All of which puts the public concerns expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the negotiating process that provoked the scorn of President Obama and much of the chattering classes in both the United States and Israel and in a very different light. Though the consensus in the foreign policy establishment is that much more time must be given to let diplomacy work, if this is the direction in which the talks are heading, Netanyahu is to be forgiven for thinking the Iranians have played the West for suckers.

President Obama took umbrage when Netanyahu said that it appeared that the first round of the P5+1 talks resulted in negotiators giving away “freebies” to Tehran’s envoys. But with Iran virtually declaring victory even before the next scheduled gathering in Baghdad later this month, that may turn out to be a generous evaluation.

This also lends credence to those who believe President Obama never had any attention of taking action on the nuclear threat but was merely talking tough for the benefit of pro-Israel voters while the diplomatic process enabled him to stall until he is re-elected and thereby have the “flexibility” to accept a policy of containment. This thesis holds that the only purpose of the talks was to prevent Israel from attacking Iran on its own.

However, if we accept the premise that the president is sincere in his desire to forestall an Iranian bomb (the point of view championed by Jewish Democrats and other Obama admirers), the coming talks present a peculiar challenge for the administration.

President Obama has taken great pride in having assembled an international coalition to oppose Iran, but now that this group is involved in talks with Iran, he is also its prisoner. The United States may have no intention of acquiescing to Iran’s demands about refinement or stepping back from the harsh sanctions that were belatedly placed on Tehran. But if the EU, Russia and China are all prepared to accept a deal that will enable Iran to continue its nuclear program, the president is going to be faced with a difficult choice. He will either have to repudiate the deal that Ashton and the other parties want to cut with Iran (and thereby embrace the sort of American unilateralism that he sought to replace when he succeed President Bush) or go along with something that he knows will present a grave threat to U.S. security. And, contrary to both the hopes of his friends and the fears of his detractors, he may not be able to put off crossing his Iranian Rubicon until after the election.

The only way to avoid such a choice is to do something that the president is equally uncomfortable with: exercising international leadership. Allowing Ashton it run the show in Baghdad is very much in keeping with the president’s predilection for “leading from behind.” But unless he gets directly involved in this process, he is going to be stuck with an indefensible deal that will give the lie to every statement he’s ever made on Iran. The coming weeks will tell us a lot about whether the president meant what he said about Iran or if he is able or willing to derail a negotiation that is heading inexorably toward an Iranian triumph.

Iraq’s government has been carrying out mass arrests and unlawfully detaining people in the notorious Camp Honor prison facility in Baghdad’s Green Zone, based on numerous interviews with victims, witnesses, family members, and government officials. The government had claimed a year ago that it had closed the prison, where Human Rights Watch had documented rampant torture.

Since October 2011 Iraqi authorities have conducted several waves of detentions, one of which arresting officers and officials termed “precautionary.” Numerous witnesses told Human Rights Watch that security forces have typically surrounded neighborhoods in Baghdad and other provinces and gone door-to-door with long lists of names of people they wanted to detain. The government has held hundreds of detainees for months, refusing to disclose the number of those detained, their identities, any charges against them, and where they are being held.

That certainly doesn’t sound like the actions of a prime minister interested in upholding the rule of law or in establishing a sound basis for Iraqi democracy. The tragedy is that, in the days when there were still U.S. troops in Iraq, the U.S. commanding general undoubtedly would have gone along with the U.S. ambassador to Maliki’s office and read him the riot act over such egregious misconduct. Similar Iraqi torture operations had been uncovered in the past and disbanded under American pressure.

With our troops gone, we have now lost a good deal of leverage to influence the actions of the Iraqi government. We must use what leverage we still have–Iraq is counting on arms sales from the U.S. to deliver F-16s and other valuable systems–to try to keep Maliki in check. But it won’t be easy. It may not even be possible. For all our disagreements about Maliki, Michael and I at least agree that withdrawing American troops entirely was a mistake, and one for which we–and the long-suffering people of Iraq–are likely to pay a steep price.

On the campaign trail for the presidential election, now only nine days away, the Muslim Brotherhood has taken a sharp turn rightward…
“We are seeing the dream of the Islamic caliphate coming true at the hands of Mohammed Morsi,” said cleric Safwat Hegazy at a campaign rally for the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate for president.

According to a Muslim Brotherhood preacher, incidentally, the capital of that revived caliphate will be Jerusalem. For the Brotherhood, in other words, “the dream of the Islamic caliphate” is a foreign policy package.

And now here is State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland last March, downplaying the rise of Islamists in Egypt. Obama had spent months punting on the issue, and the administration found itself needing to get out of grim news cycle after news cycle. The result was a pattern of willful denial, including these unblinking statements about the Egyptian Constitution panel:

“We’re not going to prejudge, obviously, the work of this [Constitutional] panel,” Nuland said… “This panel is from the elected parliament, so having been elected democratically, it’s now their obligation to uphold and defend and protect the democratic rights that brought them to power in the first place.”

