Suggesting Israel is responsible for the terror attacks launched against it is senseless enough on its own. But for Norway’s ambassador to Israel reportedly to make this argument – at a time when the shock of the devastating Oslo attack is still lingering – is also profoundly callous. Maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering Norway’s long-standing anti-Israel sentiment, but the ambassador’s timing and tone-deafness is striking:

[Norwegian ambassador to Israel] Svein Sevje said in an Israeli newspaper interview Tuesday that while the Norwergian bomb and gun rampages that killed 76 people and Palestinian attacks should both be considered morally unacceptable, he wanted to “outline the similarity and the difference in the two cases.” …

“We Norwegians consider the occupation to be the cause of the terror against Israel,” he said. “Those who believe this will not change their mind because of the attack in Oslo.”

He added, “Can Israel and the Palestinians solve the problems without Hamas? I don’t think so.”

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Like clockwork, every Republican primary season will deliver some variant on the theme of Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column today:

Pawlenty should become Mr. Republican, a term once reserved for Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio. He personifies the near-total lack of leadership among leading contenders for the GOP nomination. Not only will they not confront Bachmann and the nonsense she spews, but they diligently turn their backs on their obligation to educate their own constituencies.

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U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority has become an increasingly controversial matter in the wake of the group’s decision to bypass peace negotiations and go to the United Nations for recognition of an independent state. But the outlay of funds to the Palestinians may become even more toxic after the release of a report by a media watch organization detailing the payment of salaries from the U.S.-funded PA to imprisoned terrorists.

The report from Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli-based organization that monitors the Palestinian media and culture, said that more than 5,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are getting salaries from the PA.  Though Palestinians held by Israel on charges of terrorism have always received stipends from the PA, the practice was formalized this past April when a new law to that effect was promulgated. The law was reported in the Palestinian official press but went unnoticed by the international media. Given that the United States gives more than $600 million to the Palestinians each year, including $225 million that goes directly to the PA, the payment of these salaries is a violation of U.S. law.

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In an interview in Spiegel Online, Lawrence Summers, former director of President Obama’s National Economic Council, discusses what he is doing these days and talks about one of the causes of rising inequality in America:

SPIEGEL: You just signed on as a senior advisor to a huge venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Do you want to spot the next Mark Zuckerberg?

Summers: It is a fascinating environment. And it is still one of the great strengths of the U.S. economy that you can raise your first $100 million before you buy your first suit.

SPIEGEL: So America is still the greatest place on earth for the lucky few like Zuckerberg, but an increasingly difficult place for the “Average Joe”?

Summers: There is no question that the ability of those with ideas to leverage them in the global economy has contributed to rising inequality and to more rewards for those very few with great ideas — and less progress for average Americans.

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The Washington Post reports that Democratic Rep. David Wu has resigned amid a creepy sex scandal that was fortuitously overshadowed by the debt ceiling debate:

Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) announced Tuesday that he will resign from Congress, four days after a report that a young woman called his office complaining of an “unwanted sexual encounter.”

“I cannot care for my family the way I wish while serving in Congress and fighting these very serious allegations,” Wu said in a statement. “The wellbeing of my children must come before anything else. With great sadness, I therefore intend to resign effective upon the resolution of the debt ceiling crisis. This is the right decision for my family, the institution of the House, and my colleagues.”

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Nguyen Cao Ky, the former South Vietnamese military and political leader, died Saturday. The 80-year-old was no exemplar of democracy, but he was an important partner for the United States during the Vietnam War. As the United States assesses its foreign policy in the light of coups, democratic uprisings, and dictatorial allies, Ky’s story carries lessons still relevant today.

Ky was hardly unique. Chaotic countries often find themselves with a military leader after a coup; the military is simply the best organized among many competitors for power. Such was the case with Ky, who became the prime minister in 1965, then continued in government from 1967-1971 as the vice president under his sometimes-rival Nguyen Van Thieu.

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My heart goes out to Ryan Crocker and John Allen, who have just assumed command of the American war effort in Afghanistan–Crocker as ambassador, Allen as the U.S./NATO commander. They are taking over in the height of the summer fighting season while the Taliban are carrying out an aggressive campaign of terrorism–symbolized by the murder of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the political boss of southern Afghanistan. At the same time, allied will to win is rapidly crumbling–symbolized by President Obama’s decision to launch a premature and ill-advised pullout of all 30,000 surge troops by September 2012. Meanwhile, Pakistan shows no sign of reducing its support for the Taliban and the Haqqani Network; if anything the Pakistanis are further cutting their already tenuous ties with the U.S.

