As you know, we view the ridiculous Israel-Palestine talks going on in Washington as a piece of political theater being served up by the administration as part of trying to control the media narrative as the elections approach.

No talks can succeed until Hamas and a strong majority of Palestinians are willing to accept a two-state solution, and that has never been the case. Moreover, everyone with a brain knows that Hamas would use the occasion of the talks to kill Jews, which of course has already happened.

Question: was it an immoral (as well as cynical) decision on the part of the administration to hold these high profile, media-event talks, knowing that they would result in multiple slayings of innocent people?

The NYT said this in the run-up to events in Washington, ginving an impression that there would be two pretty large gatherings:

Two political foes –- Glenn Beck and the Rev. Al Sharpton Jr. -– are gathering hundreds of thousands of their supporters on the National Mall today for simultaneous rallies commemorating the anniversary of the March on Washington. The Tea Party faithful assembled before the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this morning waiting for speeches from their superstars, Mr. Beck and Sarah Palin…In a counter-protest, Mr. Sharpton and other civil rights activists will march from Dunbar High School in Northwest Washington to the construction site of the new King memorial…Between the two events, hundreds of thousands of people could swarm the Mall.

To be fair to the Times, its follow-up piece was a little clearer on the numbers: “Beck…event organizers put the number of attendees at 500,000; NBC News said it was closer to 300,000…Across town, several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.” Hard to spin a disparity like that.

A poll by PPP reports some results that illustrate that the political/media establishment of the left has totally lost control of the narrative:

Given what we now know about the monolithic and rather militant partisanship of the media, the Katrina narrative seems even worse than it was at the time. People had adequate notice to get out of New Orleans, but did not, and the local political officials were grossly negligent. Mayor Nagin’s behavior was utterly incompetent, and the deplorable Blanco’s first acts were to keep the feds out and hire a Democratic consultant to shape the media messaging. (Remember how Blanco stiffed both the President and Mayor Nagin at a critical juncture?) But turn on the TV or read the paper and it was all Bush’s fault.

Would it surprise anyone to learn that there was active collusion between Democratic politicians and the MSM to make Bush look bad? And yet the media today seem to be totally unable to control the narrative in a way that helps their team, as the polling results above show. No wonder they have gone berserk.

Charles Krauthammer discusses the Tea Party, Arizona’s illegal immigration law, Prop 8, etc., and the hysterical response they have drawn from the Left:

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

We think that Democrats and the media have been surprised that the old way of silencing the opposition finally and all of a sudden stopped working, and that this explains (in part) why they have become really unhinged about the Ground Zero mosque.

The process began when the Tea Party = Racist meme failed, most notably in the shameful attack launched against the Obamacare protesters early this year. People are tired of being talked down to and lied about (it’s gotten so very, very old). Moreover, when these citizens looked around and saw that they were a pretty strong majority on issue after issue, there was no reason to put up with the accusations anymore. And so their betters are reduced to nothing more than calling them “freakin’ morons.”

The results above are from a CBS poll. The most interesting aspect of this matter to us continues to be that the MSM almost unanimously support a position opposed by a supermajority of Americans — and feel perfectly free to insult their fellow citizens in vile terms (and in ways that are often comically wrong). It’s nice to finally know, once and for all, what the media really think about ordinary Americans. The MSM need never be taken seriously again. (BTW, it would be nice if CBS could learn to spell “don’t”.)

Christopher Hitchens, who, at last observation, was not a salivating right-wing rube, writes on the GZM and the sponsoring imam:

here is Rauf’s editorial on the upheaval that followed the brutal hijacking of the Iranian elections in 2009. Regarding President Obama, he advised that: He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution — to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faquih, that establishes the rule of law.

Coyly untranslated here (perhaps for “outreach” purposes), Vilayet-i-faquih is the special term promulgated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to describe the idea that all of Iranian society is under the permanent stewardship (sometimes rendered as guardianship) of the mullahs. Under this dispensation, “the will of the people” is a meaningless expression, because “the people” are the wards and children of the clergy. It is the justification for a clerical supreme leader, whose rule is impervious to elections and who can pick and choose the candidates and, if it comes to that, the results.

It is extremely controversial within Shiite Islam. (Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, for example, does not endorse it.) As for those numerous Iranians who are not Shiites, it reminds them yet again that they are not considered to be real citizens of the Islamic Republic. I do not find myself reassured by the fact that Imam Rauf publicly endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy…

Let us by all means make the “Ground Zero” debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well.

