So writes Byron York:

Television comedy writers fretted that audiences didn’t want to hear anything even slightly negative about the Democratic nominee. The political press corps went nuts over a satirical New Yorker cover that wasn’t even directed at Obama.

And this was about a man who made up his own pretend presidential seal and motto, Vero Possumus; a man who, upon securing the Democratic nomination, said, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”; a man who has on a number of occasions seemed to forget that he is not, or at least not yet, the President of the United States, who has misstated the number of states in his own country, who has forgotten on which committees he serves in the U.S. Senate. Professional comedians — and their audiences — couldn’t find anything funny about any of that?

The fact that the press corps doesn’t seem to be able to recognize Senator Obama for the pompous buffoon that he is, is the biggest indicator how deep in the tank they are for him.

The New York Times sends John McCain’s op ed back for a rewrite.

Words fail.

Can we call them biased yet?

And just what does he means when he’d like to see McCain’s piece “mirror” Obama? Does he mean that as in a reverse counterpoint? Or does he mean (as in servers) an exact copy?

Thoughts from Rick Moran, as the Times continues, unwittingly, to write its own obituary.

Is Senator Biden a secret operative for John McCain?

Biden’s letter brought attention to the fact that Obama did not attend two of those three hearings — and for the third, on March 8, 2007, Obama only asked one question, one unrelated to Afghanistan.

Don’t worry. Unlike Jake Tapper, most of the press won’t mention it.

Some follow-up thoughts on Lileks’ bleat today. If people aren’t aware, this is what Kuntar did, as described by the remaining family member, the wife and mother:

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

But the next part is the most tragic, and it illustrates the point I made the other day with regard to shouting out to the universe:

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

In any event, had an Israeli, soldier or civilian, deliberately shot an Arab parent to death in front of his young child, and then smashed in her skull with a rifle butt, in front of eyewitnesses, he would have been arrested, tried, and probably sentenced to life in prison, by the Israeli government. He would have also been condemned by Israeli society as a vicious monster. In contrast, this bloodthirsty psychopath was welcomed as a hero in Lebanon.

As long as this asymmetry of attitude toward wanton and deliberate murder, and worship of death and those who brutally bring it persists in the Arab world, there will be no peace in the Middle East, regardless of how much we appease them, even if we allow them their only true goal, which is the destruction of the state of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. As someone once said, Arabia has always had bloody borders.

[Update in the afternoon]

“Bodies’ abuse made ID difficult.”

Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, former Chief Rabbi of the IDF, who was present during the transfer of the fallen soldiers yesterday, said that “the verification process yesterday was very slow, because, if we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead, we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I’ll leave it at that.”

What is he complaining about? It’s not like they had women’s panties on their heads, or a Torah was flushed down a toilet.

Rick Moran, on the Obama campaign’s counterfactuals. It’s hard to imagine the press letting a Republican get away with this kind of thing.

Jennifer Rubin makes a pretty good point:

Obama claims that experience is not as important as “judgment” or “change.” By manufacturing or existing accomplishments, however, he suggests that he does not buy his own pitch.

Rather, his repeated attempts to bolster his resume indicate that he may be nervous about his non-existent record of achievement. Not trusting that voters will buy his disparagement of experience, Obama is now resorting to a common, but risking tactic of under-qualified job-seekers: fudge the resume.

Resume fraud carries grave risks. If the employer finds out you are lying, you are unlikely to get the job, even if the competition is weak. And for Obama, who is already belaboring under an avalanche of tough press about his many policy flip-flops, he hardly needs another storyline which sheds doubt on his credibility and character.

I think that it’s things like this that are the reason the polls now seem to be even, even with the media love affair continuing.

[Update a while later]

Victor Davis Hanson lists some of Senator Obama’s other problems:

Obama has a poor grasp of history, geography, American culture, and common sense — whether the number or location of states in the Union, basic facts about WWII or where Arabic is spoken, or his sociological take on Pennsylvania, etc. His advisors realize this, and are playing 4th-quarter defense by keeping him out of ex tempore, non tele-prompted hope and change venues, where his shallowness can manifest itself in astonishing ways.

I was just listening to NPR in the car, and Terry Gross was interviewing Ryan Lizza on Fresh Air. He just had a long piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s Chicago history. He was talking about the Rezko housing project problems, and he said that Obama didn’t seem to be involved in the corruption, that the worst you could say about him was that exercised bad judgment.

Well, that in itself is saying something pretty bad, given that his claim to the presidency is that, while he may not have as much experience as his opponents, he has good judgment. But was his Rezko involvement good judgment? Was his attending a bigoted church for twenty years good judgment? Was it good judgment to pre-declare the surge a failure before it even began? So now it’s hard to make a case for either his experience or his judgment.

I know that the Senator believes that to know him is to love him, but I think he may find out that as the campaign actually engages after the conventions, the more people learn about him, the less inclined they’ll be to make him the next commander-in-chief.