As he inspires the world, Obama is losing the press here at home. This means that, in an essential way, he is losing the election.

Bob Cesca has written a very well-researched article on this topic, and I suggest you read it in full. I disagree with a central tenet of Bob’s thesis, though - namely, that it is the press’ fear of a liberal bias that has them so hot for Obama’s blood and hateful of his dignity.

My take is that it’s the NASCAR-commentary phenomena: That if the press reported diligently, without a mind to insult and denigrate Obama to balance him with the pathetic mess that is the McCain campaign, it would not generate as much ratings. Why just polish the Golden Boy when you can tear him to pieces? In short, you draw better crowds with public executions than you do with press conferences.

The evidence of this is tragically abundant, and if anyone out there has serious proof to counter it, I welcome it. I would love a press bias towards Obama. Instead, with attributions, I have the following coverage of his trip:

AP: “In a speech that risked being seen as presumptuous…”

TIME Magazine: “capable to become the Commander in Chief of a superpower — without seeming presumptuous…”

The National Journal: “He is well aware voters here at home might see that as presumptuous…”

Washington Post: “Whether by the end of this week he will be seen as presumptuous or overly cocky…”

Chicago Tribune: “That means walking the fine line between looking presidential and appearing arrogant and presumptuous…”

Boston Globe: “plus the growing sense in some quarters that the presumptive Democratic nominee is getting a little presumptuous…”

The LA Times covered his Berlin speech today, with the following front page headline: “Obstacles Linger For Obama - The Democrat is winning friends abroad, but is struggling to gain real ground over McCain at home.” The entirety of the front page column is devoted to Obama’s weaknesses. Not a word of the speech is featured.

If we look on sites that compile the Op-Ed columns and punditry, we see more of the same.

On RealClearPolitics, we have David Brooks sneering that “Obama Plays Innocent Abroad.” Then there is Howard Kurtz at the WashPost, dismissively stating, “Obama Abroad: We Get The Picture,” a piece saying that the trip was manipulative, crass showmanship. Then “The Presumptive - And Presumptuous Nominee” and “Pride Clouds Obama’s Vision” and “A Flat Performance In Berlin.”

There is only one positive piece, called “Our First Community-Activist President?”

One could look at this and see a media struggling to maintain objectivity in a time of inspiration. To that analysis, I would ask, “Why is inspiration a bad thing?” But even that conclusion isn’t accurate, as is evidenced by a discussion on Tuesday’s Morning Joe between pundits from a variety of news sources.

…Mika Brzeznski, Andrea Mitchell and Very Serious Mark Halperin … agreed that after three days of reporting the actual news that Senator Obama’s overseas visit was successful, they should deliberately attempt to “trip him up” — to “hold him accountable.”

Apparently they decided not to wait three days. The blood is already in the water, the feeding frenzy is on. But expect a greater slaughter in the days to come, to continue until the press can exclaim in orgasmic delight, “Obama is an underdog in the polls - now we really have a race!”

As Obama roams, gathering glory for the Presidential race and the American nation, McCain is at home bringing shame to our political process.

Harsh words, but that is the point, and if I had any alternative than to write them, I would. But this week, McCain has sunk lower into the mud pit, slinging slime without a sense of moral or intellectual compass. We will begin by reviewing what things that might pass as substantial that he’s said:

Zilch. That’s what. Short list of things. Everything was an attack on Obama.

And folks, even if you’re a McCain supporter or GOP loyalist, you have to admit a candidate should provide a more substantial platform than, “The other guy sucks.”

Problems with this struck McCain directly this weekend, as the New York Times refused to publish his Op-Ed piece “on Iraq.”

This rejection spawned all manner of partisan bickering, but the reason the Times rejected it was because the piece had no plan for Iraq or Afghanistan - it was only an attack on Obama.

[NYT op-ed editor, David] Shipley wrote that McCain’s article would “have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan.”

Why a man seeking to be Commander-in-Chief might need to have a plan to resolve the two debilitating wars we’re in is apparently beyond most of the media, who painted the event like a partisan snub. Any who looked closer than the flicker of the idiot box saw better, noting that McCain’s only “plan for victory” so far - attack Obama as defeatist or wrong on The Surge - probably won’t bring peace to the Middle East. Even Ann Coulter bashed the article as moronic.

