Opinion: In today’s pages: Obama, Clinton and salmonella
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Columnist Jonah Goldberg files another installment in his weekly critiques of Barack Obama, this time dissecting the candidate’s comments about abortion at a weekend forum hosted by evangelist Rick Warren in Orange County:
Alas, when it comes to abortion, it’s probably silly to expect anything but rote fealty to ideological pieties from a Democrat, just as it’s naive to expect anything but the appropriate pro-life talking points from a Republican. But for a self-styled champion of nuance, political Obama’s rigidity is spectacular to behold.
Elsewhere on the op-ed turf, veteran campaign consultants Frank Luntz, Dan Schnur and Garry South respond to the leaked memo from Hillary Clinton adviser Mark Penn that called on Clinton to exploit Barack Obama’s ‘multicultural, diverse’ upbringing. And Turkish scholar Soner Cagaptay bemoans a recent, image-scrubbing visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.
On the left-hand page, the editorial board praises the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York for agreeing to reconsider the dismissed claims of Maher Arar, the Canadian software engineer who was mistakenly expelled by the United States and imprisoned in Syria.
Even after his exoneration by Canada, the administration kept Arar on a terrorist watch list on the basis of unspecified information that, according to Canada’s prime minister, contained ‘nothing new.’ Finally, the administration has contested Arar’s suit against the U.S. government and several current and former officials -- litigation that would be unnecessary if the administration had owned up to the injustice perpetrated against an innocent man.
The board also notes how retailers, driven in part by the threat of lawsuits, are starting to enforce food safety standards more stringently than federal regulators. And it observes how memories of MTV’s success are leading music companies to demand royalties that some popular webcasters can’t afford.
The photo of Barack Obama and Rick Warren comes from the Times’ Genaro Molina.