An Aussie gets it right: the North Korean nuclear test “demonstrates the complete failure, so far, of US President Barack Obama’s softly-softly diplomacy and willingness to start afresh with old enemies. It may be that Obama’s approach is well worth a try, but so far its yield is zero.”
Arlen Specter hasn’t quite sealed the deal with Pennsylvania Democrats.
And the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and the White House is trying to chase Joe Sestak out of the primary race. They must be awfully certain Specter can turn out the base in the general election. But, as Salena Zito remarks: “If Sestak follows his gut and ignores the bullies, Specter’s final career verdict will be decided by a jury of Democrats who never before were his primary-election peers. And that verdict also could be one about ‘jury shopping’ for political gain.”
I suspect Pyongyang is unmoved: “The U.N. Security Council swiftly condemned North Korea’s nuclear test on Monday as ‘a clear violation’ of a 2006 resolution banning them and said it will start work immediately on a new one that could result in stronger measures against the reclusive nation.” Demanding that Pyongyang return to the Six Party talks? Boy, that’ll show them!
The Washington Post editors plead for an end to bribing Pyongyang and call for steps to see that the regime is “undramatically but methodically strangled by sanctions.” That would be very unlike Obama but maybe he has “grown” in office. (Isn’t that what the media elites expect of conservatives who must come to terms with reality?)
The political tea-readers are focused on this year’s New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. If the Republican wins one or both what happens to the “Republicans are kaput” meme?
In New Jersey the biggest thing going for the the GOP is the embattled and increasingly unpopular Jon Corzine: “Mr. Corzine’s troubles largely stem from the recession that has hit his state hard, pushing unemployment to 8.4 percent and cutting tax revenues by nearly $3 billion. The shortfall has forced proposed budget cuts, including getting rid of the popular property tax rebates, except for the disabled and seniors. That has angered homeowners and sparked Republican charges of fiscal mismanagement against Mr. Corzine, who says that the collapse in tax revenues left him no other choice but to cancel the property tax rebates.”
William McGurn: “By goading a sitting president into responding to his arguments on his terms, Dick Cheney won the contest with Barack Obama last week before either said a word. And his re-emergence onto the public square seems to be driving everybody nuts. . . Ironically, it was left to Chris Matthews — one of the vice president’s most unrelenting critics — to offer the best take on last week’s dueling speeches. On his Sunday show, he put it this way: ‘I saw something from Barack Obama I never even saw in the campaign, a sense he was listening for footsteps, that he could hear Cheney coming at him and he was defensive.'”
Richard Cohen would like less of Elizabeth Edwards in his life. Hard to quibble with that. Step one: don’t write a column about her.
Byron York drills down on the claim Guantanamo was a recruitment aid for terrorists: “So if Guantanamo must be closed because it is a symbol of America’s abuse of Muslim detainees, and if the example of abuse in Guantanamo that most outraged Muslims worldwide was a story of alleged mistreatment of the Koran, and if that story was later retracted, then are we going through the enormous effort to close Guantanamo because of a bad story in Newsweek? The situation is more complicated than that, but the fact is, that’s part of it.” More importantly, if Guantanamo is now a well-run facility why isn’t the president using his revered communication skills to explain that to the world?