Egypt’s presidential candidates, who recently sparred in a televised debate about who will implement sharia more, seem to part ways with Nuland over liberal democratic rights. So do the Egyptian courts. So does the Egyptian public. The question arises – as usual – whether the administration is being unblinkingly dishonest or mindblowingly naive.

Populist Islamism would be less of a problem if there were any Egyptian checks left on religiously-motivated violence. Egypt’s Christians are openly predicting that the status quo – which already involves anti-Christian attacks committed with uttery legal impunity – is going to seem bucolic compared to the post-election environment. And of course, anti-Semitism is so deeply ingrained that political operatives go on TV to accuse journalists of being Jews: “I intend to file charges against you tomorrow and you will have to prove otherwise.” Charming.

Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996).”

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

I’m not sure who this looks worse for: Harvard Law or Elizabeth Warren. Does Warren still hold the law school’s distinction as its “first woman of color”? Apparently not. That label has since been granted to Lani Guinier, President Clinton’s controversial assistant attorney general nominee, who was tapped for a tenured Harvard Law position in 1998.

So what happened between the years of 1996 and 1998? Why did the school decide it no longer considered Warren its first “woman of color”? Was it because, as the New England Historical Genealogical Society announced this week, there appears to be no proof of Warren’s claims she is 1/32 Cherokee?

Sen. Scott Brown has continued to call on Harvard to release Warren’s hiring records. Based on the Fordham article, it seems the law school has some responsibility to clear up – for history’s sake – the confusion over who it hired as its first “woman of color.”

Mitt Romney has moved out to an eight-point lead over President Obama in North Carolina after the two men were virtually tied a month ago.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in the Tar Heel State shows the putative Republican nominee earning 51% of the vote to Obama’s 43%. Two percent (2%) like some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

That’s a big change from last month when Romney posted a narrow 46% to 44% lead over the president in Rasmussen Reports’ first survey of the race in North Carolina.

Democrats have signaled North Carolina’s importance as a key swing state by deciding to hold their national convention in Charlotte this summer.

The Democrats have put themselves in something of a bind by deciding to hold the convention in North Carolina and consequently emphasizing its importance as a swing state. Even though North Carolina went for Obama by a miniscule margin in 2008, some political observers had already put it in the Romney column months ago. Jeff Zeleny at the New York Times excluded North Carolina from its swing state list back in March (he characterized it as “leans Republican,” but also added that it was the “most competitive [of the lean-Republican states] and could become a tossup as the campaign develops.”).

Ed Morrissey looks at the internals, which show Romney picking up a remarkable portion of Democrats in the state. Pay close attention to the women’s vote as well:

Independents break narrowly for Romney, 49/45, but Romney also gets 18% of Democrats while losing only 6% of Republicans.  That 18% of Democrats looks awfully close to the 20.3% that voted “no preference” in last week’s primary rather than cast a vote for Obama, too, for a little independent corroboration of that number.

Romney leads among men 50/44, but does even better among women, 53/41.  That will send a shiver up spines at Team Obama.  Rasmussen uses three age demos, and Obama wins the youngest, but only 50/39, another red flag. Romney wins wide majorities in the other two, including a whopping 68/30 split among seniors.

Jonathan wrote yesterday on the CBS News/New York Times poll, which showed Romney leading with women nationally. Like Obama’s gay marriage endorsement, the Democratic Party’s “war on women” rhetoric may have worked to energize the base and donors, but it’s not helping with swing voters.

This means sooner or later there will be another Capitol Hill confrontation in which the two sides will seek to stand on their principles while demanding their opponents give up theirs for the sake of good government. If Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is to be believed, that next round won’t take place before the November election, because he said the government has the “tools” to keep the ship of state afloat until early next year. Let’s hope he’s right, because the answer to this stalemate won’t be found in the posturing of the parties or the somewhat disingenuous pious calls of President Obama for compromise. The only solution to this problem is to have an election.

What’s wrong about much of the rhetoric used in the debt ceiling debate is the presumption that the two parties are not offering clear choices. Rather than spend another summer badgering each other to act in a manner contrary to the promises they made the voters, what the parties need to do is to simply go to the people and ask for a mandate. While such a standoff in a parliamentary system would result in the government’s fall and new elections, our Constitution requires that we wait until the next federal election for the same remedy.

The current situation is the result of having a House of Representatives that was produced by the Republican landslide in 2010 and a Senate with two-thirds of its members who were elected in the Democratic years of 2006 and 2008 when they also had one of their number elevated to the White House. What is needed this year is a clear answer from the electorate in which they choose a Congress and a president of the same party who can then put into effect the budget and spending plans they campaigned on.

It is possible that in November the voters will duplicate this unhappy situation by re-electing President Obama along with a Republican Congress. It is also possible, though less likely, that a President Romney will be faced with at least one chamber controlled by the Democrats. If that happens, then it will be time to talk compromise again, as it will not be possible for both sides to have their way.

But until that happens, it would be far better if we heard less talk in Washington about letting the “adults” set the agenda. That’s just another way of saying that we must continue with business as usual and put off making any decisions about reforming the system. While the DC establishment deprecates the efforts of some members and activists to put an end to the governing class merely dividing the spoils, calls for bipartisanship on the budget is merely a cover for avoiding fundamental change.

