BECOMING? Walter Russell Mead: As Libya Implodes, “Smart Diplomacy” Becoming a Punch Line.

Throw in the resulting civil war in Mali and the scattering of insurgents and weapons to the four winds, and you have a classic exhibition of reckless incompetence—of American arrogance, ignorance, carelessness and moralism combining in a toxic stew to sink a fragile country we never understood.

Luckily for America’s self-esteem, it was liberal Democrats that produced this particular shambles. If Republicans had done this, the media would be on the administration non-stop, perhaps comparing Samantha Power to Paul Wolfowitz—a well-meaning humanitarian way over her head who wrecked a country out of misguided ideology. There might also be some pointed questions for future presidential candidates who supported this fiasco. But since both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have their fingerprints all over Libya, there isn’t a lot of press hunger for a detailed, unsparing autopsy into this stinking corpse of policy flub.

If Obama were a Republican, the press and the weekly news shows would be ringing with hyperbolic, apocalyptic denunciations of the clueless incumbent who had failed to learn the most basic lessons of Iraq. Indeed, the MSM right now would be howling that Obama was stupider than Bush. Bush, our Journolist friends would now be saying ad nauseam, at least had the excuse that he didn’t know what happens when you overthrow a paranoid, genocidal, economically incompetent Arab tyrant in an artificial post-colonial state. But Obama did—or, the press would nastily say, he would have done if he’d been doing his job instead of hitting the golf course or yakking it up with his glitzy pals at late night bull sessions. The ad hominem attacks would never stop, and all the tangled threads of incompetence and failure would be endlessly and expertly picked at in long New Yorker articles, NYT thumbsuckers, and chin-strokings on all the Sabbath gasbag shows.

Why, the ever-admirable tribunes of a free and unbiased press would be asking non-stop, didn’t this poor excuse for a President learn from what happened in Iraq? When you upend an insane and murderous dictator who has crushed his people for decades under an incompetent and quirky regime, you’d better realize that there is no effective state or civil society under the hard shell of dictatorial rule. Remove the dictator and you get chaos and anarchy. Wasn’t this President paying attention during the last ten years?

Some of the criticism would be exaggerated and unfair; the Monday morning quarterbacks never really understand just how complicated and tragic this poor world really is, not to mention how hard it is to make life and death decisions in real time in the center of the non-stop political firestorm that is Washington today. And the MSM attracts more than its share of deeply inexperienced but entitled, self-regarding blowhards who love to pontificate about how stupid all those poor fools who have actual jobs and responsibilities actually are.

But luckily for Team Obama, the mainstream press would rather die than subject liberal Democrats to the critiques it reserves for the GOP.

This is why, if you want accountable government, you should always vote Republican.

EVEN IN BLUE MASSACHUSETTS: Boston ‘Teeming With Protesters’ in Giant Rally Against Housing Illegal Immigrants in the State. Well, when the median American household is poorer than it was in 2007, bringing in more labor competition is a tough sell.

JIM TREACHER UNIMPRESSED WITH JAN SCHAKOWSKY’S #LIVETHEWAGE STUNT: “Rep. Schakowsky has proven the exact opposite of what she intended. America is the best-fed country in the history of the world. As she’s shown, food is plentiful and cheap. That’s despite the best efforts of leftists, not because of them.”

Plus: “Wondering how Jan usually eats? So is everybody else.”

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AMERICA IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less. “Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.”

Just “bad luck,” I guess.

DO TELL: Lawmakers complain Obama too aloof with Congress.

President Barack Obama’s request for billions of dollars to deal with migrant children streaming across the border set off Democrats and Republicans. Lawmakers in both parties complained that the White House – six years in – still doesn’t get it when it comes to working with Congress.

Top GOP leaders got no notice of the $3.7 billion emergency request. The administration sent contradictory messages about what it wanted to deal with the border crisis. And as the proposal drew fierce criticism, the White House made few overtures to lawmakers in either party to rally support.