Speaking of the Surge, we’re brought to McCain’s next blunder: His citing that it was the Surge that led to the Sunni Awakening, not the Awakening that led to the “success” of the Surge. That is just dead wrong. If you turn the most significant source of our casualties and direct it against the enemy, that is the critical factor - not increasing troop strength.

From there, McCain’s comments only get worse. And again, dear reader, I wish there was something else to say about the guy, but after scouring WorldNetDaily, RealClearPolitics and Human Events all morning, this is what I got:

First was his ad linking Obama with Castro. This is in the same vein as his ad linking Obama with Ahmadinejad.

To both, I note two things: One, nothing is dumber than equating talking to the enemy with weakness or sympathy; sooner or later, before a war or after, you’ve got to talk. And two, if you consider this just part of politics, why should we not hope for better?

Ask why the other side isn’t running ads featuring McCain with the North Vietnamese generals, Saudi extremists or Pakistani dictators.

A quick answer is brought to light by the other ad highlight from the McCain camp this week - namely, that the Press has McCain’s back anyway. McCain’s second ad portrays the media’s “love affair” with Obama - yes, the same guy who they kicked in the ribs for putting his kids on a 10-minute interview and hide positive polls about.

It is McCain, not Obama, who the media is in love with. I will enumerate for those shaking their heads and thinking about Chris Matthews’ “leg thrill.”

First, McCain has continuously been able to say he stands “for victory” in Iraq - supposedly unlike his opponent - while never being asked to define what that means. On the most critical question of our age, a matter we’re investing hundreds of billions-with-a-b dollars and hundreds of thousands of military lives into, he has not been asked to answer when and how we’re going to get a pay off. If you had cancer and went to your doctor, and he wrote a perscription that said, “Get well soon,” wouldn’t you feel a bit slighted? Apparently the press is okay with that.

After all, they love endless war - it means soaring ratings; endless bitching.

But secondly, McCain has more skeletons in his closet than the Addams Family, and the Press is touching on none of them. Obama’s already had his time through the ringer on Rezko and Wright. Pundits still cluck doubtfully as to whether he’ll win without Hillary on the ticket. We hear nothing of McCain’s past.

We don’t hear how he denounced his country when in captivity. We don’t hear how he opposed the POW committee he served on. We don’t hear about the Keating Five. And I’m not saying we necessarily should - I find those things about as irrelevant as Obama’s past - but I do want to point out whose negatives the press is obsessed with and who they’re giving a pass.

So to reiterate, this week McCain shamed the Presidential campaigning process by moronic and harmful guilt-by-association, and he shamed it by masking his attack piece as an op-ed on a critical issue, and he shamed it by complaining about a problem that probably is the opposite of what’s actually the case. He topped it off with downright namecalling:

He ran an ad directly blaming Obama for rising gas prices. The problems with this abound:

It’s dumb, first of all. Even if you support domestic drilling, you have to recognize that those vast domestic reserves here at home will, first of all, not have much effect on gas prices. The USA is a small factor in global gas prices, having 1.8% of the global share. ANWR’s cumulative amount would increase that to 2.2%. And that would take years to develop.

Second of all, it’s a distortion. Obama’s opposition to gas tax suspension and domestic drilling was hardly to blame for soaring gas prices.

But third of all, it could work, because people don’t know any better. And that, in my opinion, is the worst sin of all - exploiting the ignorance of the people rather than helping them understand things better.

Of course, McCain’s campaign depends on that. Every incident above is invested wholly in ignorance. Not in hope, not in knowledge of a better way, not in leadership.

And that is a shame - a shame on McCain and a shame for a country that expects and gets no better.

Obama travels the globe, and would that I had returned to this blog in time to cover its opening phases adequately. Suffice it to say that it has been appropriately heroic.

Here’s why: Like the heroes of old, Obama has demonstrated amazing bravery in visiting the places he has. Like the heroes of old, he has done so with an appreciation of the prestige those visits earn him and the nation he seeks to lead. Like the heroes of old, he has been fearless in who he confronts.

This is not immediately evident. But a full examination of the places he visited, and how, makes it clear:

First, Afghanistan. Obama’s decision to put Afghanistan first on his list of destinations reinforces his message that Afghanistan is the top priority in the war on terror.

Even critics of Obama’s Iraq policy have to admit this by following a simple train of logic: Afghanistan - or, more specifically, the Afghan/Pakistani border - is where bin Ladin is; bin Ladin is who we went to war to get; we need to make Afghanistan our priority to achieve the clearest objective of victory.