Under those conditions, trying to extract an acceptable outcome from Afghanistan will require a superhuman combination of determination and skill. Luckily, Crocker and Allen are two of the best in the business. If anyone can handle these challenging conditions, they can.

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In the online magazine The Diplomat, former U.S. Representative to the UN Robert O’Brien presents an excellent if disturbing overview of China’s alarming military buildup.

He notes that “China has big maritime ambitions, and they are backed up by a naval build-up unseen since Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to challenge British naval power with the building of the High Seas Fleet at the turn of the last century.”

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It is almost hard to believe there was only one Russian leader in between Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin. Two decades have passed now since Gorbachev oversaw the unraveling of the Soviet Union, yet the revolution has produced something closer to where it started than where Gorbachev’s Western counterparts envisioned it leading. And the frustration has begun boiling over into a public feud between the two men.

“(Prime Minister) Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) has got involved in earnest, but this isn’t working,” Gorbachev told Ekho Moskvy radio this week. He said the current parliament is run by “personal loyalties and nepotism,” and as for the Putin-created Russian Popular Front: “I won’t help them because they are dragging us backward, or slowing us down at the very least… It suits [Putin] because he wants to preserve the status quo and keep his hold on power.”

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The New York Times Caucus blog is claiming the phones in Congress are ringing off the hook today. This is due to President Obama’s televised plea for Americans to contact their representatives and to tell them to back the “balanced” approach to the debt-ceiling crisis that the White House wants. But does anyone really think this stunt is intended to achieve a solution?

The president’s decision to double down on his class warfare rhetoric by painting the Republican majority in the House as the party of the rich was obviously intended as one of the opening shots of his re-election campaign. But it was irrelevant to the debt ceiling talks in which Obama’s demand for tax increases have already been abandoned by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. While there is no way to know for sure what the outcome of the next few days will be, one thing is already assured: the president’s political posturing is irrelevant to the attempt to find a compromise between the two parties on the debt.

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“When one begins with an initial error,” Aristotle wrote The Politics, “it is inevitable that one should end badly.”

In the current debt ceiling debate, the White House began with several initial errors.

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As I wrote earlier today, the announcement that NATO is prepared to let Muammar Qaddafi stay in Libya as part of a peace settlement is a defeat for the United States and an illustration of President Obama’s failure to exercise leadership. But the consequences of this astonishing turn of events will be felt beyond the borders of that unhappy North African country. While those who supported the Arab Spring revolts may have thought intervention in Libya put other dictators on notice their time was coming to an end, Qaddafi’s apparent victory sends the opposite signal.

In particular, the West’s decision to start backing down on Libya will have an enormous impact on the outcome in Syria.

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Now that House Speaker John Boehner has proposed a debt ceiling plan, the question is whether he’d be able to get it through the House. So far, only a handful of congressional Republicans have said they’ll oppose the proposal, but that number is likely to grow now that conservative groups are quickly lining up against it.

The lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation is already urging Republicans to vote against the Boehner plan, and warned this morning it will include it as a key vote on its legislative scorecard. CEO Michael Needham spelled out the conservative argument against the plan in a letter to members of Congress this morning:

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Can an American president call for a speech on prime time television to talk about the weather? We came fairly close to a test of this proposition last night. Americans, who have been hearing almost daily from the president over the last couple of weeks, were now bidden—should one say summoned?—to listen to him in an official Presidential Address, a format that is normally reserved for solemn or important announcements.

Barack Obama pronounced a speech that contained nothing new, and certainly nothing important. The single “action” he called for was to urge Americans to light up the switchboards of Republican members of the House to compel them to support his approach, which includes tax hikes, to address the debt crisis. Apart from the unseemliness of the president trying so blatantly to impose his will on a co-ordinate branch of the government, this plea was completely irrelevant. From the moment talks about of a grand bargain ended last week, Congress–including the leaders of both parties in both chambers–had agreed to move beyond a plan that contains “revenues.” The president, of course, knew this, just as he knows that in the end he will likely sign such a bill.

The real aim of the speech was accordingly to position himself for the next election as the great compromiser and to paint the opposition as extreme. It was a political speech in the guise of an official presidential address.

Will it work? Will the president appear in the public’s eye—and appearance is what this was all about—as a larger figure after this speech than before? There is reason to think that he will not. Obama spoke for fifteen minutes, three times longer than House Speaker John Boehner. But many will think that John Boehner had three times the better in the exchange. Obama displayed all of his rhetorical prowess, his grand style and his characteristic eloquence. The subject of his speech, in line with almost all of his big speeches, was himself—in this case, how he alone is a figure above mundane politics, a Great Compromiser in the midst of a three ring circus. (Other speeches in the past, for example, had Obama as the one voice of civility in a climate of political incivility, or the one post-partisan in a world of partisanship.) All the elements were in place for one of those larger than ordinary mortals’ performances, but the gambit seems to have fallen flat.

