from the moment she and McCain held their first rally in Dayton two years ago. And she didn't need to run in any primaries to make it to that stage, nor did she need national name recognition or money: All it took was McCain waking up one day in just the right mood. In our quirky system, that can be worth more than a lifetime of work. 

The national political press that once imagined he was a principled maverick, because he was a sore loser who delighted in sabotaging George Bush, was also wrong about McCain being vulnerable due to his perceived moderateness. Though they were eventually right that he would probably win, once his opponent, a local talk radio host and former infomercial pitchman, revealed himself as an unelectable charlatan.

At least he will finally get to be back with his only true friend in the world, Lindsey Graham.

Aiding McCain in destroying the once-proud McCain "brand" will be his daughter Meghan, who will continue to pen flighty columns for Tina Brown's expensive experiment in publishing her friends online next to slideshows, and who is touring the east coast promoting her glossy new book about being a young Republican woman who is not scared to say the word "sex," a lot.

His wife will remain, presumably happily, in Arizona and California.

As Zizek might say, isn’t that's the essence of the profession? Doesn’t one truly become a speechwriter the day he or she sacrifices every principle to ventriloquize for the powerful, to create facile rhetoric for those most hostile to your own thoughts?

President Obama, famously, writes his own speeches. Or he talks through ideas with his “special assistant” Jon Favreau long enough so that Favreau can read Obama’s mind on the subject at hand. This is the official White House line on the words that appear on the President’s teleprompter, and who are we to doubt it? “Dreams of My Father” remains the single greatest contribution Barack Obama has made to American culture. A close second place is his speech in Philadelphia on the heels of the Rev. Wright controversy, followed by his speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention. Every word of those works of art is his, so we are told. So let’s assume that Obama, like Zizek, is a member of the fraternity, and that Mr. Favreau is merely a stenographer.

Channeling Zizek again, is it not possible – or even likely – that speechwriter Barack Obama feels a certain emotional and intellectual distance from, maybe even disdain for, President Barack Obama? At his core, the speechwriter Barack Obama is still the cunning idealist of “Dreams of My Father,” still the gifted intellectual focused doggedly on social change. It was speechwriter Obama who introduced issues like talking to foreign despots and the continued importance of race in our culture into the American public square, daring to upset orthodoxy.

Speechwriter Obama understands the zeitgeist while President Obama seems a prisoner to it. Speechwriter Obama slyly dropped praise of American atheists into a speech about race and religion. President Obama was forced to react to the “ground zero mosque” controversy, and stumbled. Speechwriter Obama promised that his presidency would be the time when the planet would be healed. President Obama signed on to more offshore drilling shortly before the Gulf oil spill and has stood mute while Russia burns and Pakistan drowns.

Speechwriter Obama was a deep reader of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre as a student. President Obama barely has time to floss and watch Sportscenter. And it shows. In the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner that galvanized his campaign in October 2007, Speechwriter Obama correctly sensed that we were at a defining moment in our history. “Our nation is at war. The planet is in peril. The dream that so many generations fought for … feels like it’s slowly slipping away. That is why telling the American people what we think they want to hear … instead of telling the American people what they need to hear, just won’t do.”

The nation three years later? Deeper in war. The planet? In greater peril. That dream generations fought for? No longer slowly slipping away, now it’s racing away. And as for what the American people need to hear – do they need to hear that, with unemployment at 9.5%, now it’s time to be conservative and cut spending? Do they need to hear from his Treasury Secretary that their work is done, that recovery is at hand? Do they need to hear that – even though the banks are more consolidated than ever -- the 2008 Wall Street meltdown will never happen again?

I give the president enormous credit for what he has accomplished – a big (if not big enough) stimulus bill, healthcare reform, financial reform, the confirmation of two outstanding Supreme Court Justices. In normal times, this would be a powerful record of accomplishment to run on. But these are not normal times – unemployment is at crisis levels throughout the country -- and President Obama did not come into office with normal expectations. Being a calm, competent manager was never going to be good enough. President Obama swept in – thanks in good part to Speechwriter Obama – on a messianic wing. Conservatives loved to mock the sweeping rhetoric and vague dreams of the Obama campaign, but these were the ideals that captured the public imagination.

