As Michael has noted, the UN inquiry into Israel’s raid on last year’s Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza largely exculpated Israel. Yet the fact an otherwise balanced report found it necessary to accuse Israel of “excessive and unreasonable” force says a lot about the warped fashion in which the West now views any use of force.

After all, as the report itself acknowledged, Israeli soldiers “faced significant, organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers when they boarded the Mavi Marmara requiring them to use force for their own protection. Three soldiers were captured, mistreated, and placed at risk by those passengers.  Several others were wounded.”

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Wilfred M. McClay, a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, has published an essay about the commemoration of 9/11 in National Affairs that is, in a word, magnificent. (It works in tandem with the wonderful Edward Rothstein essay in the New York Times to which I linked on Saturday.) Both concern the conversion of a crime, an act of war, and an act of mass murder into a meaningless “tragedy” drained of national or ideological or existential ramifications. McClay:

If one were talking only about the tragically lost lives of some 3,000 individuals and nothing else — as if their lives had been lost in a single giant plane crash or auto accident, or as the result of a random psychopathic act — there would be no way of justifying the lavish expense of or the political drama surrounding this memorial. What makes September 11th worthy of public memorializing is that it was not just a tragedy in the lives of these individuals and their families. It was an event that, like all great historical events, cannot be understood if viewed only through the eyes of those who experienced it. But when a spokesman for New York mayor Michael Bloomberg explained his decision to exclude all clergy from the tenth-anniversary observance, he emphasized the mayor’s view that the service should stay focused on the families of the victims. This view is sadly, and ominously, myopic.

Read McClay’s essay. And weep.

During the president’s August vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, former PGA golf champion Paul Azinger offered what at the time seemed like a clever, mocking tweet of President Obama: “Potus [President of the United States] has played more golf this month than I have: I have created more jobs this month than he has.” But given the number of rounds of golf Obama played in August and the number of jobs created in August (0), Azinger’s comments may well be literally true.

When comments that are meant to (gently) ridicule a president turn out to be prescient, you know the chief executive has entered quite a bad patch.

Yesterday, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa said in a warm-up speech for an appearance by President Obama in Detroit that unions would serve as the Democrats’ army in a war against conservatives and Tea Party activists where they would “take these son-of-a-bitches out.” Also on Monday, Vice President Biden referred to his political opponents as “barbarians at the gate” who must be stopped. When asked about Hoffa’s remarks the next day on the “Fox and Friends” cable news program, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz refused to condemn or disassociate her party from such sentiments.

It seems as if it was more than just a year ago the main Democratic Party talking point was that Republicans and Tea Partiers had unleashed a wave of incivility that threatened the very foundations of American democracy. This was a frequent theme throughout the 2010 campaign and culminated with Democrats and liberal pundits blaming the GOP for the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by an apolitical lunatic in early 2011. But since this attempt to demonize conservatives as both violent and anti-democratic failed, Democrats have begun to consistently resort to violent rhetoric of their own, as Monday’s barrage proved. This shift raises not only the obvious question of hypocrisy but also one about the liberal worldview in which those who disagree with Democrats can be dismissed as foes to be “taken out” rather than opponents to be debated.

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Yesterday the president began his newly aggressive push on “jobs” by saying everybody is on board with his program but Congress. It’s either wishful thinking—given that 59 percent of adults now say they disapprove of his handling of the economy, according to the new Wall Street Journal-NBC poll—or simply an effort to create the “do-nothing Congress” narrative Obama needs to use to get himself reelected in 2012. But it’s more striking to note how Obama now claims to be turning his focus toward jobs after a summer dedicated to the debt crisis.

The truth is, that for good or ill, the entirety of the Obama administration has been dedicated to jobs. He came into office vowing to create 3 million of them. The jobs problem was the justification for the $863 billion stimulus bill. “Jobs” was the primary reason given for the auto-company bailouts in 2009, structured as it was to benefit the United Automobile Workers. Even Obamacare was sold in part as a jobs creator, with then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declaring it would “almost immediately” create 400,000 jobs on its way to millions more.

There is no “pivot to jobs.” The Obama administration is and has ever been about “creating jobs.” It’s just disastrously bad at it and about understanding how to promote job creation, that’s all, and there’s every reason to believe Obama and his people remain committed to the same terrible ideas.