There’s a bizarre conversation going on between a number conservative writers over the right hysterical tone to take against Barack Obama’s insidious agenda, kicked off by this from Human Events’ First Things’ David Goldman:

I’ve been screaming about this for more than two years: Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

Commentary’s John Podhoretz called this “disgusting“:

In the first place, Obama is not responsible for his mother or her political views, any more than Ronald Reagan should have been be held accountable for the fact that his father was a drunk. In the second place, Goldman’s speculation about her sexual history is appalling in about a hundred different ways. [...]

The opposition to Barack Obama needs to keep its wits. His domestic-policy proposals and foreign-policy ideas constitute a profound challenge to the good working order of the United States and the world. Spewing repellent nonsense about Obama’s mother and spinning bizarre notions about his innate foreignness — when he is in fact the possessor of one of the great and enduring American stories, and is in his own person a demonstration of precisely the kind of American exceptionalism that Obama so pointedly pooh-poohs — can be used to discredit his opposition.

Then Michael Ledeen intervened to defend Goldman, who Ledeen assures us “has offered plenty of evidence to explain why he believes” these things, and claims that Podhoretz “would have done better if had taken a bit of time to study the facts of Obama’s life“:

It’s surely important to pay attention to biography, as John no doubt agrees in calmer moments. I don’t understand his complaint about “speculation about…sexual history.” It’s not speculative to say that she married a Kenyan and then an Indonesian, and produced children from both. [...]

The character of our president is an important matter. I think both John and David have tried to illuminate it, but I wish John had taken more time with his latest tirade, gotten the facts right, and focused his considerable talent on the serious matters that rightly concern us.

Commentary’s Peter Wehner weighs in to agree with Podhoretz. Yes, the same Peter Wehner who recently stated that President Obama “simply doesn’t hold this nation in very high esteem.”

Human Events’ First Things’ Joseph Bottum steps in to squash the beef, agreeing with Podhoretz that all of their thinking “stem[s] from the same root—a conviction that the West is under ideological assault and needs defending from its Islamofascist enemies.”

So, for those of you keeping score at home: The “crazy” side of this debate (Goldman, Ledeen) believes that President Obama’s mother’s choice of male companions is hugely relevant to understanding his plans for surrendering to the Islamofascists. The “sane” side (Podhoretz, Wehner) thinks that President Obama’s mother’s choice of male companions is irrelevant to the fact that President Obama doesn’t like America very much.

When this is the state of the debate among “serious, mainstream” conservatives, is it really any wonder that the sign below is a regular feature at tea parties?

Sifting through the debris of George W. Bush’s Middle East “freedom agenda,” Shadi Hamid writes “for all its singularly destructive actions, the Bush administration might very well be the only administration to have ever challenged the fundamental premises of US policy in the Middle East.”

For liberals long disillusioned with the narrowness of US-Mideast policy, it may be worth recalling that the “Arab spring” — when a number of Arab countries experienced democratic opportunities — was not a figment of the conservative mind. It was real. [...]

After Islamist groups registered electoral victories across the region, the Bush administration quickly reversed course and buried its “freedom agenda.” The year 2005 became America’s lost moment in the Middle East. But that it was lost is different from not happening at all; something remarkable had, in fact, occurred.

I can agree with this to a point. While the idea that a lack of democracy and an overabundance of authoritarianism is a driver of extremism in the Middle East was not a diagnosis original to the Bush administration or its neoconservative idea-men, I think he and they do deserve some credit for making it. Unfortunately, their ideas for dealing with this problem were incredibly ill-conceived and counter-productive, and grounded in a fairly narrow and essentialist view of Middle East culture. It’s not as if Bush simply lost his nerve — or, as a neoconservative might prefer it, his will — on democracy. Bush’s abandonment of democracy promotion was in large part a panicked response to forces bolstered by the central element of his broader Middle East agenda: The war in Iraq. One really can’t understand the Bush administration’s propping and then dropping of Middle East democracy in isolation from those “singularly destructive actions” that Shadi acknowledges.

That said, I agree with Shadi that the Obama administration has placed too little emphasis on political reform in the Middle East, and share his hope that the administration will begin to show a bit more creativity in its approach to the region. The Cairo speech offered a positive sign that the U.S. was prepared, at long last, to recognize the role that Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood have to play in the political process (something we’ve long recognized in practice in Iraq) but, as Shadi notes, there’s unfortunately been very little follow up to the speech. Given the priority that administration has placed on cultivating Arab support for its Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and Iran agenda, it’s understandable that they’d downplay pressure on reform, but at the very least it would be nice to see some greater acknowledgment that political stagnation creates problems for the U.S. in the region, just as do Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Shadi suggests that Obama’s success in passing health care has provided some momentum for a more ambitious foreign policy, but I’d also suggest that Obama’s more recent success in forging a stronger international consensus on nuclear security indicates that this administration has the capacity to approach the painstaking, long-term project of Middle East political reform with a seriousness that was lacking in the previous administration. By invading Iraq and replacing its government, Bush basically attempted to deal with the problems of the Middle East by overturning the chess board. At the very least, Obama seems to understand that the more responsible approach is to play better chess.