…without American influence. That’s the logical outcome of the Obama policies. And a preferable one, for many on the left. They’d prefer a world without American influence. Because America is, you know, evil.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama’s strikingly unilateral foreign policy:

Maureen Dowd doesn’t see any pattern to the President’s actions. She believes that the President’s pique at Israel was spontaneous because of the “supremely aggravating character of Bibi Netanyahu”, but Kagan suggests the President has a tendency to take alliances for granted while attempting to mollify enemies. This makes sense from a certain point of view. He’s a wooer, not a keeper. His whole life has been focused on getting to the next rung, the next office. Once that rung is attained, why it’s meant to be stepped on to get to the one above. And why not? Since your friends are already your friends you don’t need to be nice to them. On the other hand you have to convince your enemies to like you because they don’t like you yet. And a smart man should unsentimentally work on them.

…The problem is that over the long haul international relations are about the keeping, not the wooing. Building a really stable international framework, as opposed to getting a photo op, means creating a foundation based on shared values. Sometimes the bad guys like being bad guys. After all is said and done, Venezuela will import 30,000 Cuban advisers whether Obama has been nice to Chavez or not. Although it’s politically incorrect to say it, one reason why America has enemies is because there are some countries out there that are not worth making friends with.

Read all. Carly Simon is involved, too.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More thoughts from Geraghty:

The Economist: “Friends have spats, but this seems to be more than that. America has not simply accepted Mr Netanyahu’s prompt apology. Opinion in the administration is said to be divided. Mr Biden himself and many State Department officials, together with George Mitchell, who was to have supervised the now-stalled proximity talks, advised cooling things down. But, whether out of rage or calculation, Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton preferred to escalate.”

Boy, there’s a reassuring calculation about what drives our policy choices, huh? 50/50 shot this is deliberate or we’re just lashing out at blind rage at the one ally in the region we would trust in a back-alley knife fight. And how utterly screwed are we when Joe Biden has become the voice of reason on Middle East policy?

Well, that was the excuse they made for the lunatic decision of nominating him.

The subtext of the Kagan column from yesterday was pretty clear: all around the world, we’re spitting on our allies and groveling before our enemies and the most hostile states. For two years, we argued that the world didn’t work the way Obama said it did; now we’re getting to see the results.

And three more years of it to look forward to.

Thoughts from Ann Althouse.

Don’t pour water over Osama’s face, but make sure you don’t take him alive.

Read illegal combatants their Miranda rights, but kill them with Predators without a trial.

There have probably been worse AGs in my lifetime, but I’m having trouble coming up with one.

Reflections on the disastrous foreign policy of this administration:

Khadafy can be forgiven, but there are transgressions that can’t. One such sin was perpetrated by Israel after the nation’s decision to allow a new housing project to be built in Jerusalem.

The White House became so agitated with the new housing project — and the ill-advised timing of the announcement, which came during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit — that the casual onlooker might have been led to believe the Jerusalem neighborhood in question was part of some unfinished negotiation with Palestinians, or even that it was one of those “settlements.” It was neither.

Still, according to The Jerusalem Post, Hillary Clinton telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who, along with many other Israeli officials, apologized for the poor timing of the project’s announcement — to “berate,” “rebuke,” “warn” and “condemn” Israel. White House senior adviser David Axelrod used NBC’s “Meet the Press” to call the incident an “affront,” an “insult” and “very, very destructive.”

As the administration was manufacturing this anger, the Palestinian Authority was preparing the newly minted Dalal Mughrabi square. You know, just a place for folks to gather and commemorate the 32nd anniversary of 1978’s Coastal Road Massacre, in which 37 Israelis — 13 of them children — were murdered in a bus hijacking.

An American named Gail Rubin, who happened to be snapping some nature pictures in the area, was also gunned down.

No worries. No affront taken. That’s not “very, very destructive” to the process. We are above the fray. Above frivolous notions of “allies” or “friends.” History only matters when our enemies deem it important. We don’t want to tweak the fragile mood of the Arab street.

They had better start to worry about the American street. Especially if they continue to push health-care deform on us.

[Update a while later]

Some related thoughts from Michael Ledeen:

As he pushes Israel away from the American embrace, Obama has undertaken to make peace with Iran, whose genocidal hatred of America and Israel and bloody war against both requires a very different policy. Sensible Middle East experts understand that there cannot be peace between Israel and the Arabs as long as Iran exercises a decisive influence over the key terrorist organizations. But Obama has willfully ignored this connection in designing his Mideast plans.

You can’t even begin to address the Arab-Israeli thing until and unless you’ve defeated Iran.

Unfortunately, they don’t believe in winning wars, only in “ending” them.

…and Eric Holder is no John Adams.

…at the Justice Department. Some thoughts:

…if Holder can’t give up the pipe dream of running a war from the ACLU handbook and conducting witch hunts to please the MoveOn.org crowd, Obama should find an attorney general who will.

Don’t hold your breath on that one.

The president has rebranded the Iraq war. As Jonah says, making it sound like a new dish detergent sounds better than “Operation Defend Biden’s Gaffe.” Besides, you don’t want to establish a precedent like that, otherwise you’d be renaming things a couple times a day.