The two sides of the political aisle have competing visions about how we should operate the government. Romney laid down a marker on this issue yesterday with a speech in Iowa about the “prairie fire of debt” spreading through the nation while the president hasn’t let up with his calls for taxing the rich (even though that won’t do a thing to solve the budget tangle). Instead of pressuring those elected to stand up for one of those visions and betray the voters who sent them to Washington, it’s time to tell the voters to choose. That is the only and the best solution to any political deadlock.

As long as a dozen or even two dozen Western warships are forced to police an area of ocean the size of Texas, hoping they will catch pirates in the act, they have little hope of stopping pirates. The only way to be effective is to hunt down the Somali pirates, on both the sea and on land, and mete out swift and certain justice.

The U.S. has mounted a few daring operations that show the spirit required; in 2009, for example, SEALs killed three pirates who were holding an American merchant skipper. The U.S. Special Operations Command and CIA have also launched some strikes against Islamist terrorists in Somalia. But we have resisted doing what the Europeans just did–attacking pirate lairs. Presumably, this is another example of President Obama’s “lead from behind” doctrine which is thrusting European military forces, willy nilly, into the lead in all sorts of areas. It is a good thing the Europeans are doing more, but one can only imagine how much more effective anti-piracy efforts would be if the U.S. were to be as aggressive as our European partners, who have seldom been noted in recent years for a surplus of martial spirit.

Americans find Kim mythology endlessly funny for two reasons: first, it’s outlandish; second, it’s desperate. In the United States, allegiance to elected leaders isn’t obtained with fairytales, historical embellishment, and mandatory celebration. It’s earned with responsiveness to popular sentiment, sound leadership, and policy results. Gimmick-laden personality cults are for self-appointed paranoiacs who can’t deliver the goods.

Which is probably what Americans are thinking about since Seth’s discovery yesterday that Barack Obama has inserted his name into White House presidential biographies starting with Calvin Coolidge’s.

While this kind of thing is new for American heads of state, it’s old hat for this one. It started before he ran for office. Exhibit A in the myth-making project is Dreams from My Father, a 1995 text on the genesis of the character who became president. Now revealed as a patchwork of “composite” people and events, Dreams can be seen properly as a life in parables. There is the Parable of the American in the Developing World, the Parable of the Mixed Race Student Dating the White Student, and so on. It’s not what did or did not actually happen, it’s what we take away from these stories that counts. Dreams literalists are a dwindling lot.

Today, Obama mythology is piped into our lives through various mediums: pre-taped interviews, late-night talk-show skits, emails, video addresses, documentaries, and more—anything but the democratic give-and-take of a press conference, the modern White House staple that Obama has done away with.  Like someone passively-aggressively rebelling against his boss, the president kept showing up for these appearances later and later until they just ceased to occur. He was done answering to others.

Self-mythology requires one-way messaging. And the message is, creepily, everywhere. Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration now requires health insurance companies to “tell customers who get a premium rebate this summer that the check is the result of the Obama administration’s health care law.” As James Taranto noted, “to use the federal regulatory apparatus to commandeer private companies for campaign ads is outrageous.” Well, there’s no chance of it coming up at a press conference, is there?

Kim made sure to be celebrated with his own holidays but Obama just co-opted ours. On Sunday, we got a double whammy. An Obama campaign webpage asked us to “Wish Michelle [Obama] a happy Mother’s Day” by “join[ing] Barack and sign[ing] her card.”  And If we choose not to treat the first lady as we do our mothers, an unsolicited White House email enabled us to send our own mothers a card—promoting ObamaCare. “Happy Mother’s Day From The Affordable Care Act,” it read, “Being a mom isn’t a pre-existing condition. It’s a joy!”

While that wasn’t intended as a joke, it’s hard not to laugh. Similarly, the presidential biography tampering became the immediate target of biting humor. A cascade of Twitter one-liners savaged the debacle throughout the day yesterday. Like the cult of Kim, to Americans these efforts are outlandish and desperate. We laugh at them the way we laugh when Sacha Baron Cohen lampoons self-aggrandizing autocracy. They represent a wholly foreign understanding of what it means to be a good elected official. But they also represent a dearth of genuine achievement and therefore a tragicomic desperation. If Obama really believes that seeding cards and biographies with his name is the best way to get Americans on board with his presidency he’s more of a historic first than any of us knew.

This truth was brought home today in court when the judge ruled the defense couldn’t present as a witness a former head of the Federal Elections Commission who was prepared to testify that Edwards’s actions that are alleged by the government to be crimes, were, in fact, not violations of the law. In spite of the inexplicable decision to exclude that rather pertinent piece of evidence, the defense was able to present the testimony of the chief financial officer of his campaign, who pointed out that the FEC actually approved the records submitted by his 2008 presidential effort. That renders the prosecutors’ attempt to claim the failure to report the money a prominent supporter donated to help cover up his affair was a crime a legal absurdity. The day’s events make it more clear than ever what is going on in this case is not just a typical example of prosecutorial overreach in which the government seeks to make an example of an unpopular rich person. Rather, it is an unprincipled and dangerous attempt to extend the reach of an already ambiguous set of laws in order to criminalize campaign donations.

