Not all the foreign reviews from Senator Obama's Disney-like junket are glowing....

Like this one, from Al Jazeera:

Wow!

Wow!

Wow what?

Like so many I was wowed. What a rock star! Did you see how Obama drew a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, how people were clamouring to take his picture and autograph?

What are you, a teenager?

Come on! Barack looked truly presidential during his Middle East and Europe trip - like really cool.

Yeah and he has Denzel Washington's teeth and Tiger Woods' smile! So what? What does "looking presidential" mean? Is he auditioning for the president's role in a new TV series? Martin Sheen certainly looked more presidential in the Kennedy series and more recently in The West Wing. For that matter, even Michael Douglas looked more presidential in the Hollywood epic The American President.

This wasn't just a Hollywood moment. He was able to handle himself very well with world leaders.

How do you know? The only thing we saw were photo ops - at gates, doorways and gardens. So the camera likes him, how does that make him commander-in-chief of the greatest power in the history?

The point is he was appreciated and respected by Middle Eastern and European leaders - Iraq's Nuri al-Maliki went as far as supporting his withdrawal calendar.

Here you go again! He's a presidential candidate with a good shot at the presidency so they were polite to him(actually al-Maliki retracted his remarks) but how does that make it a major success or make him suitable to be president?

Look, he made no gaffes, and that's strategic with the media scrambling to catch him screw up. He made no major mistakes, no slips, no flops - like, for example, McCain's "Iran support for al-Qaeda" flop, no "Dukakis in the tank" moment and no Howard Dean bedevilled by raging image.

So because he didn't fall down on his face or utter a political blasphemy, he's presidential?

No, no, not only that - he made excellent public appearances, press conferences and his speech was just magnificent! You saw that crowd cheering him on - cameras, t-shirts ... they were O'bamed.

Okay, so he's a great orator and his speech writers are excellent and his campaign makes good events but this is a political campaign not a rock concert - it's about the policies and the principles.

Wait a minute, in the US it's the media image that counts at the end of the day and he was a media blitz.

Whatever! If it's about media image the incoherent and stuttering George Bush would have never become president. In politics, policy, leadership and principles are what counts, not packaged media images and prepared scripts for popular consumption.

So you think that Bush was elected because of his principles and leadership qualities - give me a break! Obama's charisma, wise judgment and moral values are what attract people to this new type of leader. Didn't you read his books, trace his days as a political organiser ... didn't you hear him?

Now you're talking - that's the part that will eventually make him presidential and that's what we must judge him by, not through the superficial media cover up.

Of course. Needless to say he spoke of pulling troops out of Iraq, working on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian question from day one and wanting an environment-friendly world, free of nuclear weapons and free of walls between nations and states.

Yeah, maybe ... too many cliches though and sometimes he sounds like a beauty pageant contestant who wants world peace. I heard him and there is much to be desired.

Like what?

Like why he thinks the war in Iraq mustn't go on, while the war in Afghanistan should and will with more US troops! Why he spoke of the Berlin Wall and apartheid in South Africa but nothing of Israel's apartheid wall. He spoke generalities, nothing specific - no agenda, no programme, no overarching idea ...

I particularly enjoyed the commentator on Obama's shifting sands Iraq policy:

Look, Obama did insist on the paramount question of withdrawal from Iraq despite pressure from his rival about the "success of the surge" that he was against from the very beginning.

I am not sure about that. He seems to be running away from the question of Iraq, which polls tell him no longer seems to interest the American voters, instead concentrating on Afghanistan and even bringing it up as a central issue to reaffirming the Atlantic alliance with Europe ... when it's another un-winnable war ...

Point being: actually read world press accounts instead of just looking at the posed pictures, and you'll get a far more ... nuanced ... view of how people in foreign lands see Obama.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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