The back-and-forth within the anti-sharia community about whether or not Rick Perry is a “fifth columnist” candidate continued this week, with Center for Security Policy’s Dave Reaboi and Ace of Spades both coming to Perry’s defense.

At Counter Contempt, David Stein also analyzed the “controversial” Muslim history curriculum Perry helped coordinate in Texas, and skewered the idea that it’s a pro-Sharia program. You can comb over the whole plan here, but here are a few excerpts:

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Egyptian journalist Mohamed abd al-Raouf told me the entire tourism industry in his country is likely to resist the Muslim Brotherhood because Islamism in anything but its weakest possible form will destroy business. The AKP hasn’t harmed tourism in Turkey, but it hasn’t placed a ban on alcohol, covered up women, or done much of anything, really, that makes vacationers think of the Saudis, the Iranian regime, or the Taliban. The Muslim Brotherhood, though, just announced it wants to regulate the behavior of foreign tourists who visit beach resorts like Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh.

“Beach tourism,” said Mohamed Saad al-Katatny from the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, “must take the values and norms of our society into account. We must place regulations on tourists wishing to visit Egypt, which we will announce in advance.”

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In the wake of the Commerce Department’s report downgrading our economic growth in the second quarter of this year to a measly 1.0 percent (which followed  a first quarter growth rate of 0.4 percent), Reuters reports, “Vice President Joe Biden said on Friday the U.S. economy needed more stimulus to get it moving, putting in a plug for government measures shortly before the White House unveils new proposals to boost job growth.”

And why not? After all, we haven’t tried that before.

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Apparently Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind Libya policy has been vindicated. Or so we’ve been hearing from the president’s overjoyed friends in the media. The latest is David Remnick, who writes in the New Yorker, “Part of Obama’s anti-doctrinal doctrine is that it insists on the recognition of differences in a way that Bush’s fixed ideas did not.”

In other words, our thoughtful president, unlike our cowboy president, grasps critical nuances of culture, region, and politics. This, in turn, allows him to tailor his policies to meet each unique challenge—like Libya—on its own terms. Bravo. Except this oft-told tale fails to explain why Obama has handled every wildly varying case of threatened democrats—whether in Honduras, Eastern Europe, Iran, Egypt, or Libya—in the exact same way: indifference followed by tepid, last-second support for freedom.

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Sen. James Inhofe endorsed Rick Perry this week, and he’s not wasting any time going after the competition. In an interview with the Washington Times’ Ben Birnbaum, Inhofe took a swipe at Romney’s wishy-washy position on anthropogenic climate change:

 “I think people need to make up their minds,” said Mr. Inhofe. “You know, we’ve had a lot of time, 10 years we’ve been thinking about this. We ought to decide where we are and not try to play both sides.” …

Mr. Inhofe, who says he knows Mr. Romney personally and likes him “very much,” speculated that Mr. Romney was trying to “broaden himself to capture part of the other side.”

“I think it’s not a good political move,” Mr. Inhofe said. “It doesn’t show a lot of strength when you don’t have a firm opinion on an issue that’s been around for 10 years.”

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“Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?” Jonathan Alter writes in his column.

Alter tells us he’s not talking here about Obama as a tactician and communicator, and he’s not interested in hearing ad hominem attacks or about people’s generalized “disappointment.” (Neither am I.) He wants to know on a substantive basis why Obama should be judged to have failed so far.

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Politico reports on the time-crunch Sarah Palin will face if she decides to make a late entry into the presidential race. In short, there are a lot of legal hoops and tight deadlines a late-entry candidate would have to deal with. The most difficult obstacle seems to be the convoluted requirements to get on each state ballot:

But if she does want to run for president, she’ll have to get on the ballot. Palin has gestured vaguely at various self-imposed deadlines — the latest being late September — but there are some drop-dead dates that she cannot escape, starting with Oct. 31.

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Jonah Goldberg has an excellent column today defending Rick Perry against the coastal cultural bias that resurfaces every election cycle. But Goldberg also grapples with the fact that he’s growing weary of fighting the silly battle. “Conservatism is starting to have an identity-politics problem all its own,” he writes, adding that conservatives should focus their defense of a candidate on his plans, not his personality.

But today’s David Brooks column presents an interesting challenge to Goldberg.

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More evidence is emerging of Fareed Zakaria’s political science astuteness (see my earlier post here). Recall that Zakaria thought America’s political paralysis was to blame on its presidential system.

Two days ago, Japan’s credit rating (a parliamentary system), was downgraded by Moody’s. Zakaria’s enthusiasm for parliamentarianism over presidentialism rested, among other things, on the evidence that so many parliamentary democracies kept their triple A rating (OK, he included Switzerland in the list, not a parliamentary democracy, but that’s another story), as opposed to the U.S., whose rating was downgraded one notch by Standard & Poor’s in recent weeks.

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