Decision '08

The inauguration of Barack Obama wasn't just the event of the day in the United States. It received above-the-fold coverage in countries all over the globe, as Jan. 21's front page of the United Daily News in Taipei, Taiwan, above, shows. To see more Obama-blaring newspaper front pages from Namibia to Israel to Poland and more, check out this week's photo essay, "The Inauguration Heard 'Round the World," which features images obtained from the Newseum.

I hate to diss the folks at Pajamas TV, who were nice enough to let me come on recently to promote our worst predictions list, but sending Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher to cover the war in Gaza seems like a questionable decision:

Mr Wurzelbacher, 34, says he will spend 10 days covering the fighting in Gaza and explaining why Israeli forces are mounting attacks against Hamas.

He told WNWO-TV in Toledo, Ohio, that he wants "go over there and let their 'Average Joes' share their story".

If you're a little fuzzy on Joe's foreign policy views, just recall that he agreed with a voter on the campaign trail that a vote for Barack Obama was equivalent to a vote for the death of Israel.

Meanwhile, the Internet is still anxiously awaiting Joe the Blogger's debut. Joe the merchandiser is going strong though.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Apparently, some Kenyans are still celebrating Barack Obama's winning of the U.S. presidential election last month. But a Kenyan high court pulled the plug on one celebratory activity that was scheduled to take place in Nairobi last Saturday, the 13th: a bullfight.

Animal-welfare activists said the competitions, in which two bulls have a go at one another, are cruel. Check out the full National Geographic video report here.

All may not be lost for McCain-supporting Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman. It seems President-elect Obama won't be kicking him to the party curb after all. Apparently, supporting the opposition -- campaigning with Republican candidate John McCain, speaking at the Republican National Convention, and criticizing Obama's foreign policy cred -- wasn't enough of an offense against Obama to get Lieberman banished from the party altogether.

Not all Democrats are in a forigiving mood, though. Many, like Majority Leader Harry Reid, are still gunning to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Senate Democrats are set to vote next week on whether or not Lieberman will keep his chairmanship. If Lieberman has spent any time kissing the reigning party's behind since the election in an attempt to keep his spot, he's not exactly apologizing for his recent behavior. Lieberman says he'll walk if he loses his gavel.

I have to get behind Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd's advice that Obama stay out of this one and avoid a political mess. Why would the president-elect waste such precious time and energy haggling over a Senate seat? And even more to the point, over Lieberman? Let's not gloss over Lieberman's voting recording. While he's fond of saying it's 90 percent in line with Democrats, it tends to go against the next administration's plans when it comes to matters of foreign policy -- Iraq and Iran to name two biggies.

The Connecticut senator has shown himself to be a hardy politician, one who's stayed afloat by swinging between parties. This time Lieberman played his hand, hoping to get another shot at the VP seat, and he bet poorly -- on McCain. If there's a pity party in his honor, I won't be going.

Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

Following up on the Hamas and MEND posts, here's a new term for the foreign-policy blogosphere:

Hopejacking: n. The cynical use of exaggerated or completely invented associations with president-elect Barack Obama by international leaders or organizations.

We'll be keeping an eye out for more examples.

The Arab daily Al-Hayat on Tuesday quoted a senior Hamas official as saying that United States President-elect Barack Obama's advisors met with members of the Palestinian militant group before the U.S. presidential election.

Ahmed Yusuf, a political advisor to Hamas' Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh, reportedly told the London-based paper that, "The connection was made via email and after that we met with them in Gaza."

Al-Hayat reported that Yusuf also said the relations were maintained after Obama's electoral victory last Tuesday. He said the president-elect's advisors requested that the relations be kept secret so as not to aid his rival, Senator John McCain.

So, we're supposed to believe that a campaign that was afraid to have its candidate filmed in front of women wearing hijabs, would take the risk of holding closed-door meetings with Hamas? Obama's advisors have already denied the report. I suspect we're going to be seeing a lot more of this.

In response to William Kristol's lament that John McCain's advocacy of the surge in Iraq lost him the election while winning the war, Fareed Zakaria writes:

Let us imagine that the surge had not worked. Imagine that over the past year and a half, American deaths in Iraq had soared, the gruesome civil war between Shiites and Sunnis had deepened, the
flow of refugees out of Iraq had increased and the government in Baghdad had lost control of the country to gangs and militias. Would Americans then have turned to the most passionate advocate of the surge and given him the presidency?

Zakaria means this to be a rhetorical question, but I think it's actually worth pondering. If the top story in every nightly news broadcast throughout October had been about terrorists killing U.S. soldiers instead of corporate meltdowns, would Americans really have voted for a candidate who (perhaps unfairly) was best known for his pledge to negotiate with extremists?

When terrorism is at the forefront of voters' minds, they tend to favor more hawkish candidates and Barack Obama actually fared worse than John Kerry with voters whose top concerns were terrorism or Iraq. Luckily for him, there were far fewer of these voters in this election.

Zakaria continues:

The electorate has seemed to sense that there is a new world out there and that the nostrums presented by McCain in his campaign are irrelevant to it. [...] The vigorous unilateralism openly advocated by the administration is recognized by most Americans to have weakened the country's influence abroad."

Wishful thinking. If anything, voters saw Obama's foreign-policy vision as not objectionable enough to outweigh his perceived superiority on economic issues.

It's true that Obama probably has a better chance of enacting change in foreign policy than on the economic conditions that won him the election. U.S. presidents are generally elected for their stances on domestic issues and remembered for their actions on international ones. But interpreting this election as a major shift in how the United States views its place in the world is probably premature.

Ouch:

[Carl] Cameron, the Fox beat reporter for the Republican presidential ticket, said he had been told by unnamed sources -- and on the condition he not report the details during the campaign -- that Palin could not name all of the countries that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

He did not mention which one (or ones) she whiffed on, but there are only three: Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

Nor, according to Cameron, was Palin aware that Africa is a continent.

Here's the video: