Swopa

By complaining about Obama being popular with foreigners, McCain is pandering to the most insular, xenophobic instincts of the GOP base... the prospect of a president whose foreign policy isn’t based on pandering to that fringe probably is exactly why Obama is so popular overseas.

To say the least, it's been an interesting weekend for anyone following political developments involving the United States and Iraq. What's the real meaning of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's surprisingly explicit endorsement of Obama's proposed 16-month timetable for withdrawing American combat troops?

Barack Obama's campaign must have felt it was Christmas in July when they heard about the Phil Gramm "mental recession/nation of whiners" gaffe, seeing as they happened on a day when he was campaigning with Hillary Clinton specifically to shore up his working-class-hero credentials.

Earlier today, Matt Yglesias mused about how Richard Nixon's illegal acts caused him to be forced out of office, while any suggestion of such accountability for Dubya's flagrant disregard for the law (for instance, regarding FISA and torture) has been marginalized or ignored as "lunatic" extremism. What's the real difference between then and now?

Just when you might have been thinking you could, oh, "relax" a bit and just worry about Afghanistan going to hell, there's more bad news from Iraq today. As Alissa Rubin reports for the New York Times: "Two insurgent bomb blasts struck at pro-American Iraqi targets in Anbar province just west of Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul on Thursday..."

This story in the New York Times has already been widely noted across the blogiverse this morning: "Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power...."

By now, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about this story in the Washington Post today: "High-level negotiations over the future role of the U.S. military in Iraq have turned into an increasingly acrimonious public debate, with Iraqi politicians denouncing what they say are U.S. demands to maintain nearly 60 bases in their country indefinitely."

From Daily Kos to the New York Times to points beyond, political commentators have spent today spitting out post-mortems for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. By now, the standard criticisms are familiar enough to be unenlightening. Nearly all of the retrospectives, though, miss a key turning point in October 2007.

Via Matt Yglesias, self-described optimist Ezra Klein wrote at the American Prospect yesterday: "My hunch is that because Obama and McCain keep saying, in speeches, that they disagree, the press will actually report on their disagreements. The media is perfectly happy to be led around. The problem in 2000 was that Bush insisted he was a moderate and the press had no interest in questioning that."

From ABC News on Saturday: Sen. Barack Obama called Sen. John McCain’s refusal to admit he misspoke about troop levels in Iraq "disturbing" and cast his actions as the sequel to the Bush administration’s refusal to admit their own mistakes. "We've seen this movie before," Obama said at a town hall in Rapid City, S.D. (...)