The government seems to think that by treating any money spent on behalf of a presidential candidate as a reportable donation it can establish a broad legal precedent. Though few would weep if Edwards were jailed because of the money spent to hush up his tawdry personal scandals, if this is a crime, then virtually anything done with or on behalf of a candidate even if it is not spent on campaign expenses can be treated as a donation and therefore be regulated. Were the courts to let them get away with this sleight of hand legal maneuver, it would be a huge power grab on the part of the federal government. It would give U.S. attorneys and their masters at the Justice Department the ability to trump up prosecutions against any politician they didn’t like, including those who are not quite as hard to like as John Edwards.

This cannot be allowed to happen. What is going on in that courtroom is nothing less than a show trial with potentially dangerous consequences for not only politicians but also the free speech rights of Americans to express political opinions that are financed by contributions. We already knew the movement to enact increasingly onerous and confusing campaign finance laws was a blight on our democracy. But the effort to criminalize John Edwards’s peccadilloes is particularly perilous for the future of fair elections.

Unfortunately, the trial judge in this case may have bought into the elastic logic that is the foundation of the government’s case. We can only hope that even if the jury in this case is blind to the prosecution’s misconduct here that an appeals court will eventually point out that what is going on in North Carolina is a travesty of justice.

Brooks adds that “the secret to his popularity through hard times is that he is not melodramatic, sensitive, vulnerable and changeable. Instead, he is self-disciplined, traditional and a bit formal.” While declaring that “Obama is a slight underdog this year: the scuffling economy will grind away at voters,” David concludes that Obama’s leadership style “is keeping him afloat. He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.”

There’s something to Brooks’s argument. The president, after all, is higher in the approval ratings than objective circumstances would warrant.

On the other hand, the fact the Mitt Romney is ahead of Obama in several polls, even after a bruising primary battle, and that Obama is only drawing 43 percent support against Romney in the most recent CBS News/New York Times poll has to be a source of concern for the president. Many people forget that Jimmy Carter was ahead of Ronald Reagan in the Gallup Poll just a week before the 1980 election–but independents and undecided voters broke in massive numbers toward Reagan in the end. It’s usually the case that a challenger wins most of the late-deciding voters (especially in an economy this weak), and in all likelihood that will be the case in 2012. The polls will be relatively close for the next several months, with some fluctuations, but if Romney heads into the last week of the campaign tied or with a slight lead, he’ll win by a comfortable margin.

This election, like most elections, will be decided on substance, not style; on objective circumstances, not ginned-up attacks. Which is why Mitt Romney is extremely well-positioned to become the next president of the United States.

In her column about the incident, Goldberg refuses to apologize and puts the controversy down as just another Twitter-era fake controversy that Romney is exploiting. But before we buy into that attempt to weasel out of this, it might be apt to ponder exactly what Goldberg and the entire mainstream media would be saying if a conservative talking head on one of the cable TV networks compared Michelle Obama to Hitler and Stalin for praising motherhood of all things. However, Goldberg’s decision to air her animus for Mrs. Romney again shows that her problem goes deeper than forgetting the person who first mentions Hitler and Stalin in a debate almost always is the loser.

Goldberg complains that the outrage about the incident was feigned. But that is no truer than the Democrats’ crocodile tears for Seamus the dog’s rooftop ride to Canada or the boy Mitt Romney may have hazed in high school 47 years ago. She also complains that many of the comments made about her gaffe on Twitter and e-mail are rude. No doubt they are, but for someone who writes on the Internet to complain about that sort of thing is pretty weak. As anyone who does this for a living knows, anything one writes, no matter how bland the topic, may provoke nasty comments.

But Goldberg’s not apologizing for a reason. What she resents about Ann Romney is her ability to undermine the Democratic theme of a fake Republican war on women. It that quality that is frustrating the left:

For the record, I don’t believe that Ann Romney is either Hitleresque or Stalinesque. Rather, I think she is a calculating political wife who once struck me as fairly likeable, but who is now determined to play up the idea that’s she’s being victimized for being a stay-at-home mom. Her op-ed was part of that effort. Unfortunately, if the messages I received on Monday are any indication, it’s an effort I might have assisted.

While I don’t think anyone ever accused Goldberg of being a brilliant political observer, trying to gin up an effort to portray a woman as generally admired as Ann Romney as a political villain is about as dumb an idea as has come down the pike in a long time.

As I wrote earlier today, polls seem to indicate that the voters aren’t buying the war on women as a substitute for a defense of President Obama’s failed economic policies. Neither is the war on Ann Romney.