Hitchens mentions Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who is a rather remarkable man. Also remarkable nine years after 9-11 is that most Americans have very little understanding of the cultures of traditional Islamic societies. The media’s willful ignorance has been on display in its unappealing lectures to the majority of Americans.

Some commentators are wondering if Obama wants to get re-elected. Other commentators note that the polls show a stunning lack of support for the administration’s policies, but no mid-course correction in sight. Others say that Obama is as bad a politician as he is a chief executive. The Washington Post says that 2010 could be a worse massacre than 1994. Yet the President seems unperturbed. How does this picture make sense?

One possibility is that it doesn’t make sense, and that we are witnessing a series of spectacular blunders on the part of the administration and the Democrat Party. But there’s another possibility as well. If the administration’s roots come from the far left and if there is an iron will to advance that agenda after November, having an obstructionist Congress is far from the worst thing that could happen to the Obama administration.

If we were the President and a committed radical, and if we also knew that the media would give us cover by calling our opponents every name in the book (as they have recently), we’d chart a bold course. We’d create millions of new instant citizens to support our plans. It would be an incredibly risky stroke, but the dividends would be fantastic if we got away with it.

(Final point: scenarios like this are the stuff of fiction of course. Hmmm, fiction, where have we seen that before?)

Frank Rich damns the “virulent Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats.” Maureen Dowd says this:

The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment. The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems — making them easy prey for fearmongers.

Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.

It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who mocks “Imam Obama” as “America’s first Muslim president,” and by the evangelist Franklin Graham, who bizarrely told CNN’s John King: “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.” Graham added: “The teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them. Their goal is world domination.”

A poll last week by the Pew Research Center tracked a strange spike in the number of Americans who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a Muslim. And even the ones who don’t think he’s a Muslim don’t necessarily believe he’s a Christian.

(C. Edmund Wright has a response to the Times and similar outlets in the AT.) Not to be outdone by the Times, CNN, which previously reported that seven out of ten Americans oppose the project, has a pictorial history of American religious intolerance posted now.

There sure is a crack-up going on, as Maureen Dowd said. However, the crack-up seems to us to be that of the MSM, so shocked to find that the vast majority of their countrymen are sick and tired of being insulted, lectured and talked down to by people who, for no good reason, are convinced of their own importance and moral superiority.

Indeed, it probably goes further than that. We think there is the shocking realization by the MSM that they find themselves with so little power in setting the journalistic agenda and dictating what the public should think. Note Dowd’s and Rich’s ascribing the political opinions of a supermajority of Americans to the influence of a cable news channel and a talk show host. The MSM have lost their power so they think it has flowed into some other centralized source, when in fact they have been undone by the decentralization of news availability. No wonder they sound so over-the-top and lost.

(More: Richard Cohen in the WaPo and a report from NPR make the Times commentators look almost moderate by comparison. HT: BOTW)

TIME ran a poll and then started yelling about it (much as the rest of the media are doing):

Are One-Quarter of Americans Freakin’ Morons?…That’s not a rhetorical question, although the way some people have reacted to yesterday’s TIME and Pew polls about the percentage of Americans who think Obama is a Muslim, I wouldn’t be surprised if they took it as such. Sure, it’s possible that one-in-four (or five, depending on the poll) Americans actually believe in their hearts of hearts that Obama is a Muslim, despite the fact that he became a Christian in his twenties, has spoken during the presidential campaign and since about his Christian faith — even referencing his belief in “our risen Savior” — and attends Christian worship services.

He is not, despite what Franklin Graham thinks, a Muslim who converted to Christianity. If anything, Obama was a secular agnostic by default who became a Christian once he reached adulthood and started thinking seriously about faith.

There’s something odd about the tone of this piece. Its author Amy Sullivan is so insistent and categorical in her writing. What’s up with that? And then there’s the matter of TIME creating the basis for a story — it ran the poll and asked the question after all — and then shrieking about the results. It’s like TIME had an agenda or something.

As for the issue at hand, we don’t care whether Obama is Zoroastrian — we just wish he knew as much about events in American history like the Berlin Airlift and D-Day as he obviously does about Islam. (Super fun bonus: American Jews leaving the Democrat Party in droves.)

