In a good indication that the Wisconsin protests have become a liability for Democrats, the White House and the DNC have clumsily attempted to distance themselves from the event in the New York Times:

Administration officials said Sunday that the White House had done nothing to encourage the demonstrations in Wisconsin — nor was it doing so in Ohio, Florida and other states where new Republican governors are trying to make deep cuts to balance their budget. …

And, officials and union leaders said, reports of the involvement of the Democratic National Committee — specifically Organizing for America, the grass-roots network born of Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign — were overblown to start with. …

“This is a Wisconsin story, not a Washington one,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “False claims of White House involvement are attempts to distract from the organic grass-roots opposition that is happening in Wisconsin.”

But apparently someone forget to tell the DNC’s communication director Bob Woodhouse to scrub his Twitter feed to reflect this new strategy. Doug Ross has pointed out a Feb. 17 Tweet from Woodhouse saying that the White House was “proudly” playing a role in the protest.

With all of the baseless claims made by Democrats that the Tea Party movement was Republican Party Astroturf, it doesn’t seem likely that the GOP will let this blunder by the DNC slide.

At Tablet magazine, Marc Tracy suggests someone should be fired for diplomatic malpractice regarding the UN vote on Israel, since the episode confirmed that Obama’s words and actions do not match; featured “the ostensible leader of the free world supplicating himself to the disputed leader of a stateless authority,” who called his bluff; demonstrated how little weight a personal request from the president carries; had the whole world watching him try to find his way out of the mess; and culminated with a result that antagonized everyone. At the American Thinker, Richard Baehr suggests the administration “crossed a line” with its “particularly unskillful” handling of the situation.

Let me add one more point, gleaned from the teleconference Susan Rice held Friday evening with reporters explaining the U.S. alternative – a “very strong” and unanimous Council statement that would have “gone further than we have gone of late on the issue of settlements and other important issues,” plus a commitment to “new and important statements [by the Quartet] on core issues, including territory, as well as settlements” and a Security Council visit to the region. She said it would have permitted the Security Council to speak “with one voice on core issues in the manner that we hadn’t before.”

The point to be noted is that this was completely inconsistent with the administration’s Congressional testimony the week before. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told the House Foreign Affairs Committee the administration had a “clear and consistent” position: “we do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues, and … we will continue to employ the tools that we have to make sure that continues to not happen …”

How did the “clear and consistent” position to prevent the Security Council from engaging on the issues become a concerted effort one week later to have the Council engage, as long as it acted through a unanimous anti-Israel statement, an anti-Israel Quartet statement, and the maraschino cherry of an anti-Israel Security Council trip, instead of a resolution?

It is fairly easy to piece together what happened, by reviewing Hillary Clinton’s schedule last week. On each of the three days preceding the veto, she spent the afternoon at the White House with President Obama, sometimes accompanied by James Steinberg. It was undoubtedly there that someone pushed the idea of having the Security Council engage with a statement, a follow-up statement, and a trip. The “clear and consistent” State Department position was transformed into the opposite, with Rice later delivering an extraordinarily harsh statement against Israel, using decidedly undiplomatic language indistinguishable from what might have accompanied a U.S. vote in favor of the resolution.

Michael Oren reportedly said last year that peace-process policy in the Obama administration is a one-man show. Last week we may have viewed another confirmation – one that makes Marc Tracy’s suggestion impossible to implement.

The Battle of Madison–so far a peaceful one–is, in its way, almost as fraught with significance as what is now sweeping the Middle East. History, for better or worse, is being made in both places. In both places the forces of the status quo are battling the forces of change.

But there the analogy ends. In the Middle East it is the forces of change that are in the streets while those of the status quo have been clinging desperately to power as they hole up in their palaces.  In Madison, a democratic and fair election (and Wisconsin’s reputation in that regard is nearly the polar opposite of that of its neighbor to the south) put the forces of change into the State Capitol. They have a clear mandate, indeed duty, to implement the platform they ran on. Those determined to continue business as usual–the people be damned–are the ones howling in the streets.