The CBS News/New York Times poll, if only because of the source, must be creating panic at Obama re-election headquarters. So afraid of the results are Team Obama that campaign officials are actually attacking the poll — whose sample of registered voters is weighted in favor of Democrats (36 percent Democrats, 30 percent Republicans, and 34 percent independents) – as “significantly biased” in favor of Republicans. Of course it is. And Republicans are the ones who are supposed to be members of a “faith-based community” instead of the “reality-based” one.

As bad as the results are — showing support for Romney among women to be higher than support for Obama among women — my hunch is that what’s really driving the president crazy is that 67 percent of Americans think Obama’s stand on same-sex marriage was done mostly for political reasons rather than principled ones.

President Obama, after all, has presented himself to us – and seems to fancy himself to be – a man of rare political integrity and courage. The narrative they would have us believe is that Obama is an individual driven by the highest and purist motivations. He doesn’t simply want our support; he wants our reverence, our respect, and our awe. It helps explain the cult-like nature of the 2008 campaign.

So for Obama to be seen as just another scheming politician must really grate at him.

The truth, of course, is Obama is just that. Even for a politician, his stands on same-sex marriage – he was for it, then against it, then neutral on it, before he once again came out in favor of it – have been transparently cynical. And for Vice President Biden of all people to receive credit for forcing Obama to embrace same-sex marriage has, as we know, enraged Obama’s top aides.

Obama’s mask continues to slip. He is nothing like the image he created (post-ideological, non-partisan, high-minded, inspirational, unifying). He is, it turns out, a very liberal, rather ruthless, and deeply cynical politician. The fact that he is these things doesn’t bother him in the least. But the fact that more and more Americans are aware he’s these things bothers him quite a lot.

But if President Obama thinks the negotiations are the perfect way to kick the nuclear can down the road while he is running for re-election, the Iranians think the talks are a triumph for their nuclear ambitions. As Hamidreza Taraghi, an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated in a startlingly frank interview with the New York Times, the regime’s stalling tactics have been an unmitigated success, allowing them to transgress every red line set by the West and forcing them to accept Iran’s terms. As the Times notes:

In continually pushing forward the nuclear activities — increasing enrichment and building a bunker mountain enrichment facility — Iran has in effect forced the West to accept a program it insists is for peaceful purposes. Iranians say their carefully crafted policy has helped move the goal posts in their favor by making enrichment a reality that the West has been unable to stop — and may now be willing, however grudgingly, to accept.

Taraghi is, of course, absolutely right. The opening of the talks in Istanbul gave the Iranians reason to believe the international community was prepared to accept their nuclear enrichment program as well as buying the fiction that Iran’s Supreme Leader had issued a fatwa against a nuclear weapon. The question these conclusions pose for President Obama is whether he is really prepared to allow Ashton and the Europeans to broker a deal while he is running for re-election that will, in effect, give the international seal of approval to an Iranian nuclear program that is likely, deal or no deal, to lead to a nuclear weapon?

That the Iranians have played the West for fools for a decade is no secret. For this, President Bush bears as much responsibility as President Obama or the Europeans. By allowing the Iranians to stall diplomatic efforts for years and for refusing until the last few months to set in place meaningful economic sanctions, the Western powers have encouraged the Iranians to think they can get away with doing what they like, safe in the knowledge there will be no serious repercussions.

Every red line has been transgressed. The West had opposed the opening of a nuclear plant, the construction of heavy water facilities as well as uranium enrichment. But Iran has them all now and has good reason to think a deal will not force them to surrender any of it.

Mr. Taraghi and other officials say their policy has forced the United States to accept enrichment, though five resolutions by the United Nations Security Council have called for it to suspend it. Obama administration officials dispute that view.

But some Iranian and Western officials have hinted that the White House may now be willing to accept some level of enrichment activity …

Iran’s negotiators left the Istanbul meeting believing they had scored a major victory. “We have managed to get our rights,” said Mr. Taraghi in his office in downtown Tehran. “All that remains is a debate over the percentage of enrichment.”

President Obama has talked very tough about stopping Iran and even convinced some otherwise savvy observers (like Jeffrey Goldberg) that he means it. But the Iranians clearly believe Obama is a paper tiger who has no stomach for a conflict with them. They think he will be talked into going along with the Europeans and letting the Iranians keep their nuclear program while abandoning the crippling sanctions that the president never showed much appetite for enforcing.

The proposed deal will also give them relative impunity against a pre-emptive attack by Israel to forestall the creation of an Iranian bomb. Despite the fact that the West is already in possession of evidence of a weapons program, once it is put in place and the sanctions are lifted, the deal will allow Iran to quickly pivot to the construction of a bomb whenever they like.

That the Iranians believe they have defeated Obama on this issue is now no secret. The only question is whether the president and his credulous Jewish supporters will let this taunt go unanswered as the P5+1 talks head inevitably toward an agreement that will give international sanction to Iran’s nuclear goal.

