A couple of idiots in the audience at the last Florida GOP debate booed a gay soldier when he asked Rick Santorum a question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The booing was disrespectful and immature, and definitely not representative of the larger audience, which seemed much more interested in fiscal issues than rehashing the culture wars. But the Democratic National Committee isn’t about to let a perfectly good fake controversy go to waste, so it spliced the debate scene with some ominous music for its new attack ad:

The ad titled “Not One Candidate,” references an editorial in the Concord Monitor Sunday that said, “The most disturbing aspect of the WrestleMania behavior at the debates is not that some audience members booed a soldier and many cheered death. It’s that not one Republican candidate, and there were nine on the stage on Thursday, spoke up to admonish the crowd and call for civility. Not one candidate, in situations that cried out for it, exhibited leadership.”

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At a speech before the Congressional Black Caucus this weekend, President Obama told the crowd, “I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain.” He also told the CBC to “take off your bedroom slippers” and “put on your marching shoes.” And he scolded them to “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.”

I have written before  about Obama’s deep, almost desperate, need to portray himself as the opposite of what he is, to conceive of himself in a way that is at odds with reality. We have seen it in all sorts of areas, including claiming himself to be a voice of civility, portraying himself as a champion of bi-partisanship, lecturing others about profligate spending, and saying he is the only responsible “adult” in Washington. Now we see this habit in a new arena – this time, the president as Obama the Stoic, a man so committed to “pressing on” for the cause of social justice he just doesn’t have time to feel sorry for himself. Indeed, he has now decided to sermonize to others not to complain, not to grumble, and to “stop crying.”

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I’ve been on the road and so am late reacting to comments Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22, but they are worth considering:

I think over the summer there was a significant spike into what the secretary said earlier with respect to Iran supporting two Shi’a extremist groups, AAH [Asaib Ahl al-Haq] and KH [Kata’ib Hezbollah]. And they have control of that — very clear. Because we went by several channels, but politically to Iraq; Iraq went to Iran, and it stopped. So it is — there’s no question that Iran can control this, and it’s a very dangerous potential. And they’re shipping EFPs [Explosively Formed Projectiles] and IRAMs [improvised rocket-assisted munitions] in particular, and the IRAMs are getting bigger and bigger… If they keep killing our troops, that will not be something we will just sit idly by and watch.

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During Obama’s LinkedIn town hall today, he touched on a provision in his jobs bill that’s supposed to prevent employers from basing their hiring decisions on a job-seeker’s employment status. Because the long-term unemployed are less likely to get hired, the bill would make it illegal for a company to “discriminate” against people who are out of work.

As you can imagine, the law would have some disastrous unintended consequences. From the Oregon Business Report:

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Last week, I noted that William Cohen’s Politico piece, by focusing on off the battlefield issues, ignored the serious battlefield raised by the United States’ increased use of drones. Peter Finn’s report in the Washington Post on America’s development of autonomous robotics – robots with the ability to “think” and act without human intervention – takes Cohen’s approach and doubles down. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most self-absorbed of all?

There’s natural concern –perhaps even natural repugnance – at the idea of machines taking the place of soldiers as trigger-pullers, and you don’t need to think about the Terminator to understand why. And some of the robotics enthusiasts Finn quotes seem to be working undercover for the opposition: Ronald Arkin’s belief it is possible to build “ethical military drones and robots” that would fire with proportionality and recognize surrender, among other requirements, carries less conviction than the view of a University of Michigan expert that common sense is both the most important human skill and the toughest one to program.

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Vladimir Putin’s decision to return to the Russian presidency, despite the drama surrounding the announcement, surprised almost no one. Putin hinted at his return along the way, at times so obviously as to suggest he had lost interest in the game. For example, when he sent his NATO envoy, Dmitri Rogozin, to speak at a conference with President Dmitry Medvedev earlier this month, Rogozin contradicted all Medvedev’s main points. No one would dare show up the president in public like that without Putin’s express direction.

And while that may have been embarrassing for Medvedev, there was no international audience for that episode. The way Putin announced his return on Friday, however, was in the fashion most degrading to Medvedev. He said: “I want to say directly: An agreement over what to do in the future was reached between us several years ago.” In other words, Putin declared in front of Medvedev and while the country was watching that Medvedev never had any power and he never would. But it got even worse for Medvedev, and fast.

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Here’s a timely reminder that liberals haven’t always opposed cuts from the green loan program that funded Solyndra. The National Journal reports Democrats were happy to raid the renewable energy loan budget to fund “Cash for Clunkers” and a bailout for teachers’ unions in the past. But now that Republicans are demanding Democrats choose between the green initiative and averting a hurricane relief-less government shutdown of catastrophic proportions? Solyndra, it is:

But twice before, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), diverted money–$3.5 billion total–from the renewable-energy program that issued loan guarantees to Solyndra to fund other programs. The first time he dipped into the program was to pay for the administration’s ‘cash for clunkers’ program; the second time was for state aid. Democrats weren’t thrilled with Reid, but they kept their frustrations in check. But now that Republicans want to use the clean-energy money for disaster relief, Dems are standing firm.  (“Need To Know Memo,” National Journal, 9/26/11)

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The New York Times had a long and interesting front-page article on Sunday about the Haqqani network, the Pakistan-based  Islamist terrorist group which is responsible for the recent attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul and other outrages. The article reflects understandable fatalism on the part of U.S. officials who have dealt with this evil group; there are suggestions made we need to accept the Haqqanis’ power and perhaps even to reach some kind of alliance with them as we did in the 1980s when we were fighting a mutual foe—the Red Army.