The status quo is clearly losing in the Middle East, as the tyrants of Tunisia and Egypt have already fallen, those of Bahrain and Yemen are tottering, and now Libya’s strongman is clinging to power only by turning the Air Force on his own people (with limited obedience from the Air Force, apparently). I, for one, would not be inconsolable with grief if Moammar Qaddafi suffered the same fate as Romania’s Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu. The justice that was meted out to them may have been summary, but justice it was. How much further this revolution may spread in the Arab world is anyone’s guess right now, but I imagine a lot of kings, emirs, and perhaps the odd mullah or two,  have helicopters on standby in their palace gardens.

There is no chance of firing squads being employed in Madison. But the importance of the forces of change prevailing there can hardly be overstated. If Governor Scott Walker wins this battle, the forces of change will sweep other states as well, just as it has the Middle East. The 21st century can begin in the United States as, it seems increasingly clear, it has in the Middle East. If he goes wobbly, however, the status quo could prevail for quite awhile.

Wisconsin State Senator Mark Miller, Democratic minority leader, said today that ”The governor has not done anything except insist that it has to be his way, all or nothing. The governor needs to recognize that this is a democracy and in a democracy you negotiate.”

Not when you have the votes you don’t, Governor.

Reasonable people can argue about whether the Bush-led liberation of Iraq planted the seeds for what’s happening across the Middle East today. But it is almost a certainty that the invasion caused Moammar Qaddafi to come clean and give up his weapons of mass destruction program. When Qaddafi surrendered his WMD in 2003, even he himself acknowledged that the Iraq War influenced his decision.

In light of what some are now describing as a civil war in Libya, with the regime in Tripoli fighting for its life, this is not insignificant. If someone wants to believe that freedom fever would have spread this year even without the Iraq War, they still have to face the fact that without that war the wave of popular protest would have unleashed revolutionary anarchy in a potentially leaderless country with WMD–significant WMD, at that. When Qaddafi gave up his program, Americans were startled to learn that it was much further developed than most intelligence experts had thought. It included centrifuges, uranium enrichment facilities, and dual-use labs.

Some who still cant countenance any positive outcome from the invasion of Iraq might argue that this is a mere one-off unpredictable side-effect of a war that has otherwise caused great geopolitical damage. But, in truth, cleansing a dictatorial regime of its WMD so that the weapons would not be used by the unstable dictator or obtained by extremists after his ouster was precisely the kind of thing proponents of the Iraq War hoped to accomplish. As President Bush put it in one speech:

We can allow the Middle East to continue on its course, on the course it was headed before September the 11th, and a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. Or we can stop that from happening by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope. And that is the choice America has made.

In other words, he saw that WMD, radical Islam, and Middle East autocracy were on a collision course, and that the American promotion of democracy abroad was the best chance at averting disaster. With new reports that Qaddafi has fled the capital, while his military jets fire on Libyan protestors, and that extremists from all over the region are looking to exploit new power vacuums, it’s worth considering what role Libyan WMD might have played in these events. Thankfully, that is now a question of speculation rather than observation.

Omri Ceren is correct to call out all of those journalists who bought into the Libya-has-reformed canard. Academics also deceived themselves in believing the Libyans weren’t so unhappy. See, for example, Stephen Walt’s description of his trip to Libya.

In hindsight, it is interesting to look at how Libya tried to cultivate useful idiocy in the United States and Great Britain. A couple years back, a Libyan opposition group published documents drawn up by the Livingston Group and Monitor Group detailing their strategy to rehabilitate Libya’s image in Washington. The documents are authentic. The core of the Libyan strategy was to bring professors to Libya, and then produce a book about their conversations with Muammar Qaddafi. Francis Fukuyama visited Libya as part of the program, and waxed eloquently about his experience to his core class at Johns Hopkins University-SAIS. The Libya lobby also had some conversations with Cass Sunstein about his participation, although it is unclear whether Sunstein, who now serves as Obama’s administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, ultimately participated in the propaganda trips. A responsible White House press corps would ask. The Libyans appeared to target London School of Economics professor Anthony Gidden because he was a tennis partner of George Soros.

Some U.S. officials may have diluted America’s tough line with Qaddafi, especially on human rights, so that they could get on his gravy train after leaving office. Of course, sometimes moral blindness starts at the top.