House and Senate lawmakers in both parties plus several senior congressional aides said this past week that the handling of the proposal by Obama and the White House is emblematic of the administration’s rocky relationship with Congress: an ad hoc approach that shuns appeals to opponents and doesn’t reward allies. . . . Congressional frustration with the administration is not limited to the White House.

Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly implored the State Department last month to weigh in on a bipartisan resolution calling on Turkey to return confiscated Christian property before a House panel voted on the measure. The Virginia lawmaker complained the resolution included “gratuitous Turkey-bashing” and wanted State Department officials to help persuade lawmakers to support a toned-down version.

None of his House colleagues heard from department’s legislative liaisons.

“The State Department was missing in action,” Connolly said in an interview. “They have to professionalize their operation.”

He’s a cold fish who doesn’t care about much of anything outside his own narrow priorities.

PUTIN’S PAL: Stephen Cohen was once considered a top Russia historian. Now he publishes odd defenses of Vladimir Putin. Shockingly, The Nation is taking a pro-Russian line.

CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRAT: We’d rather get illegals into the United States and on the voter rolls than reelect vulnerable Dems this year.

ANOTHER PRESS RELEASE ON CAMPUS KANGAROO COURTS FROM PROF. JOHN BANZHAF:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 22, 2014): A female student – whose complaint that Swarthmore violated Title IX by ignoring her report about rape triggered major changes in how the school handles date-rape cases – has now come out in strong support of a male student whose law suit is challenging those very procedures as unfair, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

Banzhaf has been studying a new legal movement in which males found guilty of date rape are then successfully suing their colleges, sometimes under the same Title IX which triggered the problem.

Moreover, even those who are sympathetic to the problem of campus date rape, and are in charge of the campus adjudication process, are now recognizing that it can be unfair if not illegal.

For example, the director of the Association of Title IX Administrators bluntly warned that some male students may have been improperly penalized.

“Some boards and panels still can’t tell the difference between drunk sex and a policy violation,” he wrote. “We are making Title IX plaintiffs out of these men.”

In the Swarthmore case, “John Doe” and “Jane Row” had two sexual encounters in 2011 which did not involve intercourse. Subsequently, the male and female had intercourse, which the woman agrees was consensual.

But, 19 months after the fact, she suddenly claimed that the two earlier episodes had been coerced. The school originally thoroughly investigated and then cleared the man in January 2013 without even filing disciplinary charges.

However, sometime thereafter, the student newspaper published articles charging that women who reported rape felt revictimized by the college’s failure to take their complaints seriously, and Mia Ferguson’s highly publicized Title IX complaint against Swarthmore went public. Less than two weeks later, Swarthmore told the male, a law student, that they had reopened a complaint filed against him a year earlier.

Then, after an emotional hearing before a panel made up of faculty, staff, and students, he was expelled. His attorney charges that the inference is clear. “To correct one wrong – its past unresponsiveness to female complaints – [Swarthmore] committed another wrong against John based on his gender . . . He was a male accused of sexual misconduct at the wrong time and in the wrong place.” Mia agrees.

Swarthmore has subsequently changed its adjudication procedures, and now has such cases heard before and decided by a retired judge; a tacit admission, suggests Banzhaf, that its former procedure had serious problems.

Male students have already used legal action successfully at Brown (2X), Central College, Denison, Duke (2X) , George Washington, Holy Cross, Occidental, Saint Joseph, University of the South, and Xavier.

Meanwhile, law suits filed by male students convicted by their universities of rape and/or sexual assault are pending against Bucknell, Cincinnati, Columbia, Delaware State, Depauw, Drew, Kenyon, U of Michigan, Philadelphia U, Swarthmore, Vassar, Williams, and perhaps others.

“When even rape victims and Title IX administrators admit that men are being convicted unfairly, it’s long past time to consider changing the procedures,” argues Banzhaf.