This attitude helps to explain the seemingly inexplicable fact the Haqqani network is still not listed as a proscribed terrorist group by the State Department—a fact which makes a mockery of the entire process for designating terrorist groups. It is high time we took  this step and a few others suggested in a Wall Street Journal editorial–ranging “from designating the Haqqani network a foreign terrorist organization (as a prelude to hitting its finances); withholding $1 billion in military aid to Pakistan in the absence of antiterrorist cooperation; or hitting the Haqqanis ourselves.”

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L. Gordon Crovitz has a good description of the kids who’ve been lining up to earn pepper-spray-victim status by “occupying Wall Street”:

Some protesters were wryly self-aware, such as the one with the sign, “College Taught Me Nothing (But They Got My Money).” Most were typical left-wing critics of markets, Zionism and people who wear fur—perhaps with an exemption for the fellow demonstrator who along with a fur cap wore a long burlap vest and goggles. A woman drew attention by going topless with “Free Bradley Manning” written on her chest, referring to the Army private accused of leaking intelligence reports to WikiLeaks.

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It’s been three months since Obama began urging Congress to move forward on three job-creating trade deals “right now.” And yet the White House still hasn’t submitted the free trade agreements (FTA) to Congress for a vote. While Obama has been blaming congressional Republicans for obstructionism, The Hill reports Democrats are the ones still holding up the deals:

Throughout the summer, Obama has been making the case that the trade accords with Colombia, South Korea and Panama will help the ailing economy by creating jobs. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) disagree.

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Though Democrats have been working hard trying to put a positive spin on polls showing declining support for President Obama even among Jewish voters who identify disproportionately as both liberals and Democrats, the latest and most comprehensive such survey gives the lie to the notion all is well for the Democrats. The American Jewish Committee’s 2011 Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion showed the number of Jews who approved of Obama’s job performance dropping precipitously since just last year. Currently, 48 percent disapprove of Obama with only 46 percent approving. That’s a drop of over 10 percent since last year when 57 percent approved of the president.

That sets up the possibility of a drastic drop in the Jewish vote for the Democrats next year. The AJC survey also showed that when matched up against Mitt Romney, only 50 percent of respondents said they would vote for the president. Considering Obama won close to 80 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008, this raises the possibility of a modern historic low for the Democrats that might rival Jimmy Carter’s poor showing in 1980.

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There have been many warnings issued in recent weeks about the consequences of cutting the defense budget—but little in the way of specifics. That’s because the Defense Department still hasn’t figured out how it will respond to either the $465 billion of cuts Congress has already mandated this year or the additional cuts, amounting in total to roughly a trillion dollars, that could be imposed if a super-committee doesn’t find some alternative this fall. But the House Armed Services Committee’s majority staff has performed a valuable service by releasing a detailed memo spelling out what cuts on this scale would actually entail.

It hasn’t been posted on the Internet yet, but I got a copy of the report on Friday—and it makes for alarming reading. If the Pentagon is forced to slash a trillion dollars during the next decade—which would amount to an 18 percent reduction from the Obama budget projections released earlier this year—the Committee staff projects the total size of the Army and Marine Corps could fall from 771,400 personnel today to just 571,000, a 25 percent reduction that would make it impossible to respond to a range of different contingencies around the world. Some 200,000 soldiers and Marines who signed up to serve their country will be fired—and many of them will be hard put to find work at a time when the national unemployment rate is over 9 percent and the unemployment rate for young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is believed to be over 20 percent. (For wounded veterans the rate is said to be over 40 percent.) We would not only be breaking faith with these heroes but also jeopardizing our security—and that of our allies—in the process.

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Rick Perry came into the Republican presidential race as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. Yet, all his once-promising candidacy may have accomplished is to bring many right-wingers around to Romney. By allowing the former Massachusetts governor to slip to his right on immigration, Perry may have not only sunk his own hopes for the presidency but also strengthened his main rival.

Romney’s main obstacle to the nomination has been the belief conservatives would never forgive him for passing a Massachusetts health care law that might have been the inspiration for Obamacare. But at this moment, the backlash against Perry’s defense of his state’s allowing the children of illegal immigrants an in-state discount for college seems to be even more passionate. This surprising turn of events poses the question of whether it is possible immigration has supplanted Obamacare and tax/budget issues as the top priority for Republicans? While the answer to that question is no, that may not save Perry’s faltering candidacy.

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Here’s the scariest part of events at the UN during the last week: In its obsession with the Palestinian statehood bid, the world seems quite prepared to let the entire rest of the Middle East implode.

Tunisia, Libya  and Egypt all underwent revolutions this year and are struggling to rebuild their countries; revolutions in progress are convulsing Syria and Yemen. Not only is the Israeli-Palestinian arena stable by comparison, but most of these countries, and especially Egypt and Syria, are far more important to the region’s future than the backwater of the West Bank and Gaza. Yet as Lilia Labidi, Tunisia’s new minister of women’s affairs, discovered, nobody at the UN had any attention to spare for their problems:

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Obama’s poll numbers are scraping bottom, his own party is in revolt, and Americans are even starting to get nostalgic for the president Obama “inherited” this terrible economy from.

But on the other hand…have you seen those wacky right-wingers the Republicans are running?

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