Bushehr delayed again

The opening of the Bushehr nuclear power plant has been delayed once again. Maybe even the Russians have realized that allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons is a danger to the world? (Hat Tip: Challah Hu Akhbar). The reformist Aftab daily on Monday quotes Asgar Jalalian, a member of the parliament's special committee on the plant, as saying that Iran has already paid at least twice the expected

The Obama epic fail from A to Z

Bret Stephens does a masterful job of categorizing the Obama Presidency's epic failure from A to Z, although I hope and pray that he's wrong about Z. Here are some highlights. A is for the Arab world, and our standing in it: This year, Zogby International found that 5% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the U.S. In 2008, when George W. Bush was president, it was 9%.B is for the federal budget

The cult of Obama worship; The Red Decade; Eugene Lyons

In 1941, Eugene Lyons wrote The Red Decade, a description of American liberal Soviet worship during the 1930's. American leftists would travel to Russia, ignore the mass oppression and starvation that appeared plainly before their eyes and report back to the U.S. in glowing terms about conditions in Stalin's Russia. The Soviet government could do no wrong in their eyes:

I do not believe I am exaggerating the element of self-delusion in the process. I lived in Russia, close to its grim realities, precisely in the years when the strange Russia-worship overcame so many Americans. At the height of the tourist invasion, in the early 'thirties, as many as 85 per cent of the foreign hordes were from the United States. I watched literally thousands of my countrymen prostate themselves at the shrines of their new inspiration.

. . . . I heard them exclaim in hushed wonder over marvels that existed only in their quivering imaginations. I saw them stiffen in desperate resistance at the first contact with doubt. I watched them move like somnambulists among the food queues and horrors of a throttled and policed population, clapping their hands in glee over the lovely "sacrifices."

The Red Decade, p. 93 [1971 printing]

If this sounds familiar, it should. There is little difference between the dupes of the 1930's and today's "journalists," in whose eyes Obama can do no wrong.