Obama visited Afghanistan first in order to invest the prestige of his trip in his foreign policy’s military priority.

Then came Iraq. Here Obama did something that is unbelievably, jaw-droppingly bold and significant - something only Petraeus and his agents have so far had the vision and guts to do.

I don’t mean his saying he came not to criticize Maliki but to listen to him. That was artful, sincere and correct, but it only demonstrated the man’s wisdom, not his, well, audacity.

I refer to Obama’s meeting with the men who were and are the hinge for the war in Iraq: He met with the warriors who turned the operational promise of the Surge into a strategic victory for the nation. He met with the terrorists.

Specifically, he met with the Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province. These leaders are the backbone of the “Awakening” - the sudden and ruthless uprising against al-Qaeda by their former base of support, the Sunni militia community.

Few in American, and virtually none in the media, care to state the significance of this event. It is often presented as a convenient backdrop to, or even a by-product of, the Surge. But looking at the raw economy of the Iraq war, the Awakening caused a shift of dozens of casualties per month being inflicted on us by the Sunni militias into dozens of casualties being inflicted on al-Qaeda, routing the Islamic extremists.

This is a tough pill to swallow for those who see war in sepia tones or action-movie terms: The notion that our worst enemy in Iraq was persuaded by Petraeus, in many ways directly in spite of the White House, to become our best ally - that as powerful as our troops are, they could not have achieved success without the terrorists on our side.

Look at the names made famous in the Iraq war history and it becomes evident: Fallujah, a stronghold of the Sunni nationalists. Haditha, a massacre hyped by the Sunni nationalists. Juba the Sniper, most notorious killer of Americans, a member of the same militias who rose up to scatter al-Qaeda to the hinterlands of Iraq.

Obama met with them, and so demonstrated he not only has the courage to meet with the most dangerous men in Iraq, he also recognizes they represent a critical power in the nation’s fragile future. That takes vision and guts. It got no press.

Then came Jordan, and the press conference at the Temple of Hercules. And this choice of venue showed the third aspect to Obama’s command of the heroic image so crucial to great leadership - that a great leader must appear great.

We see it throughout history - Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot, Caesar standing firm and alone to halt his routing forces at Dyrrachium - and in our modern times. I can understand those critical of Obama, who see his speaking from the awesome vista of a ruined Greek temple to the mortal hero who became a God as grandstanding. But I would remind them of the spiritual value of the Reagan era - the man who, not by his policies but by his prestige, led this country to believe in its greatness again after the bleak compromises of the 70s. He did this in ways both gaudy - lighting the Statue of Liberty with a laser - and grand - yelling out demands from the Berlin Wall. And while they could be dismissed by critics as crass, these actions nevertheless suggested an awareness, an appreciation, of greatness by our leader.

The rest of Obama’s trip has continued to evoke these appreciations, these commands of heroic qualities: He went to the West Wall, visited the Holocaust memorial, visited both the Palestinian hotbed of the West Bank and the leadership of Israel. These are evocative, powerful destinations, and visiting them to talk to people displayed a combination of audacity and modesty.

Even accusations of showmanship must recognize this - that while Obama may be travelling to places perfect for photo ops, he is also going to places that are dangerous, diverse, often forgotten, and always critical to our future in the region.

His latest destination, Berlin, is a model of this.

It is, most assuredly, going to be a pep rally for him. Europeans almost universally love Obama.

In a survey of some 6,200 people in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, the senator from Illinois received 52 percent of the vote to just 15 percent for Republican Sen. John McCain.

This support is especially strong in France. 65% polled there favor him; only 8% favor McCain. The biggest support committee in Europe is in France with over 2,000 members on staff, and the papers overwhelming laud him, expressing not just preference, but genuine excitement.

“For the French establishment, Obama represents a new chapter in the Western alliance … For ethnic minorities he embodies the equality of opportunity they crave.”

Thus Obama represents not only inspiration for the hopeful among the African-Americans, but people of color the world over. In a nation like France, where 10% of the population is of African or Arab origin, that has significant appeal.

But it is in Germany that Obama has the most profound support - 67% to 6% over McCain, and papers across their political spectrum hailing him as the salvation for American foreign relations.

It is expected that hundreds of thousands of Germans will flock to see him speak at another heroic location today: The Victory Column. Obama will be capitalizing on the genuine adoration many Europeans feel for America; the desire to see it restored to an ally, rather than a solitary and sullen adversary. This will be a grand photo-op given his international support.