Case in point: While the Americans assist Afghans in agriculture (although we have recently stood down and cancelled the missions for our Agricultural Development Teams) and education, there are certain projects popular with Afghans which neither the American government nor U.S.-based NGOs conduct. An Iranian website, for example, just released a photo essay of a recent mass wedding Iran’s Imam Khomeini Relief Committee sponsored in the Western Afghan city of Herat. The Committee—whose assets are controlled by the Supreme Leader—is active not only in Afghanistan, but also in Tajikistan, Lebanon, the Comoros Islands, and Bosnia. A year ago, the U.S. Treasury Department designated the Committee’s branches in Lebanon for their relationship to Hezbollah. When I lived in Tajikistan, the local branch of the Committee was conducting surveillance on the U.S. embassy, and contributed directly to the evacuation of all non-essential personnel.

When I got married a few years back, my wife and I had a very small wedding so as not to break the bank, but when an Afghan gets married, he cannot get away with inviting less than 1,000 of his closest friends, family members, and neighbors. Most impoverished Afghans delay marriages for years because they cannot afford the price tag. The Iranians, however, know that by subsidizing such marriages, they can win hearts and minds for a generation.

What to do? I don’t know. The United States should not be in the business of subsidizing marriages. We do, however, need to recognize that others are. Soft power should not simply be throwing money at random development projects, but should be carefully crafted to gain the most long-term benefits for the buck. Most of our aid and assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan has been wasted and will derive the United States no long term benefits. The Islamic Republic may start with less, but they are careful to ensure what they do spend will pay dividends for years. We can’t work in weddings, but perhaps we can do more with higher education (the Iranian-backed Khatam Al-Anbia University in Kabul, according to one Afghan professor, has an annual budget which exceeds the entire higher education budget of Afghanistan) and scholarships for study abroad. One thing is certain: What the Iranians now do works, while what the American aid community invests in largely does not.

For those who claim the Middle East conflict is about borders or Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the prominence given Nakba commemorations ought to be an embarrassment as it highlights something Israel’s critics are often at pains to obfuscate. The goal of the Palestinians isn’t an independent state alongside Israel. Their goal is to eradicate Israel and replace it with yet another Arab majority country.

As Palestine Media Watch notes in their survey of official Palestinian Authority programs, the point about the Nakba narrative is that it draws no distinction between the pre- and post-1967 borders. That means the Jewish presence within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Israel is treated as just as illegitimate as that of the settlers in the territories who we are constantly told are the main obstacle to peace. This is not a minor point, because for the Palestinians, the desire for the descendants of the 1948 refugees to “return” to Israel is tantamount to demanding the dismantling of the Jewish state.

The Jewish left has become increasingly sympathetic to Nakba Day demonstrations. They feel it is only right that the victors show compassion to the losers in Israel’s War of Independence. But compassion for those who suffer — and the Palestinian Arabs have suffered since 1948 — is one thing. Indulging the political fantasies of those who wish to reverse the verdict of that war is something else.

As much as the world seems to have tired of hearing about the history of the events of that year, it is vital we point out that the war that created the refugees was one started by Arabs whose goal was not to share the land but to prevent Jewish sovereignty on any part of it. The vast majority of Palestinians who fled did so because they feared the consequences of this war. Most thought they would return to reap the spoils of the expected destruction of the besieged Jewish community. That they and their descendants still regret this reversal of fortune may be understandable, but it is not a point on which they have any right to demand the world’s sympathy.

Nakba Day is also a reminder that the focus on refugees also ought to discredit Israel’s critics and others who have kept the Palestinians stateless and homeless during the last 64 years. Unlike every other refugee population during this period, the Palestinians have been deliberately not resettled or allowed to assimilate into the Arab populations of the surrounding nations. Instead, they have been kept in poverty by a United Nations agency (UNRWA) supposedly dedicated to their welfare but which is, in fact, merely interested in perpetuating their status as refugees so they can remain props in the Arab war on Israel.

On this day, the unhappy fate of the Palestinian refugees will be endlessly rehearsed. But no mention will be made of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab countries in the wake of the events of 1948. Unlike the Palestinians, these people were given homes and new lives in Israel and the West. If Arabs are entitled to compensation for what they lost when they fled the newborn State of Israel, the Jews of the Arab and Muslim world deserve to be paid for what was stolen from them.

Nakba Day takes us back to the unfortunate fact that the Arabs have always treated the struggle between these two peoples as a zero sum game. In 1948, the Jews were willing to share the country, but the Arabs would hear of no solution other than the destruction of any Jewish state no matter where its borders were drawn. Those who wonder why the Palestinians continue to refuse to negotiate with Israel and have rejected offers of statehood repeatedly during the past two decades need only go back to 1948 to discover the roots of this madness.

President Barack Obama told an audience in New York tonight that Mitt Romney is worse than his 2008 opponent Sen. John McCain.

“We have a very clear contrast this time. John McCain believed in climate change and believed in immigration reform,” Obama told an audience of about 200 donors who paid at least $5000 for a ticket to the event. “What we have this time out is a candidate who said he would rubber stamp a Republican Congress that wants us to go backward, not forward.”

This is how Obama’s going to rein in his base. The gay marriage endorsement will help increase enthusiasm significantly. But to get his base out at the polls, Obama also needs to give them a big reason to vote for him – avoiding four years of a right-wing, Tea Party-controlled government, or whatever, is a pretty good reason, in their minds.

