Quotes:

"If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?" - Peggy Noonan tries to unpack Mrs. Obama's declarations

"...the Messiah of Generation Narcissism" Kathleen Parker joins the new media trend of trying to understand the Obama factor.

This story seems to me not to pass the smell test. It makes the innuendo of impropriety, even corruption, without backing it up. I was taught that before you run something in the newspaper that could ruin somebody's reputation, you'd better have your facts very straight indeed. SeattlePI editor explains why he resisted the McCain story and almost restores my faith in journalistic ethics

Laugh as some may about the Bush Administration's idea to export democracy to the Middle East, they had the basic principle right. The world needs our help more than we need to petition its approval. We are a people who choose our own faith, and, after a civil war and a civil rights movement, a nation where the dignity of each individual human being is accorded respect, and men and women are equal regardless of race, sex, religion or creed.

The Middle East is not like that and George W. Bush thought it wise, for the sake of Arabs and Americans, to try to do something about it, an initiative that inspired some Arabs while it enraged others. (So now guess who the good guys are in the Middle East and who are the bad ones?) What made them like or dislike Bush wasn't the color of the president's skin or his religious faith, but his ideas. It's not clear to me why Americans seem now to be trying to export a very un-American idea - that a man's color and his faith matter. Lee Smith looks at how Obama's colour plays in the Arab world

More quotes, later..

This is later:

Simply Jews links to a perspicacious analysis by Barry Rubin about Iran's latest anti-Israel genocidal threat:

In effect, though, Jafari is erasing all the historical actors in the conflict: Arab states, Arab nationalist groups, Sunni Muslims, and--most remarkably of all--the Palestinians.

The battle is being waged by the heroes of today and the victors of tomorrow--Shia Muslims, and Lebanese ones at that. It is not even a Muslim-Jewish battle (which is in general the Islamist line), because the great majority of Muslims are also not included.

Of course, Hizballah has always maintained that it would fight and defeat Israel, though it was mainly interested in retaking the south of Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. But to talk about Hizballah, and only Hizballah, as fighting and defeating Israel is a whole new theory of the conflict.

Weren't the Palestinians supposed to be the vanguard? Isn't this battle supposedly being waged on behalf of them?

Now, however it is a Shia cause--not an Arab or Muslim one--to be used to promote Iranian hegemony in the region. The Arabs are left out, the Sunni are left out, and the Palestinians are left out.