Most importantly to Americans, it restores a measure of grandeur to the Presidency and to the nation. It invests heroic qualities like courage, compassion and majesty to the station.

By doing these great things, Obama is not just telling the world he can be great - he is reminding it how great America is.

Here it is, the Victory Column Speech.

I will never forget that it was John “Let The Eagle Soar” Ashcroft’s Justice Department that spent taxpayer dollars on covering up Lady Justice’s bosoms. Yet more and more these days, Ashcroft is also being indelibly identified as a man who stood by his principles against torture and warrantless spying in an administration that was scrambling for these and other perversions.

An article yesterday revealed that Ashcroft had made a list of five candidates to lead the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 - an office responsible for overseeing the legality of DoJ deeds - only to have the White House shoot down his candidates and insist on appointing a chief architect of pro-torture, pro-warrantless spying policy.

In an angry phone call hours after Ashcroft’s list reached the White House, President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., quickly dismissed the candidates, all Republican lawyers with impeccable credentials, the sources said. He and White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that Ashcroft promote John Yoo, a onetime OLC deputy who had worked closely with Gonzales and vice presidential adviser David S. Addington to draft memos supporting a controversial warrantless wiretapping plan and detainee questioning techniques.

Ashcroft’s response, despite ailing health and an uphill battle, was to dig in his heels. He fought hard for a compromise candidate, Jack Goldsmith by name. And it was Goldsmith who went on to help expose and undo a lot of the grim deeds of the Gonzales-Yoo policies.

This has brought an interesting distinction to light for me. This distinction is one that I anticipated to develop after the Bush administration, but considering how long and eventful the administration has been, I suppose it was crafted rapidly. It is the distinction that even among the cliquish Neo-Conservatives, as in practically any group, there are moral true believers and there are self-serving hypocrites.

John Ashcroft is, apparently, a man that does indeed walk the walk. He surely has a few skeletons in his closet, but by all indications he struggled to stick by the Constitution, even when the agenda of his cohorts was pulling hard in a dangerous new direction. He may have wanted to chip away at civil rights progress - there is no painting him as other than a staunch enemy to the ACLU, pro-choice movements and drug users - but apparently believed in his gut that there were certain lines America did not cross.

I would imagine in Ashcroft’s clean-cut, picket-fence America, they may have locked up the hippies, but they did not torture.

On one level, I’m happy to hear it. It’s nice when someone with dramatically opposing views turns out to have fought the kind of fight I’d want fought.

On the other, it strikes me as an eviscerating tragedy that because a fanatical social conservative doesn’t sink so low as to okay sexual assault as a means of interrogation, he stands out as an exceptional hero in an administration the greatest country in the world has lived under for eight of its most critical years.

Obama has come out with an ad explaining how he identifies the threats we face and how he would go about solving them.

Let’s do the list:

One, he identifies the threat of cyber-attacks and loose nukes are critical.

This is good because neither of these topics are discussed much in the news, if at all. They are, however, threats we’ve backburned due to the GWOT. That he brings them up is important to me, as it makes me think he’s actually thought this through better than his pollsters.

Two, he recognizes the immediate solution to the terrorist problem depends on better alliances. As much as we may not like the UN and NATO and such, the reality of warfare is that unless you’re ready to pay a cataclysmically stiff price, it’s not a “go it alone” affair. Even the Romans needed allies in every major conflict they fought. Grumble about inadequate sanctions all one wants, but Iran would not be ascendant like it is now if we had listened to our allies in ‘03.

Third, and most importantly, he points out the strategic solution to global terrorism:

Energy independence. I know it’ll cause heartbreak in Houston - which is why the White House is talking about offshore drilling and ordering the Saudis to open the spigots full blast, rather than trying to wean us from oil - but it’s got to be done. All that money and favor goes right from the pump and into the pockets of the Islamic nations.

What’s more, the reason gas is so bloody expensive is that China needs it more than we do, and is paying top price for it. Thus, if we had an economy and infrastructure based on non-petrofuel energy, China would be stuck with the oil problem and we’d be riding high on the value of a new technology. And believe me, that tech is going to be worth buckets when the rising stars among the developing nations - India, China, the Middle East - realize they may have heaps of petro-industrial wealth, but zilch resources like water, food and energy.

It may sound weird, but the weapon of the 21st century is going to be conservation.

Obama gets that.

