WHEN EVEN NEWSWEEK NOTICES – AT 7:23 P.M. ET:  Related to the item just below:  When even the moribund Newsweek notices that our foreign policy has gone hopelessly PC, we know we're starting to get the message out:

The Obama administration is deeply concerned with stopping the next Faisal Shahzad—the man who, but for another lesson or two on bomb making, might have blown up Times Square on May 1. But in an administration also eager to ingratiate itself with the Muslim world, how far are Obama and his advisers willing to go to confront the radical Islamism that drives men like Shahzad?

Hedieh Mirahmadi, a Muslim community organizer based in Washington, D.C., fears that political correctness has got the better of this administration, to the point where it seems to be almost dissecting radical Islamism out of existence. “You can’t start at just violence because the trajectory is so dangerous. You need to start at that radicalism. The ideology,” Mirahmadi says. Other critics agree. The Obama team, says Scott Carpenter of the Washington Institute for Near East Peace Policy, “is doing some interesting things on the public diplomacy side [outreach to the Muslim world], and on the counterterrorism side. But in this big fat middle, radicalization, they’re doing zero.”

COMMENT:  While the piece contains the still-required swings at President Bush, the overall tone is something of a breakthrough, as Newsweek symbolizes the trendy New York media. 

But one of the most serious problems remains the left wing of the Democratic Party, which calls itself "progressive," but which is really a throwback to the old Henry Wallace faction of the 1940s, a faction that never met a Communist dictatorship it didn't like.  Political reports say that the White House is genuinely frightened of losing the left in this year's midterms if it moves closer to the center.  It should stop worrying.  There are vastly more moderates than leftist "progressives," a good number of whom spend their weekends reading Lenin in the libraries of California colleges. 

June 21, 2010