It’s always amusing when Obama talks about how moderate and reasonable Sen. McCain is; nothing at all like these scary, new, extreme conservatives today. It’s a play off of that old “the-only-good-conservative-is-a-dead-conservative” trope. McCain’s far from dead, but now that he’s no longer a political threat, Obama can speak honestly about McCain’s history as a moderate and an aisle-crosser.

Back in 2008, of course, McCain was blasted by Democratic groups for the same things Romney is being attacked for now – being an extreme right-winger. From a Democratic National Committee press release in Feb. 2008:

Throughout this campaign season, McCain has been working overtime trying to remake himself into a candidate the right wing of the Republican Party can accept in 2008. Along the way, he has cast aside his principles by flip-flopping on signature issues like campaign finance and immigration reform, and embracing the very same “agents of intolerance” and shady campaign tactics he once denounced.

Campaign McCain’s “extreme makeover” may help him pander to the right wing, but the rest of America has figured out that a vote for John McCain is a vote for a third Bush term. Whether he is pining for a 100-year war in Iraq, calling for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, supporting efforts to make the same Bush tax cuts he once opposed permanent, supporting President Bush’s veto of health care for 10 million children, or applauding the president’s decision to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence, John McCain has promised four more years of the same failed Bush policies that have undermined our economy and made America less secure.

Characterizing Romney as an extreme conservative is almost as ridiculous as calling McCain one. And it’s another example of why, at least from a campaign perspective, it doesn’t matter how moderate the Republican candidate is. He will always be portrayed as a radical, out-of-mainstream figure.

The question regarding Barzani’s family holdings will come to a head next year as the Kurdish presidency again comes up for election and could undermine the stability and security about which the family brags and foreign investors depend. Masud Barzani, first elected in 2005 and then re-elected four years later in elections marred by widespread fraud, should, by law, not run for a third term. If he does seek to become president for life, the disgruntled youth may again take to the streets, and all pretense of Kurdistan being anything but a Mafioso state will disappear. Few expect Barzani to follow the lead of the opposition Kurdistan Islamic Union party leader who resigned his post to allow a true successor to emerge.

Masud has, since his return from exile, lived in a mountaintop resort expropriated first by Saddam Hussein and then, in the wake of the 1991 uprising, by Masud himself. The questions Kurds will face—and which may also presage violence in the region—is what happens to the substantial properties which Masud Barzani has acquired. Barzani is used to luxuries—sources in the high-end retail industry reported that his agent once dropped $50,000 in a Bulgari store without blinking.  The question which Kurds have never addressed is whether such property belongs to the presidency, his political party, or Barzani himself. If Barzani claims the property for himself, then it raises questions about how he acquired multibillion dollar holdings on a politician’s salary. In the unlikely event Barzani releases the property to his Kurdistan Democratic Party, it could exacerbate squabbling within the party between his eldest son and nephew and myriad other family factions.

In the face of Iraqi central government opposition, Exxon is trying to extricate itself from Kurdistan. During Barzani’s meeting at the White House, both President Obama and Vice President Biden underscored that, in the dispute between Kurdistan and Baghdad, the United States stood with Baghdad. Unrest in Kurdistan may spook further oil investment. Questions about Barzani’s power and the legality of his holdings—especially should a new Kurdish government seek to reclaim property the Barzanis hold—may cause them to question their shadow partnerships with Barzani proxies. The opposition, which says it stands against corruption, has not gone beyond the rhetoric of change, however, and so may seek its own shadow partnerships. This in turn could further spook investors and send them fleeing, just as Western oil firms cut their losses and fled Russia and Turkmenistan when local corruption became insurmountable.

Good governance and transparency matter. Iraq is one of the most corrupt states on Earth, and Kurdistan is perhaps the most corrupt part of Iraq. Whenever corruption thrives, stability becomes increasingly an illusion.

The ad is, of course, unadulterated demagogy. Never mind that the closing took place in 2001, two years after Romney left Bain Capital. Never mind that 2001 was a terrible year for the American steel industry. Never mind that ten percent of the jobs in America disappear every year as the economy endlessly remakes itself through the process of creative destruction that makes capitalism work.

Indeed, the ad is so shamelessly dishonest that it has produced a surprising critic, Steve Rattner. He is Obama’s former “auto czar,” who presided over the administration’s remaking of General Motors and Chrysler, a process that cost tens of thousands of jobs, as dealerships across the country were closed down by order of the Obama administration.

“I think the ad is unfair. Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs. Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to create profits for his investors, most of whom were pension funds, endowments and foundations. It did it superbly, acting within the rules and acting very responsibly and was a leading firm,” Ratner said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.

“So I do think to pick out an example of somebody who lost their job unfortunately, this is part of capitalism, this is part of life. And I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about,” he said.