These last three days, I have been busy writing about the climax of another war, while a war just as riddled with tribal loyalties and imperial interests reeled out of balance. I refer, of course, to the events in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama, with typical foresight, wrote this Monday about the critical status of Afghanistan. In an Op-Ed piece describing his strategic vision for America’s ongoing conflicts, Obama repeated his belief that forces in Iraq must be reduced and our efforts in Afghanistan bolstered.

Senator Barack Obama is proposing that the United States deploy about 10,000 more troops to battle resurgent forces in Afghanistan, a plan intended to shift the American military focus from the Iraq war to the marked rise in violence from the Taliban.

As if underscoring his point, events in Afghanistan turned gruesome that day, as a vicious Taliban assault hit a US Army outpost in the east of the war zone. The attack not only killed nine Americans and wounded over a dozen more, we lost the ground. For the first time in recent memory, we had to withdraw from the outpost.

That wasn’t the most of it.

Elsewhere in the frontier region, NATO launched artillery and helicopter strikes in Pakistan after coming under insurgent rocket fire, officials said.

To clarify that statement, yes, you read it right: Insurgent rocket fire from Pakistan. If ever there was proof that McCain’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward counter-insurgency operations in Pakistan was intellectually and morally bankrupt, you have it right there. Something has to be done about the fact that our enemy’s base is in a nominal ally’s country, whether that ally likes it or not.

In order to overcome a dumb media, ignorant of anything beyond magazine covers this week, Obama then gave a speech on global security, emphasizing the dire circumstances our troops are all too conscious of abroad.

It was typical Obama: The vision thing, with guts and insight.

The response from the other side was typical McCain. Rather than explaining how on earth he would take the fight to the enemy, McCain took the fight to Obama. He criticized him for everything from inflexibility to inexperience, apparently missing the irony that despite all his considerable experience, he is, unlike his opponent, yet to propose any actual solutions.

Joe Biden laid into McCain in reply.

The speech was a bravura delivery of Biden tour de force, calling the idiocy of the ignorant Iraq-centric strategy to task. As soon as it’s posted in video format, it’s going up on the blog. For now, here’s a small cup of Joe, no cream, certainly no sugar:

President Bush and Sen. McCain lump all the threats together,” said Biden. “Al Qaeda, the Shia militia, listen to them speak. Listen to my friend Joe Lieberman, and he really is a friend, listen to them speak. Find me a distinction that they make. As a consequence of this profound confusion they make profound mistakes. The idea that al Qaeda will cooperate with the philistine, a guy who in fact used to run the country in Iraq, the guy who did away with the caliphate… is completely contrary to anything that the now-dead leader of Iraq had in mind. It’s dangerous. How can we run a sound foreign policy without understanding these decisions? How can we talk about a Shiite-dominated nation cooperating with a Sunni dominated Wahabi sect of Islam as if they had anything in common? Yet listen to my friends, listen to the president, listen to Joe Lieberman, listen to John McCain. Ladies and gentlemen, if they can’t define the enemy we are fighting it is very difficult to define whether we have won or lost.”

It certainly gets the blood going. I can only hope “No Drama Obama” signs on this firebreather.

With a briar patch like Afghanistan waiting us over the horizon past the Iraq mire, we’ll need all the truth to power we can get.

Recently, McCain took a bold and ambiguous stance on Social Security, stating that the current tax-based system was a “disgrace.”

I was not quite sure what he meant, really. Beyond treating me to a really fetching photo of the Senator, McCain’s Web site didn’t help much. It has no entry on Social Security.

So I resort to the latest comments he made to CNN, quoted by the LA Times, just recently:

“I want young workers to be able to, if they choose, to take part of their own money, which is their taxes, and put it in an account which has their name on it…”

As with much of his economic policy, it is not quite clear how McCain intends to use this idea to make Social Security solvent. Would it be tied to the market via the accounts? Would it be another form of government 401k?

There is no telling. No doubt, as with the Clinton campaign before him, McCain’s campaign thinks it’s better that way.

In case there was any question, let me immediately clarify that this is my Saturday morning puff piece.

First, the sad news. I nearly didn’t report on this, but since it involves NASCAR and so defines “puff piece,” I had to throw it up here.

Obama will not, apparently, be sponsoring a NASCAR racing team.

BAM’s choice of drivers and car brands might have been a little too sticky politically for the Obama camp.

I think he missed one hell of a checkered flag by doing this. Nothing dispels the specter of elitism like sponsoring a group of men driving a machine around and around in a circle at reckless speeds - the Roman emperors knew it; Obama should have wised to it. But so be it.