How different it feels today to have a President Obama who takes weeks to get angry – a very feigned anger at that – at BP over its destruction of the Gulf. Where is that young community organizer who was outraged by plant closings in South Chicago? Imagine a college student in 2008 who volunteered her nights and weekends for this campaign of hope, only to graduate into a wasteland of a job market and discover that President Obama has no new plans to create job growth?

Speechwriter Obama has a duty to force President Obama to listen to the discontent and not hear Tea Party anger, but rather the continuing demand for change. President Obama cannot hide behind excuses, we the people gave him enormous power, de jure and de facto, and we expect him to act and to strive. President Obama knows that the shock of the 2008 economic crisis has not faded and that there’s a serious risk of an aftershock if Americans cannot be assured that the trauma has passed and the recovery is real. And President Obama – who bragged recently that he “politicks pretty good” – also understands that he has a great, largely untapped, ability to sell ideas that may at first strike the American people the wrong way.

As Zizek has written, the dream of the messianic is deeply human – or as Nietzsche would say, all too human. We are unashamedly committed to universals – freedom, prosperity, peace and, yes, hope. To embrace the messianic, a leader must take a leap of faith and be willing to embrace what appear to be lost causes.

And what is the greatest of all supposed Democratic lost causes? It’s the cause of full employment. It’s what drove FDR to create the Works Progress Administration – to advance the radical thought that Americans out of work are Americans out of dreams and that government must harness these creative drives for public good. This cause drove the Congress of another era to pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, making full employment a national priority and making full employment a mandate of Federal Reserve monetary policies.

Just enforcing this act with the Fed might be a nice start for President Obama. But why stop there? Why not push for a genuine Full Employment Act? Why have Democrats abandoned what was once a pillar of their political platform? Why not pick up the first year’s salary for companies that re-hire workers laid off since the start of the recession? Why not cut the payroll tax in half for employers and employees for the next two years? Why not provide free community college tuition for the unemployed, so they can gain new skills and be ready for economic change? Why not invest in America’s human infrastructure with more day care centers and community health centers? And, yes, why not bring back the WPA to fix sewer and water systems and repair bridges, tunnels and rail lines – the crumbling infrastructure that’s already led to bridge collapses and levy failures and other catastrophes of the long-ago built world.

Could it pass? Worry about that later. Will the Conservatives scream socialism? You bet. But they already do! A party that moralistically attacks and ridicules the unemployed probably would oppose these actions even if they cost nothing. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin will scream just as loudly about our mortgaged future if you propose a $1 million jobs bill or a $1 trillion job bill. So why not propose the latter?

The American people know partisan rhetoric when they hear it – and they expect Democrats to be Democrats. They also understand the limitations of the Presidency. What they don’t understand is how a President who repeatedly says that we “can’t wait” to fix problems, thinks it’s perfectly okay to tell people without jobs and without hope that we’ve done all we can, that you’ll just have to wait.

Failing to pass a big jobs bill, the public can understand that. Failing to care while millions of Americans become chronically unemployed? That’s a road that will surely lead to Barack Obama’s unemployment.

 

In the "it's Barack Obama's fault that he is lied about, constantly," camp is intrepid Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York. In his piece today, headlined "Obama has himself to blame for Muslim problem," York lays out a compelling case: Obama admitted that his grandfather was a Muslim, in a barbershop, in 1985. Also, other members of his extended family were and are Muslims. And so therefore it is accurate to describe Obama as having "Muslim roots," which ABC News and USA Today -- both arms of the Obama administration -- said when Obama went to Cairo. And because people just sort of half-pay attention to the news, they took that to mean that the president is a Muslim. And that, friends, is why it is Obama's fault that people think he's a Muslim.

Oh, wait, also:

Pew asked respondents how they learned about Obama’s religion. Most who believe Obama is a Muslim say they learned it through the media. But 11 percent say they learned it through Obama’s “own words and behavior.” Perhaps they read the White House press pool reports, which often describe Obama heading out to play basketball or golf on Sunday mornings.