Nothing is more difficult from a rhetorical standpoint than to pronounce a speech that follows immediately upon a presidential address. The president holds all the advantages—the setting, the dignity of the office, and, of course, the personal recognition. He has no need to introduce himself.  Almost all of the respondents in these jousts have been bested, sometimes disastrously, with the most favorable result being a draw. Boehner’s performance stands out as the exception. His address was simple and direct, while the president’s was mendacious; his was earnest, while the president’s was self-serving; and his was about the crisis, while the president’s was about himself. Obama strove mightily to get above politics, but failed. Boehner did seek political positioning and succeeded.

Obama, the master orator, has now been defeated on his own chosen ground. Will this leave the emperor without his clothes?

For the first time last night, many of my non-political friends and family noticed there’s a major fight brewing in Washington. It probably has something to do with the fact the “Bachelorette” program was preempted. The consensus I’m seeing from these otherwise disinterested friends is that this fight in Washington is a useless game of political tug-of-war. While it is a game of tug-of-war, the implications of this fight are far-reaching and are an outline of fundamental differences between two halves of this country. The national conversation we’ve now been forced to have is long overdue. The looming threat of default has put a deadline on an admission of an inconvenient truth: We’re broke.

Many are asking, “Why now? Why has the GOP decided after years of raising the debt ceiling, that this time it cannot be done?” The answer is simple: The Tea Party. There was a financial awakening in this country in 2009, starting with Rick Santelli’s CNBC rant. The American people were bailing out their neighbors, their bankers, and their car makers with no end in sight. In light of the financial meltdowns of first world countries in Europe, the conservative wing of the GOP has come to realize there are serious consequences for continuing to write blank checks.

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A pro-Rick Perry group is taking advantage of a new rule in the Iowa straw poll that allows voters to write in a candidate. GrowPAC will air radio ads in Iowa urging voters to write in Perry’s name in the Ames straw poll next month. The move would–if the ad works–help Perry in two ways: it would reveal public support for Perry without having to meet expectations, as he would if his name were officially on the ballot, and it will drain support from Perry’s conservative rivals.

It’s a smart strategy that won’t cost Perry a dime. In a second bit of good news for the Texas governor, a new poll of Republican primary voters in Florida has Perry leading all candidates. It was the first time Perry’s name was included in the poll, so it’s difficult to determine whether this represents a surge in popularity for Perry or simply an expression of support that has been there all along.

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Reports that France has persuaded Britain to agree to new terms for a ceasefire in Libya allowing Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi to remain in the country are a signal NATO knows its effort in the North African nation is failing.

Though the NATO bombing campaign against Libyan government targets continues, the public acknowledgement that “one of the scenarios” that could end the fighting will permit Qaddafi to stay in the country can only mean both France and Britain are coming to grips with the fact the insurgents cannot prevail. This means after months of bombing and incessant talk about Qaddafi having to go, the half-hearted humanitarian intervention could end in a fiasco that will further undermine the credibility of the West.

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I didn’t watch the president’s address live last night, but before reading it I did take a look at the insta-reaction, and there was a stunning lack of intensity in the response to it. It had become clear in the two hours before he spoke that he himself had no particular proposal to push or goal in mind for the speech. Or rather, there were far too many goals—to blame the GOP, to talk about his desire to raise taxes on wealthy Americans even though that appears to be off the table even in the Democratic plan being pushed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid he said he supported, to separate himself from a Washington growing increasingly toxic in the eyes of voters, and to offer a genuine warning to the public of the consequences of a default. It didn’t succeed—in its own terms—in making a strong case for any of these points individually, and collectively they don’t hang together.

It wasn’t just a bad speech. It was a glaringly ineffectual speech. And it adds to a growing impression of the Obama White House that threatens the president’s reelection chances now more than anything else: The impression that he simply doesn’t know what he’s doing. The damage done to him and his party by his ideological overreach was done in 2010; now he is going to be judged on the practical results of his presidential policies. Right now, with economic growth slowing and unemployment actually rising and no serious proposals or plans on the table to help speed up job growth, that’s not looking too good for him. And one gets the sense that, in response, he and his team are improvising wildly, looking for political advantage. The problem with political improvisation is that it only works well when your instincts on how to sell the public on what you’re pitching are sound.

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