See if I care.

But next up, McCain released a new commercial. I watched it and, I must say, I really like it.

My enjoyment has three aspects. First, it reminds me of the “old warhorse McCain” that I favored in 2000 - a guy who was genuinely distressed by sleazy politics and attack ads, rather than reliant on them. Second, it will offend some of the anti-immigration crowd; at least the ones who are in it for largely racial reasons.

Lastly, I love when the Hispanic-American military tradition is highlighted.

In my ongoing - potentially life-long - diatribe against the media’s unforgiveable mishandling of news, I present the latest installment of stories that should have been sources of shock and dismay at the McCain candidacy, were it not for the almost total lack of coverage.

If you have been tuning in to the news this week, you would know that squeamishness over Obama abounds. From criticism over his allowing his children to be interviewed, to criticism over his regreting interview given the media’s take on it, to the incessant handwringing about the fragility of his public support, to at last the prattling about Jesse Jackson’s off-color, on-mic comments, it’s all bad Obama, all the time.

Meanwhile, McCain is talking about things that actually matter - insofar as they should put anybody with any sense in a position of anxious dread over the possibility of his election.

Credit to the compilation of this list of alarming statements from McCain goes to Max Bergmann, whose excellent piece covers ten of them in detail.

In Bergmann’s order, the incidents are:

* McCain calls social security an “absolute disgrace.” Not the threat to social security; social security:

“Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace and it’s got to be fixed.”

That should take care of the senior vote … if anyone was listening.

* Top McCain campaign economic advisor Phil Gramm said the effects of the recession were all “mental,” and that Americans are complaining because we’ve become a nation of “whiners.”

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy.

So gas prices, food prices, foreclosure problems; they’re all just mental. Good to hear Gramm’s got solutions for them: Namely, “cheer up.”

This should be a big wake-up call to the illusion that typifies recent GOP economic policies: Economic growth does not necessarily mean everybody profits, only that the rich profit.

* McCain on Iraq: First, permanent bases are the way to go. Next, he claims Maliki didn’t really say what he said. Then, he admits to it, but says dismissively, “Prime Minister Maliki is a politician.”

Meaning, I suppose, that Maliki was just telling the Iraqi people what they want to hear. Well, if the Iraqi people want to hear we’re going to leave, and Iraq is a democracy, and we will respect Iraq’s wishes, what’s McCain’s support for permanent bases and dismissal of a timetable about?

This should bankrupt McCain’s claim to moral foreign policy, but hey, what’s so important about that? Let’s talk about Obama flip-flopping on interviewing his kids.

* McCain claims he’s going to eliminate the defecit within his Presidency. The media transmits this obediently. They do not call this into question by pointing out that other parts of his economic proposals include:

“…a) cut individual and corporate taxes even further, b) extend the Bush tax cuts and c) massively increase defense spending on manpower (200,000 more troops) and d) maintain a long-term sizable military presence in Iraq.”

Nobody asks how he intends to pull off this magic trick. Why worry? More importantly, Obama is losing a little support among Progressives, so he is expected to not kick McCain’s ass as badly in fundraising this month - now there’s a story.

* McCain made a hallmark of his defecit reduction plan “achieving victory in Iraq” - he’s going to use the money we are borrowing for the war to pay down the money we are borrowing.

This should have raised questions about either his honesty or his sanity. Oh well. Got to be objective!

* Speaking of utter mendacity, McCain announced 300 economists had signed a letter supporting his economic agenda, save that they really didn’t.

“…good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.”

This goes virtually unmentioned in the mainstream. McCain may lie, but Obama has apologized - what’s more important?

* McCain then implies he wants to kill Iranians by making a joke about how we should export more cigarettes to them. The press reports this as a moment of humor.

* McCain denies he said he was no expert on economics, when in fact it’s well-documented.

* McCain then distorts his record on Vet benefits, and gets upbraided for it by a Vietnam vet. This takes place, like the previous clip, on the only network approaching responsibility in reporting - MSNBC.

* McCain says there’s a glimmer of hope in improving relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan lately. Blogger Pat Barry points out how incorrect this is:

Just what “glimmer” is McCain talking about?? Maybe he’s referring to President Karzai’s remarks last month, which threatened military action in Pakistan if cross-border attacks persisted? Or maybe McCain is talking about Afghanistan’s allegations that Pakistan’s ISI was involved in a recent assassination attempt on Karzai? Maybe in McCain’s world you could call that a silver-lining, but in reality-land I’d call it something else.