Tikkun has announced that it will be honoring Justice Richard Goldstone, author of the highly controversial Goldstone report, with an award at its 25^th anniversary dinner in March.

Five other recipients will share the award with Goldstone: Arizona Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva (one of Israel’s leading critics in Congress), Jewish theater founder Naomi Newman, Rabbi Marcia Prager, C.K. Williams, and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf (whose unsavory ties once made him the subject of a Weekly Standard take-down).

But forget the official award recipients for a second. Apparently, those who truly deserve this recognition are Tikkun and its editor, Rabbi Michael Lerner. Here’s the publication’s press release:

When Tikkun editor Rabbi Michael Lerner announced that Tikkun would be extending this honor to Justice Goldstone in Berkeley, his house was attacked by right-wing Zionists.  On March 14th, some of these people may picket or even disrupt the event when Tikkun acknowledges Goldstone for the good he did for humanity in his UN reports on Rwanda, Bosnia and Gaza.

Tikkun needs and deserves support from those of us who recognize that, in giving this award, Tikkun has once again distinguished itself as one of the most courageous progressive voices in the U.S. And that is one major reason why YOU should be coming to this celebration to honor Tikkun, Rabbi Lerner, and Justice Richard Goldstone in person.

So if you were thinking that it’s absurd for a Jewish group to give an award to someone like Goldstone, who has done everything in his power to attempt to delegitimize the Jewish state, you need to ask yourself a few questions. Why would you try to undercut Tikkun’s courageous decision to give this award? And why would you seek to ruin Tikkun’s moment of glory and recognition?

With characteristic courage, Tikkun has even courageously written a press release about its courageous decision. So let’s commend Tikkun and Rabbi Lerner, and acknowledge that it’s not easy to criticize Israel from 3,000 miles away, knowing that somewhere on the Internet, Neoconservatives might criticize your criticism.

The best political analysis I’ve seen in recent days comes from Ed Morrissey of Hot Air, who digs into a new Gallup poll and shows how its state-by-state polling suggests that whatever effect Barack Obama may have had on changing the partisan and ideological coloration of the electorate is now completely gone:

Almost every state has had a decrease in voter affiliation for Democrats, most of those significant, and the number of solidly-blue states has been cut in half….So much for 2008′s supposed political realignment.  Barack Obama now appears to have profited from Bush fatigue more than any move of the country to a center-left position on the political spectrum.  Most states show Democrats losing ground, even in the 14 states that are solidly Democratic. That gives Obama some bad portents for his 2012 re-election campaign.  It also puts Democratic control of the Senate after the 2012 elections an even more remote outcome.

In fact, the president—currently doing unquestionably the worst job of managing American foreign policy since the days of Jimmy Carter—may have made things far worse for Democrats than they otherwise would have been. It’s worth remembering this, since the conventional wisdom over the past month has become that Obama will be extraordinarily hard to beat in 2012.

If ousted Tunisian dictator Ben Ali didn’t have any skeletons in his closets, a Tunisian television news report suggests, it was mainly because there wasn’t any room: He had stuffed his closets and bookshelves full with blocks of cash and boxes of jewelry. While the report is in Arabic, you needn’t be a linguist to get the drift.

Jewish Funds for Justice – the group that has loudly spoken out against Glenn Beck’s use of Holocaust comparisons – has defended George Soros’s controversial references to the Nazi regime, which were made during an interview on CNN yesterday morning.

The group told me that Soros’s comments were misinterpreted, and he did not, in fact, claim that Fox News was using Nazi tactics during his interview. Instead, Jewish Funds for Justice said that Soros was comparing Fox News to the German media that led to the fall of the Weimer Republic and the rise of the Nazi regime. The organization seemed to indicate that this was an acceptable, and even reasonable, comparison.

“You should really watch the interview again. George Soros did not compare Fox to Nazis,” the organization wrote in an email. “[Soros] talked about how during the Weimar Republic the media was full of falsehoods and deceived people, just like Glenn Beck and others do now….Ultimately, these actions by the press during Weimar contributed to the downfall of the Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich.” Read More