I'll admit it took me a minute to figure out what the hell York meant, here (Muslims play golf?), but he obviously is making a little joke about the fact that the president doesn't go to church every Sunday. You know, like Muslims. And the majority of Americans. And President Bush.

This is all the evidence York marshals to support his claim: That Obama is "reluctant to discuss his Muslim roots" except sometimes (when the media bring it up), and that he does not attend church every Sunday (even though there was a huge scandal during the campaign about the Christian church he did attend). But I am sure that everyone who sees this bold headline claim will read the piece carefully and come to their own conclusions.

Meanwhile, Billy Graham's son Franklin adds an interesting wrinkle to the debate: Maybe Obama is, as he claims, a Christian. But that doesn't mean that he isn't also technically a Muslim!

Graham, who has personally prayed to the Christian god with Obama, explained Obama's "secretly technically a Muslim" problem to CNN's John King USA:

"I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name," Graham told John King.

Airtight logic. Obama was born to an atheist who was born a Muslim, and so therefore by the "no-backsies" patrilineal rules of Islam, he was a little baby Muslim, even if he didn't know it.

Where does this nonsense come from, exactly? Well, Graham's entire argument seems to have been cribbed from this hilarious New York Times op-ed from 2008, written by "Center for Strategic and International Studies" fellow Edward N. Luttwak. But I'd imagine that Fellow Luttwak got this clever-dick argument from someone else (possibly an email forward).

Luttwak's very serious and important and not-at-all completely moronic larger point, which was very sensible and totally deserved placement in the opinion section of the nation's most prominent and serious newspaper, was that electing Obama would be a disaster ... for our relations with the Muslim world, because in their eyes, he would be an apostate, on account of his technically being a Muslim baby who eventually converted to Christianity:

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

Thankfully, this dark future where everyone knows Barack Obama is a Christian never came to pass, because of the heroic work of people like Luttwak, Graham and York.

The "scandal" is that these liberal journalists, commentators and academics apparently spent some time trying to figure out who Palin was, and some of them thought the Palin selection would prove to be a mistake, because of her inexperience.

Do you remember 2008? At the end of August, during the Democratic convention, John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Hardly anyone not named Bill Kristol knew anything about her. All I knew was that she was the governor of Alaska and that she had a reputation for being not corrupt.

So the members of Journolist were doing what every reporter and political junkie in the nation was doing: Figuring out who Palin was, how McCain would sell her to the nation, and how Obama would campaign against her. And because many of the participants were avowed liberals, who wrote liberal things for opinion columns or liberal think tanks or blogs, some of the Journolist commentary on Palin concerned the best ways to campaign against her.

There's groupthink here but, as usual, no conspiracy. None of the liberals can even agree on whether or how to criticize Palin.

Here's an example of the coordinated attack, from think tanker Michael Cohen:

The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”

Even though Michael Cohen proved completely correct, Strong quotes a response from another Journolist member saying that the experience argument would just help McCain.

This is the best part, buried at the end of the story:

Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged came from strategy sessions on Journolist. “Here’s my attempt to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of this august list-serve community,” he wrote. And indeed Klein’s article contained arguments developed by his fellow Journolisters. Klein praised Palin personally, calling her “fresh” and “delightful,” but questioned her “militant” ideology. He noted Palin had endorsed parts of Obama’s energy proposal.

So the result of this secretive liberal smear campaign against Sarah Palin was a blog post at Time.com summing up the disparate reactions of the journalists and commentators on the off-the-record listserv to the Palin selection? In other words, this story was already written two years ago.

There's so little here to support the claim that Journolist was a conspiracy to coordinate media coverage that no one serious will come away from this story still imagining that. But the audience isn't "serious" people, on the right or left.

Jonathan Strong ends his story on this ominous note: "That was all on the day of the announcement."

You know what that means, right? Up next: the Bristol and Trig stuff.

(For a more representative example of Journolist discussions -- in context and unedited, even -- The American Spectator has posted a Journolist thread concerning "Japanese tentacle porn.")