Indeed.

TYLER COWEN: The Real Import Of The Gruber Fracas. I like this from the comments: “All I can say is, if you’re going to pass a law with zero bipartisan support, you should be very careful in the drafting, since they aren’t likely to help you out if you muck it up. In this case, haste and arrogance is biting them in the ass.”

GIVEN THAT HAMAS IS A BUNCH OF LYING LIARS, YES: “The media has engaged in journalistic malpractice by reporting casualty figures for civilians coming from Gaza as gospel. The figures come from the Gazan Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas.”

Personally, I’d go all Curtis LeMay on ’em, but Bibi is more merciful.

“SMART DIPLOMACY” BEARS ITS USUAL FRUIT: U.S. evacuates Libya embassy after ‘free-wheeling militia violence.’

Meanwhile, Obama went golfing today.

EVERYTHING OBAMA TOUCHES: Taliban Making Military Gains in Afghanistan.

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LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Anti-Semitism on the march: Europe braces for violence.

SO THE STANDING WITH IDF FACEBOOK PAGE THAT I LINKED TO EARLIER IS GONE NOW. Clicking on the link just takes you to the main Facebook page. The I Hate Israel page is still up, though. Nice job, Zuckerberg, you putz.

UPDATE: Check out the I Love IDF page.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, EH? This makes me wonder how much overlap there is between the happiest places in America and the drunkest. Though I imagine they drink plenty in Scranton, and it’s not doing so well. . . .

SOCIAL MEDIA: What I Instagrammed Vs. What Was Really Happening, Or My Entire Life Is A Lie.

ELIZABETH PRICE FOLEY IN THE WASHINGTON POST: Federal courts need to stop Obama from flouting the Constitution. “The Constitution states that it’s Congress’s job to make the laws and the president’s to faithfully execute them. It does not permit a president to suspend a law or grant special dispensations from its requirements. But President Obama has done just these things on numerous occasions, and only the federal courts can preserve the constitutionally mandated separation of powers by definitively rebuffing his illegal actions.”

THE SUPREME COURT IS BECOMING MORE ELITE, AND MORE OUT-OF-TOUCH WITH AMERICA. “As most readers know, in the past a lot of Justices were politicians, statesmen, and advisors to Presidents. The modern trend is for Justices to be former appellate judges who graduated from elite law schools. Amar suggests that it would be better to have Justices with more diverse backgrounds. . . . It’s interesting that discussions of the Justices’ backgrounds tend to ignore the recent Supreme Court nomination of a Justice who did not fit the modern trend: Bush 43 nominee Harriet Miers. Miers fit the traditional pattern of the Presidential confidante who had not been a judge and did not attend an elite law school.”

CHANGE: Rand Paul introduces bill to reform civil asset forfeiture.

THERE’S A NEW EDITION OF Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty. Here’s a nice review.

SORRY, I HAD THE WRONG LINK BELOW SOMEHOW. Here’s the link to Best Books of the Year so far.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: DC Gun Carry Ban Struck Down. “In light of Heller, McDonald, and their progeny, there is no longer any basis on which this Court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny. Therefore, the Court finds that the District of Columbia’s complete ban on the carrying of handguns in public is unconstitutional. Accordingly, the Court grants Plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and enjoins Defendants from enforcing the home limitations of D.C. Code § 7-2502.02(a)(4) and enforcing D.C. Code § 22-4504(a) unless and until such time as the District of Columbia adopts a licensing mechanism consistent with constitutional standards enabling people to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms.4 Furthermore, this injunction prohibits the District from completely banning the carrying of handguns in public for self-defense by otherwise qualified non-residents based solely on the fact that they are not residents of the District.”

STRANGELY, NOT SO MUCH FOR HAMAS: A New Facebook Page Dedicated to the IDF Is Being Flooded With Sexy Selfies. Here’s the page. “This tunnel made in Israel.” Heh.