This is so out of touch, so false-confident, it’s downright insulting. And considering the parties involved, it is dangerous - dangerous to believe it and let that situation continue to spiral, and dangerous to act like it and use it as an excuse to underfund and ignore the troops we send in there.

* The coup de grace comes today from a blog on ABC, mentioning that McCain lied to people in Pittsburgh about having resisted NVA interrogation by telling them the names of the Steelers offensive line rather than his squadron’s names. It was actually the Packers, as he’s written about before.

Maybe this story will stick. It has all the elements of a Hillary-in-Bosnia story: It’s basically lying about human interest fluff; it is contradicted by public record; it sounds dumb enough to be interesting.

I doubt it, though.

And that’s the tragedy of our times: Not that we want for political leadership, or that we’re divided as a nation, or that it’s so hard to figure out the truth.

There are good political leaders. We can come together over common ground. The truth is available with a few key strokes.

The tragedy is that the people who control the information we exchange - who literally decide what most people hear and what they do not - feed on the contrary.

They tear down, they foment division, they obscure the notion of truth, they prop up weak liars like McCain has made himself out to be and ignore actual issues for the sake of tabloid, fast-food news service.

They do this, and if our politicians pander to it, it is because the media not only lets them, but demands it of them.

After reading all of the above, I am certain McCain would be a disaster if elected. Yet I am even more worried, more despondent, given that no matter which candidate is elected, we will never truly be able to change the channel.

I don’t much like Christopher Hitchens. I do like the study of torture.

Those interests are joined in this video, wherein he subjects himself to waterboarding to highlight the agonies of our detainees:

If that does not put you off your appetite for human discomfort, another fine bit of journalism on torture is below.

This is an article by Naomi Wolf about the sexualization of torture. Its thesis, in a nutshell, is that since sexual torture was not explicitly forbidden prior to the Bush administration, officials saw it as a loophole to exploit.

The result, Abu Ghraib and the gruesome stories of nude, male bondage coming out of Gitmo.

Iran conducted a highly visible test of mid-range and long-range ballistic missiles today; many reacted by declaring it proof that they’re crazy, when in fact it’s proof that they’re not.

…even as Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials have dismissed the possibility of attack, Tehran has stepped up its warnings of retaliation if the Americans—or Israelis—do launch military action, including threats to hit Israel and U.S. Gulf bases with missiles and stop oil traffic from the Gulf.

Think about it: For the last five years, Iran has literally had a gun pressed into its guts - a gun in the form of the most powerful military in the world. And over the last year or so, the person pressing that gun into their guts has been yelling about “obliterating” them or “eliminating” them, while another assailant - Israel - makes similar demonstrations of force.

So there you are, you’re Iran; you’re the guy in the dark alley with someone pointing a potential murder weapon at your head and promising your days are numbered … and you have a gun too.

And today, Iran just showed its gun. After having Israel conduct war games and John Bolton suggest that Bush would make sure we’re good and entangled in a military solution to Iran’s nuclear program before he left office, Iran has responded by saying, “I can hurt you too. Back off.”

It doesn’t make it look any safer. Hopefully, it makes it look saner.

Obama’s response has been to urge the President to actually address this with direct talks with Iran, just like in the good old Cold War days, rather than getting half-hearted Europeans and State Department water carriers to handle it.

McCain urged for a missile shield. I think that is completely without merit if it’s done like the Bush administration has handled the shield - namely, breaking all treaties pertaining to it and sparking an arms race before the thing is even able to protect us. Considering I expect no less from McCain, and that his plan doesn’t even begin to address the root of the problem of Iran, it’s no shock I think Obama has the better solution.

Iran needs to be talked to; convinced to put the gun down and back away from the podium of scary talk. Not threatened further by a gun that, in the case of our missile shield program, isn’t even loaded.

That, after all, would be crazy.

It’s rare that I find an article of analysis so insightful that it sobers me right up and impels me to devote some prose to heaping laurels on it, but that’s just what Tony Sachs’ piece on Obama and the liberal movement demands I do.

I highly recommend you read the whole piece. It’s a work of sagely genius, marked by a rare divorce of candor from sentimentalism - it covers our recent electoral history without the kind of quasi-nostalgic partisan distortion so common to pundits. And the thesis it shamlessly proposes is that as much as the libs may cross their fingers, a leftie revolution just ain’t in the cards.