Rattner, to be sure, made his considerable fortune in a private equity firm not dissimilar to Bain Capital, called Quadrangle Group, and so might be inclined to see things from Romney’s point of view. But this is exactly right. Corporations are not WPA projects; they don’t exist to provide jobs but to maximize profits. Indeed, management has a fiduciary obligation to the stockholders to do exactly that. The theory of businesses as job providers was tried, in effect, in the Soviet Union, which always had a zero unemployment rate. Except for the highly privileged elite at the top, it produced nothing but poverty and a stunning lack of technological innovation.

Romney in particular and Republicans in general need to stop apologizing for advocating capitalism. It is what has made this country so extraordinarily rich, both for the Steve Rattners and Mitt Romneys and for the average American family as well, which lives at a level of affluence undreamed of even two generations ago.

But focusing on such non-problems allows the EU to ignore the real threat to the two-state solution: the ongoing Palestinian refusal to talk to Israel – not only among the official leadership, but among civil society as well.

Last week, for instance, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in the West Bank announced that any journalist who dared meet with an Israeli colleague would be expelled from the union, and perhaps even from his job, for the crime of “normalization” with Israel. Because many Israeli journalists (unlike the Israeli mainstream) vocally support the Palestinian Authority’s stated preconditions for resuming negotiations – a complete settlement freeze and an upfront Israeli agreement to a final border based on the 1967 lines – one would think Palestinians would want to encourage them. Instead, the journalists’ union has just declared that even Israelis who fully support Palestinian demands will be treated as bitter enemies. And then the “international community” wonders why mainstream Israelis fear that ceding the West Bank would result in yet another enemy state rather than a friendly, peaceful neighbor.

Nor is the union’s decision an aberration: Such boycotts are official PA policy, and are consistently aimed precisely at the most pro-Palestinian Israelis, such as authors and peace activists. In short, from the Palestinian perspective, there’s no such thing as a good Israeli; all Israelis are enemies.

Given this, is it really surprising that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis believe most Palestinians “have not accepted Israel’s existence and would destroy it if they could,” and are thus reluctant to make territorial concessions that could enable them to do so?

In the EU’s fantasy land, all the Palestinians want is a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines with Jerusalem as its capital. But as Cameron Brown of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies noted last week, three simple statements by Palestinian leaders would suffice to persuade an overwhelming majority of Israelis to agree to this: that the Palestinians renounce all claim to pre-1967 Israel, that they are willing to share custody of Jerusalem’s holy sites, and that refugees will be resettled in the Palestinian state rather than Israel. That would tell Israelis that the Palestinians’ goal really is a state alongside Israel rather than Israel’s destruction.

But Palestinian leaders have never said this, and they never will. Because the unpleasant truth, as polls consistently show, is that most Palestinians still do seek Israel’s destruction.

The poll shows Romney winning a head-to-head match up with the president by a margin of 46-43 percent. That is interesting, as it’s the first time since early January that Romney is beating Obama in this poll. But of even greater significance is that Romney leads the president among women by 46-44 percent. Only a month ago, Obama had a 49-43 percent edge among women. That this result would come after a month in which the Democrats have pounded Romney and the GOP and sought to portray them as waging a Republican war on women is astonishing. The war theme is apparently not convincing wavering females that a President Romney would harm them. Indeed, it may be having the opposite effect as — just as is the case with the gay marriage issue — many women seem to understand that the war tactic is a dishonest attempt to divert their attention from the more pressing issues relating to the economy.

Like last week’s Gallup poll, the CBS/Times survey also shows that the gay marriage decision is likely to cost the president some support. More voters say they are less likely to vote for the president as a result of his statement than those who say they are more likely to back him by a 22 to 14 percent margin.

Not all the results in the CBS/Times poll were unfavorable to the president. His job approval figure of 50 percent was the highest in two years other than the month Osama bin Laden was killed. And there is more optimism about the economy, with 36 percent saying they think it is getting better, a number that is also the highest in two years.

And yet despite the sense that the economy is not as bad as it has been, Obama is still losing to Romney and even losing among women, a group that has skewed heavily to the Democrats in the past two decades. What can account for this declining gender gap after a period when the president and his campaign have sought to emphasize the difference between the two parties on what they think are women’s issues?

The answer isn’t all that complicated. Though some liberals may be convinced there is a GOP war on women, most aren’t buying it any more than they believe the president’s flip-flop on gays was a principled stand. Whatever their positions on social issues, most women seem to believe that the economy and the well-being of their families is their primary concern and on that score, Obama has lost their confidence. And it’s not clear that it can be won back by ginning up fake controversies that are transparent attempts to demonize Obama’s opponents.

Even more to the point, after three and a half years in office, President Obama may have just worn out his welcome with many voters. Having made it to the White House as part of symbolic election in which all Americans could take pride in righting some great historic wrongs, there is no such rationale for his re-election. Tactics that seem to be merely a way to trick the voters into thinking ill of the GOP are falling flat. The poll may be a wake up call to the Democrats to drop their phony war on women and start concentrating on the bread and butter issue of the economy, which 62 percent of those surveyed say is the most important in the election (the second most is the federal deficit at only 11 percent) where Romney seems to have a strong advantage.