Get ready for political theater as the administration and the media try to shape the discussions during the political season — Act I, if you can believe it, is a new round of Arab-Israeli peace talks, announced by Hillary Clinton:

The breakthrough after a nearly two-year hiatus in face-to-face negotiations brings the two sides back to where they were when the last direct talks began in November 2007, near the end of the Bush administration. Those talks broke down after Israel’s 2008 military operation in Gaza, followed by Netanyahu’s election last year on a much tougher platform than his predecessor.

Friday’s announcement came after months of shuttle diplomacy by the Obama administration’s Mideast envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell. It also followed a period of chilly U.S. relations with Netanyahu, primarily over expansion of Jewish housing on disputed land.

Under the agreement, Obama will hold separate discussions with Netanyahu and Abbas on Sept. 1 and then host the dinner, which will also be attended by Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Egypt and Jordan already have peace deals with Israel and will play a crucial support role in the new talks. Also invited is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the special representative of the “Quartet” of Mideast peacemakers — the U.S., the U.N., the European Union and Russia.

On Sept. 2, Clinton will bring Abbas and Netanyahu together for the first formal round of direct talks since December 2008. At that point the parties will decide where and when to hold later rounds as well as lay out what is to be discussed. U.S. officials have said following rounds are likely to be held in Egypt.

This is just more expensive rubbish, and it does the US no good to lend whatever credibility it has left to this charade. Here’s our thought on when peace talks might be useful: when Palestinian maps of the Middle East include a distinct country called Israel, there might be some basis for talking. Until then, let’s save time, money and credibility and skip this farce.

This is from a ppt on Obamacare based on polling by Democratic firms. Note the last point. It stands in contrast to the way the legislation was sold by the flim-flam man and the media. If this scam were in the private sector, people would be in jail by now.

Democratic pollster Doug Schoen says that Obama is governing against the will of a majority of Americans, and that he has been told this by none other than his own pollster, Joel Benenson:

he has systematically put forth policies the American people do not want. The net result is a crisis of confidence and legitimacy in the American political system and our institutions. The president is now at record low levels of approval — close to 40 percent overall, and in the mid- to low 30s among swing voters…

The Benenson survey shows that the administration’s approach is fundamentally at variance with the one voters desire. Voters favor tax cuts over government investment by a clear majority and are looking for candidates and parties that champion fiscal discipline, limited government, deficit reduction, a free market, pro-growth agenda, and comprehensive plans to create employment opportunities, enable entrepreneurship, and aid business creation.

Indeed, when asked which approach to strengthening the economy they prefer, 54 percent of the respondents in the Third Way/Benenson poll preferred cutting taxes for businesses to help jump-start private sector job creation and economic growth, while 32 percent said they prefer making new government investments…

the swing voters who hold the fate of the Democratic Party in their hands care about three things first and foremost: reigniting the economy, deficit reduction, and job creation. Looking ahead to the November midterm elections, more than twice as many voters said they would prefer a candidate for Congress who will start from scratch with new ideas to shrink government, cut taxes, and grow the economy (64 percent) over one who will stick with Obama’s economic policies (30 percent).

What the heck is going on? It is perfectly obvious what needs to be done to fix the economy, and yet we get weird distraction after weird distraction from the administration. One day it’s Arizona, the next day it’s a mosque. Some days we think there’s a super-clever plan behind all this, because it is otherwise nearly impossible to explain the cosmic incompetence of Obama and his staff.

The only thing that is perfectly clear at this point is that the media’s contempt for ordinary Americans is now no longer hidden and is plainly on display. That’s some kind of progress at least.

Peter Beinart makes an unwittingly revealing point in the course of taking the media’s party line in the mosque controversy:

it’s time for New Yorkers to stop talking haughtily about the prejudices of flyover country. According to Fox, 30 percent of Americans support building the mosque near Ground Zero. In New York City, according to Marist, it’s 34 percent. That, evidently, is the margin of blue state decency. Turns out that when push comes to shove, folks in the Big Apple are about as concerned about the rights of Muslims as folks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Who says we’re a nation divided, that we can’t find common ground? Almost a decade later, we’ve finally done it: The memory of September 11 has brought us together again.

We are beginning to have a theory about the ferocity and volume of the Democrat-Media-Left’s politically crazy opposition to what 7 out of 10 Americans think.

