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G-20 Summit

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Wyatt Cenac filed the report from London for Jon Stewart on Thursday night's Daily Show, and he was shocked, shocked by the angry protests:

It's bulls--t, John. I'm hearing anti-American slogans, I'm seeing angry protests. This was not the deal. The deal was, we give them Obama, they don't hate us anymore.

You bait-and-switch m---f---rs, you tricked us!

I already ripped the Canadian flag off my knapsacks -- and the back of this suit. What am I supposed to do now?

At some point, a brick enters the picture.

Look, the chancellor of Germany, hey! Remember when our last president tried to feel you up? Has the new guy told you you look tense and tried to look down your shirt? Did he pretend to fall and grab your boobs? No! Quit your whining and agree with our economic policy!

No, I thought the only reason they never cooperated with us was because the last guy was such a dick!

They've got Taylor Hicks syndrome. They begged us to vote for a guy, and now that he's won, nobody's buying his album. Suck it up, Europe, he's your American Idol!

Of course, Hannity and O'Reilly and the rest of the Fox crew busily plumped the "Europeans still hate us" meme all week, as usual, mewling piteously about how they're a bunch of "whackos over there" (O'Reilly's phrasing) and so on. But then, they thought "the last guy" was not a dick but a prince among men.

So the brick-throwing thing does indeed come readily to mind as a measured and appropriate response.



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Now there's what you would call a leading question:

Is President Obama selling out America?

That's how Bill O'Reilly started out last night's "Talking Points Memo" segment of his Fox News show: A question that none-too-subtly accuses the president of betraying not just his oath but the nation at large. Like the kind of thing John Birch Society members and militia leaders do reflexively.

And sure enough, he was off and running, helping promote the Bircherite notion that Obama is taking us toward a nefarious "one world government" in which America is enslaved under global rule:

Talking points believes fear is driving the president's numbers down -- some Americans believing he's not been effective on the economy so far, others feel his policies are too socialistic, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating the USA will run up about $9 trillion in deficit over the next ten years.

Some conservative pundits actually believe President Obama is a "Star Chamber" guy -- a man who secretly wants to turn America into a progressive country modeled on Western Europe. Also, they think, he wants to lessen the power of America and sign up for a one-world combine of governance.

In the past, that kind of thinking was labeled loony, but that's changing. Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, the former prime minister of Denmark said:

In Europe, we have been protected from the worst effects of the crisis thanks to welfare states built up over the past 60 years to cushion citizens from the threats posed by the free market. We can all count on state health care, social housing, education, unemployment support and other universal, tax-funded services. ...

The simplistic dictum of more markets and less government -- championed by Reagan, Thatcher and their ideological heirs -- has failed on a momentous scale. ...

I am hopeful that the G-20 will make progress ... We must keep up the pressure by demanding a globalization that works for everyone, and forge new alliances and new lines of communication across national boundaries. We must develop new, progressive ways to achieve global justice.

Well, Karl Marx could not have said it better. Global justice requires that a one-world government seize private property and distribute it so that every human being has roughly the same amount of resources.

So there you have it: "global justice" equals "one world government." Evidently, all that talk about cooperation is just

Now, when O'Reilly says "some conservative pundits" believe this stuff, he means far-right nutcases like Alan Keyes and the Birch Society. And while he tries to set position himself as being somehow slightly skeptical of such notions, in reality, this whole rant is nothing but an endorsement of their worldview.

Next: O'Reilly wonders aloud if a black man is capable of being president, because "some conservatives" have claimed all along he is incompetent by virtue of his mixed race ...

But what's noteworthy about this rant is that the basis for his thesis is, once again, entirely groundless -- because not only does Poul Nyrup Rasumussen, the European socialist whose op-ed he cites, have absolutely nothing to do with either President Obama or any of the G-20 leaders who met in London, but he doesn't actually promote a "global government" (beyond building an international framework for cooperation) or any of the other things O'Reilly characterizes the op-ed as saying.

You can read it yourself:

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There were several questions at President Obama's G-20 Summit press briefing today asking him to compare himself to the previous administration. While he made clear there was a significant difference between himself and his predecessor, mostly he shied away from slagging the Republicans he replaced, and particularly George W. Bush.

But watching him onstage, you couldn't help making the comparison. And all I can say is: What a relief it is to once again have a thinking, competent, and capable man as the president.

Still, probably the most pertinent question, for those watching at home, came from Chuck Todd:

QUESTION: What concrete items that you got out of this G-20 can you tell the American people back home who are hurting, the family struggling, seeing their retirement go down, or worrying about losing their job, what happened here today that helps that family back home in -- in the heartland?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, as I said before, we’ve got a global economy. And if we’re taking actions in isolation in the United States but those actions are contradicted overseas, then we’re only going to be halfway effective, maybe not even half.

You’ve seen, for example, a drastic decline in U.S. exports over the last several months. You look at a company like Caterpillar, in my home state of Illinois, which up until last year was doing extraordinarily well. In fact, export growth was what had sustained it even after the recession had begun.

As a consequence of the world recession, as a consequence of the contagion from the financial markets debilitating economies elsewhere, Caterpillar is now in very bad shape.

So if we want to get Caterpillar back on its feet, if we want to get all those export companies back on their feet so that they are hiring, putting people back to work, putting money in people’s pockets, we’ve got to make sure that the global economy as a whole is successful.

No doubt this is some reassurance for Americans. At the same time, it was responses like this one, I think, that will help build confidence in America among other nations:

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