Don't You Know

London Fund-Raisers Put Romney in a Scandal’s Glare
(New York Times headline, 7/20/2012)


Ten paragraphs later we read this......


But Democrats may be loath to draw attention to Mr. Romney’s donations from big banks like Barclays. Employees of the bank have contributed $34,800 to Mr. Obama and his joint effort with the Democratic National Committee. (Mr. Obama does not allow registered lobbyists to bundle for his campaign.)


This month, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. attended a fund-raiser in Park City, Utah, co-hosted by Mark Gilbert, a top executive at Barclays, who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mr. Obama’s re-election bid.


So what would have been a more honest headline if the New York Times was an objective newspaper? Perhaps something like:


LIBOR Scandal Complicates Fund Raising for Candidates
(RedStateVT headline, 7/20/2012)


Helpless
It won’t help him win many votes this year, but it should be noted that Barack Obama has been a good foreign policy president. He, Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest of his team have created a style of policy making that is flexible, incremental and well adapted to the specific circumstances of this moment. Following a foreign policy hedgehog, Obama’s been a pretty effective fox. (David Brooks, NYT, 7/19/2012)


This quote is excerpted from the Fiction section of the Times. With images still fresh of Hillary Clinton's motorcade being pelted with tomatoes, we get the storyline that Team Obama has got the foreign policy thing covered. To which we would note the following representative list: Obama stiffs Eastern Europe on missile defense and gets nothing in return from Putin, Obama stiffs America's most erstwhile ally Israel and gets nothing in return from the Arab world, Obama has largely been a bystander in the Arab spring after failing to support Iranian street protests ("leading from behind" doesn't count). Further, name one foreign leader that 'Obama the Fox' has bonded with in the way that Reagan, Bush and, heck, even Clinton did.