In the wake of 9-11 we began to see lapel flags on politicians and newsmen, and it often seemed out of character: They had to act like they approved of the warmongering rubes that comprised the vast majority of Americans at that time. But it’s been almost a decade since 9-11. We believe we’re now seeing what many on the Left really thought in those bad old days but were afraid to express, and that’s why they’re doubly angry and loud today.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi wants to investigate opponents of the Ground Zero Mosque:

There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,

A mere 27% of New Yorkers support the project, and Pelosi goes ballistic? This is crazy. And we suppose she can investigate Harry Reid while she’s at it.

The Politico’s Roger Simon joins others in the media in mocking two-thirds of Americans as rubes and bigots:

A recent CNN poll found that 68 percent of Americans do not want a mosque built close to ground zero. Which should mean: end of story. That’s all she wrote. Let’s move on to the next crisis. It appears, however, that at least on this occasion, Obama does not care what the polls say…

Maybe Obama is disconnected. After all, as a former professor of constitutional law, he actually knows what the Constitution says. His opponents have no such fetters. They know what they want the Constitution to say: yes to guns, no to gay marriage and never to mosques close to hallowed ground, though churches and synagogues are OK. What’s so wrong with that? I’ll bet they poll great.

Actually, the polling does not support Simon’s contention. What is most fascinating about the mosque controversy is that so many in the media — simultaneously and all of a sudden — have no reluctance to display their revulsion at what a supermajority of Americans think. It feels like some turning point has been reached, though we’re not quite sure what it all means yet.

Josh Marshall is talking about xenophobia and religious hatred in the matter of the Ground Zero Mosque. Mark Halperin says similar things, but a little less overtly. Eugene Robinson talks about lies, distortions, jingoism, and xenophobia. And there are many other examples of similar writing.

A few points seem noteworthy to us. First, these writers all acknowledge that a huge majority — two-thirds — of the American people oppose the WTC area project. Second, these writers all ascribe the basest motives possible to these opponents, a completely unwarranted inference. Hell hath no fury like a MSM viewpoint scorned.

What does it say about how those in the media regard themselves that they think it is proper for them to be lecturing a supermajority of Americans, and to do so in the most insulting terms possible?

Paul Mirengoff talks about the former effectiveness of the President’s rhetorical style. (It is no accident that the words the media and so many Americans swooned over in 2007-2009 were composed by three guys, none of whom was over thirty.)

First, Obama was able to cast himself as a reasonable man, capable of seeing both sides of an issue. Second, he was able to cast himself as a decent and charitable man, capable of seeing the good in the fiercest of clashing adversaries. Third, he was able to cast himself as an intelligent man (albeit in the facile manner of a bright college sophomore or a slightly above average law student), capable of finding similarities where lesser intellects can spot only differences. Finally, and most importantly, Obama the synthesizer cast himself as a problem solver. His seeming ability to identify common ground was not just an exercise in intellectual nimbleness and human decency. For many, it held out the promise that longstanding conflicts might be made to recede.

But now most everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows they were conned in 2008 by a guy whose actual beliefs bear no resemblance to the words the speechwriters put in his mouth. Question: what do you call a guy who disses Israel in words and deeds, bows to the Saudi king, appeases Iran’s mullahs, changes NASA’s mission in a very weird way, has senior officials legitimizing Jihad, and endorses the adhan at Ground Zero? Answer: not your average American.

Somehow the US has suddenly become Albania or some other moth-ridden, impoverished eastern bloc satellite of the USSR, if the Chevy Volt video below is any indication. This is a devolution so steep and so swift it’s hard to believe. HT: Iowahawk

PS: it’s hard to imagine the America of today (at least as it is currently being governed) having the will and wherewithal to muster the effort that ultimately resulted in VJ-Day.

Rasmussen‘s polling shows that the country is deeply, but not closely, divided — two thirds of voters are fed up with the current trajectory:

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats feel the country is heading in the right direction.

Ninety-two percent (92%) of Republicans and 70% of voters not affiliated with either political party feel the country is heading down the wrong track. Sixty-five percent (65%) of all voters say the country is heading down the wrong track

What is astounding and mystifying is that, on issue after issue, 60-70% of the country is opposed to what Congress and the Obama administration are doing, but these politicians just don’t care what a landslide majority of American citizens think. One way or another, this will not end well.

What’s the difference between a $375,000 vacation in Spain and a $200,000 set of china? Answer: the Reagan china contributed to the American economy and is still in the White House.