Liberal

There's a profile of the late Andrew Breitbart in the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section by reporter David Carr. Carr's a talented and fair journalist, by Times standards, and the piece is mostly fair enough. But in the middle of it is this striking sentence, or rather this striking parenthesis:

Dean Singleton, chairman of the Associated Press board, introduced President Obama this afternoon at a speech to news editors in Washington. But Singleton didn’t just tell the audience the president was the next speaker—the supposed newsman offered lavish praise for the Democratic president.

This week has really reminded me of Election Day 2004. Liberals, then, were just plain convinced John Kerry was going to be elected president, so much so Bob Shrum actually called Kerry, “Mr. President.” The left had convinced itself  Bush was unpopular, Kerry had closed the deal, and everything was swinging his way in the final week. So, when the early, unweighted exit polls came up Tuesday afternoon, they were exuberant.

Does liberalism embody the military virtues? Is martial virtue the highest stage of progressivism?

President Obama wants us to think so.

Two years ago in Cairo, Nobel laureate and former International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei was the talk of the town. Newly retired from the IAEA, ElBaradei returned to Egypt in February 2010 after living abroad for decades. He began criticizing the Mubarak regime, hinting that he might run for president, and almost overnight he became Egypt’s great liberal hope. And yet when ElBaradei announced last week that he was ending his presidential bid, the news was met with a collective yawn.

On Friday, President Obama addressed the Union for Reform Judaism's convention. As Jen Rubin notes, "A good two-thirds of the address was devoted to liberal nostrums, reflecting his confidence that no matter how badly he treats the Jewish state, liberal Democratic Jews will stick by him."

The entire text of President Obama’s ambassador to Belgium’s remarks on anti-Semitism is a useful case study in the genre of pseudo-sophisticated liberal apologia for Muslim anti-Semitism. Below, Ambassador Howard Gutman says that Israel, the Jewish state, is responsible for a new wave of anti-Semitic beliefs held by Muslims:

The Daily Show explores whether there is class division at the Occupy Wall Street encampment:

Frank Miller has a rant about Occupy Wall Street that’s going around this morning. It’s not a real shock—Miller has been on the side of law and order since The Dark Knight Returns and earlier this year he published a graphic novel, Holy Terror, about the clash of Islam and the West. So he’s been a closet-fascist for a long time.

Politico's Keach Hagey reported last week on what appeared to be, and was later confirmed as, coordination between the not for profit and allegedly non-partisan Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and the environmental activist group Greenpeace. Each organization had produced a report on the chemical industry and how Koch Industries, in addition to its support for free market policies, had also opposed some regulations that Greenpeace and CPI believe are necessary in order to save the whales or something.

This video of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been making its way around the blogosphere. In the clip, Romney listens to a question from a voter in New Hampshire about the balanced budget amendment, and after a bit of an exchange, Romney gets visibly annoyed, particularly when the woman interrupts his answer, and responds:

Some political groups like to go incognito, hiding their political allegiances in order to take on a more serious, impartial tone. Take, for instance, the “Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington,” which masquerades as “non-partisan watchdog.” But CREW is far from non-partisan, a new report from the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) points out.