Trolling through AOL News today affords the chance to poll just how awful a faux pas was committed by the Obama campaign when it balked at seating a group of Muslim women in photo-op range. In case anyone is interested, a slight majority respondents thought the decision was "wrong", but most also opted for the least-severe sanction  - that Obama himself should do "Nothing, his spokesman's apology was enough."

In a country practically addicted to doling out sancimonious punishments, and in a campaign blessed with endless prattle about "terrorist knuckle-bumps" and financial minutiae of transient campaign staffers, that's a good sign (although a distressingly sizable number of folks thought the candidate should both apologize to the women himself and seat them at a future rally). Earlier this year, in the grind of the Democratic primary, revelations about Rev. Wright’s rancorous rhetoric and Obama’s own verbal missteps about blue-collar voters failed to torpedo his standing with the electorate. (Whether or not these non-issues had a part in Hilary Clinton’s resurgence and the subsequent closeness of late races remains to be seen.)

And reviewing a lot of mainstream blogs over the past few weeks, American “just-folks” seemed unexpectedly sensitive to the latent rot of swift-boat politics. The News Corp. specialty of fabricating video “evidence” by inter-cutting lurid accusations with innocent photo ops was easily sussed out when it became clear that the infamous “whitey tape” revealing Michelle Obama as a Sistah Souljah in pastel ensemble didn’t exist.

Even slap-dash half-measures offered up as policy must past muster these days, as witnessed by the cool reception given to the McCain/Clinton gas tax holiday proposals last month. Americans realize the infrastructure underwritten by such taxes is crumbling; since bridges have begun to fall, levees to fail and people to die, the harshness of that reality is hard to skip. Starving already-neglected budgets to fill SUVs doesn’t seem an attractive tradeoff nowadays.

Easing the gas crunch from the other end, with McCain/Bush calls to expand offshore drilling, probably will be met with similar indifference – if not outright antagonism. Even with gas cresting toward $5 a gallon, America’s traditional, longstanding environmental heart still beats… and rankles at potential coastal devastation.

Besides - increasing oil supplies will lower prices? In what fairy-tale world will that happen? It took a century to thoroughly lock us – and much of the world – in a transportation/energy circuit locked up by petroleum commission. Moving off that format will require research, reviving long-abandoned public transit programs, lifestyle changes… years. It will take years. Offshore drilling and wringing our reserves of all mineral wealth offer a compulsive glutton more donut shops.
 
All “relief” proposed by the ruling party is too little, too late. And that tax-refund “stimulus” never shook off the stink of insult: Let’s throw the little peasants some chickenfeed to blow on precious trinkets. Yeah… that’ll get us out of this slump – except that the money will be spent, for the most part, on staple goods shaved sparse by high prices and a shrinking dollar’s listless buying power.

The GOP has a tough time playing change-up this year, and the rank tactics of the 2004 campaign – in which mere accusation sufficed as guilty verdict – can’t be put aside handily if they’ve become an intrinsic part of the party’s mechanism. In fact, this year, if we extract badmouth and whisper campaigns, the Republicans have little to run on. McCain is reduced to reacting to Obama, condemning everything his opponent does or proposes as evidence of incompetence or malfeasance. But constant, reactive carping gets really tired, really fast. At some point, any campaign must offer proposals and platforms of its own; since McCain’s present little more than an extension of the disastrous Bush era, flop sweat must be flowing like the flooded Mississippi at RNCC.

The GOP can thank the dystrophic integrity of the Bush Administration for waking up Americans to the fact that our leaders lie, and steal… and send to countrymen to die in pointless wars. And the blowback from the last seven and a half years can’t be spun away.

Guess all those birth pangs of democracy in the Middle East have gone and squeezed out a pup: Israel and Hamas are talking. And there is even some muttering about a cease-fire.

And in Lebanon, none other than Condoleeza Rice is giving the thumbs up for a parliamentary pact that allows greater political power to Hezbollah, one of the Administration's biggest bugbears in the region.

Oh... let's not forget Israel is talking with Syria, too, That move apparently goes over the heads of the White House neocons, whose loyalty to Israel is practically killing that country - and this one - with love.

Is peace busting out all over? Uh... well, this is the Mideast, where all the players are experts at public flourishes and private bushwhacking.

Over at The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss has a good, short overview on what this development could mean for the Presidential campaign (you know... the one here):

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/330380

On one hand, this appears to validate Bush's vast democracy-building campaign in the Levant. Except, well, Iraq is still a mess... and Iran lurks over the horizon as the object of our hoary fantasy-projection. And regardless of the fanfare, nothing has been worked out yet between Israel and its chronically despised foes.

The timing is a little odd, too. Right here, in the summer of an election year, a lot of the pressure in the Mideast is... dropping. Hmm... We know the President and GOP will take credit for it, although it seems to have been accomplished despite entreaties from the White House, not because of them.

The news could be good or bad for McCain, depending on how he plays it. That's not a particularly good omen for him, judging from his recent bumbling. He's patterned himself as the ultimate action-figure politico, an instrument of pure, aggressive reaction and incapable of substantive calculation or even movement on his own. It's hard to see this as an advantage: Diminishing the peril of our Perilous Era seeps a lot of gas out of his bag.

Besides, all the people Israel now is engaging were only days ago propped up as our dire enemies, cursed in hushed, revulsive tones usually reserved for Satanists, Nazis and self-loathing paparazzi stalking celebrity beaver.

It the apple cart isn't upset, it's at least rocking on its wheels. Throughout this long "democracy" campaign, the Bush Administration and the Israeli Lobby have sought for their conscripted client the reduction of surrounding Arab nations to vassal status, beholden upon the U.S. – and thereby, Israel – for nothing less than survival itself. From the look of things, heads are a lot cooler in Tel Aviv, and that country's "realists' apparently aren't the pariahs that are this country's. Talk is always cheaper than blood and treasure.

Israel apparently has scoped out the future and decided to go its own way. With a likely Obama presidency on tap for its most-reliable sponsor, Olmert and his cabinet probably feel it's better with fewer rowdies outside the tent, pissing in. Some adjustments are in the offing, and negotiations have always been the surest means of keeping one's friends close and enemies closer.

Wish someone could convice the U.S. Administration of that...

And, too, there's always a possibility the table is being cleared for another Big Show. With some semblance of peace on its borders, Israel and the United States could marshal their forces for an all-out attack on... well... you know.

It's easy to speculate on and difficult to pin down the prime motivation for all this peace-pipe stuff. The choreography seems as offhand and spontaneously improvised as building the Panama Canal.

The immediate benefit of the peace intitatives is, well, peace - however temporary - for the Israelis and their neighbors. For the time being, citizens of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, and settlers on the northern and western border, won't have to worry about bomb vests and improvised rocketry blowing them to bits.

And for others in this “bad neighborhood”, there may be some quiet. As long as tensions are at the boiling point, Palestinians and Arab states in fighter-bomber range must feel they're limbo-stuck in Jericho... and the walls are forever crumbling.

The long-range upshot? Like almost everything else in the Mideast, that can change and remain the same - all at once.