George Bush and his administration have made a hash of conservative ideology just as LBJ set back liberal orthodoxy. However, this is still largely a country of gun-toting, abortion-hating, God-fearing haters of tax-and-spending, welfare-queen liberals. Barack Obama, being an intelligent politician, realizes this.

He’s dead right for saying so, and so falls into a slim minority amidst the swamp of the deliberately dumb. For as much as our fatuous mainstream media and the callous GOP mercenaries at the National Journal might misdiagnose Obama’s record as through-and-through liberal, they’re only doing so to pick a fight.

The truth is that the Democratic nominee is not toppling any temple walls of conservatism - he’s not our Reagan, policy-wise; he’s our Nixon. Nixon, the dead-on brilliant, centrist leader who bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia while promoting affirmative action because he knew it was what was rationally demanded.

As Sachs says, 2008 is for the left what 1968 was for the right: A chance to exploit the crash of the other side in order to put a braintrust, not a true believer ideologue, in office. You wouldn’t know this from the dozens of sobby screeds literally littering the punditry on TV and computer screens - the last week has seen a piece on “Obama’s shift to the center may alienate…” featured on Yahoo’s homepage daily - but it’s the truth.

I have long supported Obama because, unlike most analysts who either find no value in admitting it or are too thick to recognize it, the guy is more intelligent than he is ideological. But right now, the press is giving itself a hernia trying to push this “alienation” crap until everyone buys into it, laying into Obama’s hamstrings like a latter-day McGovern.

I, and Sachs, hope and trust that Obama’s canniness and charisma will carry the day despite it.

Some have said this approach caused Al Gore’s loss in 2000 and John Kerry’s loss in 2004. But they were lousy, uncharismatic campaigners. Obama is exciting even when he’s pissing off the progressive wing of his party.

That could be his saving grace: Even when you don’t bathe him in blood or scandal, the guy’s exciting. He’s got Nixon’s real politick with Reagan’s charm. Despite how the progressives may pule, Obama could just end up a voice for the Bush-era’s silent majority.

Provided he can shout down the talking heads, that is.

Two events that summon the increasingly common specter of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and veterans struck the news yesterday.

The first was that a storied soldier, Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, apparently killed himself after violently grappling with PTSD.

After breaking down the door to Dwyer’s home, officers found him surrounded by empty cans of aerosol-gas dusters and prescription pills.

The Army medic was featured in a famous photo of him carrying an Iraqi child to safety. What was not so well publicized was the inability of the military to help Dwyer, even after several incidents where his mental distress inspired him to blaze away with a pistol and drive off the road. The system wouldn’t commit him, the VA couldn’t help him, and the result was one becoming all too common.

A RAND study put this familiar catastrophe in proper context earlier this year.

Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — 300,000 in all — report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression…

Just 53 percent of service members with PTSD or depression sought help from a provider over the past year, and of those who sought care, roughly half got minimally adequate treatment.

Meanwhile, the Army is trying to control the message that filmmakers are putting out there on the subject of PTSD.

That may sound sinister to some, but there’s nothing like censorship about it. The deal is that the military will swap assistance like loaned equipment and technical advisement in exchange for having input on what goes in the script.

Some films, like Paul Haggis’ exploration of PTSD, “In the Valley of Elah,” don’t find enough common ground of message for the military to lend a hand. But some, like Tim Robbins’ upcoming film, “The Lucky Ones,” still manage to tackle tough subjects like PTSD and remain linked with the Army.

“It captures the nuance. It is not a broad brush stroke or just about PTSD” — post-traumatic stress disorder — [Army program director] Breasseale said. “They manage to tell a story that is familiar but different.”

This shows promise, in all regards. Increasing comity between the military and the public, even anti-war elements, suggests a mutual respect. Mutual respect can only lead to mutual understanding, and understanding is what our discarded, suffering soldiers afflicted by PTSD need first and foremost.

McCain has a glaringly stupid idea to balance the budget. The analysis of it, cogent and thorough, is here.

I will just synopsize here:

He’s going to take the borrowed money used on the war - which we’ll “win” in his first term, somehow maintaining an indefinite presence overseas while not spending any money on it - and use it to pay off the defecit. Yes, the borrowed money will be paying off our borrowed money.

Now here’s our favorite bi-partisan commentator, James Kotecki, to make that idea sound even funnier than it is: