Barack Obama launched a Web site that fact-checks “smears” about him, his wife and his career. It remains to be seen whether this is an effective tactic against negative campaigning, but it certainly isn’t very funny.

The New Yorker did much the same thing with its cover depicting President Obama - in full Muslim regalia - doing the “fist bump” with First Lady Michelle - sporting a ‘70s-style Afro and with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder – as the American flag burns in an Oval Office fireplace, above which hangs a portrait of Usama bin Laden. It is very funny and would have been effective if the Obamas, political pundits and the chattering classes had more of a sense of humor and less of a sense of superiority.

Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer was spot-on in his analysis:

Although every critic of the New Yorker understood the simple satire of the cover, the most fretful of them worried that the illustration would be misread by the ignorant masses who don't subscribe to the magazine. Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm wrote, "That's the problem with satire. A lot of people won't get the joke. Or won't want to. …

Calling on the press to protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire is a strange, paternalistic assignment for any journalist to give his peers, but that appears to be what The New Yorker's detractors desire. I don't know whether to be crushed by that realization or elated by the notion that one of the most elite journals in the land has faith that Joe Sixpack can figure out a damned picture for himself.

Obama himself is setting the tone for his supporters, who reflexively look down their noses at proletariats and petite bourgeoisie. As Maureen Dowd notes: “Barack Obama may make it to the Rose Garden, but he’ll still be an orchid. For all his attempts to act like a sturdy American perennial, he’s a genuine hothouse flower, and everything he is and does is cultivated.”

Obama and his supporters are cultivated, cultured, sophisticated and nuanced. The rest of us are “people who think George W. Bush's C-average is a good thing,” as law professor Kyron Huigens at NY’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law put it in this article that attempts to explain Obama's flip-flopping using the flawed Supreme Court ruling on subjecting child rapists to the death penalty as an example:

Obama's position has been described as a move from the left to the center of the political spectrum, or to the right of liberal opinion. From a legal point of view, however, Obama's position is unremarkable. Given this, it is likely that his reaction to the decision does not reflect a shift in his beliefs at all.

The law of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment presents the Court with two options in dealing with the death penalty. It can ban the penalty for certain offenses or offenders, or it can regulate death sentencing. …

To a legal scholar, a ban for a particular offense can seem too much a matter of one-size-fits-all - and regulated death sentencing ensures, if not an error-free process, at least an unusually careful and deliberate one. The Court's most recent opinion took the first approach to cases of child rape. Obama said that he would have taken the second route. The advantage of this, as he explained, is that it allows capital punishment to be imposed, or not, on the merits of each individual case. …

Not only are these choices impossible to fix on the left-right spectrum, they also are the kind of fundamental choices about the rule and role of law that legal scholars tend to make and then stick with until an especially strong argument persuades them otherwise.

Here’s the kicker: Huigens admits he is speculating on Obama’s thought processes - meaning he has no idea whether Obama’s opposition to the high court’s ruling was based on legal analysis or political expediency. Then he adds: “the anti-intellectualism of his opponents … makes it politically dangerous to explain complex issues in complex ways.”

Perhaps. But it is also possible to think George W. Bush's C-average is not “a good thing” while thinking that affirmative action is not a good thing, either. Which brings to mind this recent Dinesh D'Souza column about the quality of Michelle Obama’s undergraduate thesis:

Michelle Obama is part of the affirmative action generation of above-average but far-from-stellar performers who were granted preferential admission to America's most elite institutions.

Michelle notes that she graduated with honors in her major. … You might expect that she wrote about Shakespeare's sonnets or the political evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois. Well, no. Essentially Michelle Obama wrote about the problems of being a black woman at an Ivy League university.

Here is a typical passage: “By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight.”

Alas, the grammar is all wrong here. More than once, the tenses are garbled. People are ignorant “of” the plight of the lower class, not ignorant “to” their plight.

And “desperation” should be spelled “desperation.” To wreak so much havoc on the English language in one sentence, without conveying anything of substance, is perhaps deserving of a prize. Is this what her professors were thinking when they granted her honors?

“[T]hese are not mere typos,” D'Souza writes, “they reflect an estranged relationship to the English language.”

The Obamas also have an estranged relationship with humor and satire - and their supporters (or “Obamorons,” as D’Souza has dubbed them) appear to have an estranged relationship with reality. 

Will Bashir’s Indictment Stop The Carnage In Darfur?

In the 10-page summary … the prosecution drew a tough portrait of Mr. Bashir’s actions, saying it had tracked all the known attacks from 2003 to 2008 and shown the government’s genocidal strategy to attack civilian towns and villages.

The prosecutor’s charges include three counts of genocide in the killings of people in the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups; five counts of crimes against humanity involving murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape; and two counts of war crimes involving attacks on civilian populations in Darfur and the pillaging of towns and villages. The United Nations estimates that 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have been displaced in the conflict.

In a New York Times op-ed, Richard Goldstone, formerly chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, knocks down all the arguments against the indictment:

Critics predict that an arrest warrant will harm efforts to deliver aid and to deploy the United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur. But both of these efforts are already hobbled. Mr. Bashir’s government has a long history of obstructing aid - notably during the famine in 1998, before the International Criminal Court even existed. …

Some critics also worry that the indictments may harm the Darfur peace process by removing a key negotiating point - an offer of amnesty to President Bashir along with the possibility of quiet retirement in a third country. But sometimes ambiguity over accountability can help peace negotiations along, as it did in South Africa in 1991, when amnesty was also a bargaining chip. Arrest warrants from The Hague also assisted the Bosnian peace process by removing hard-liners from the negotiating table.

It is too early to tell what effects the indictment will have on peace efforts. So far, there has been no Darfur peace process to speak of. Part-time United Nations and African Union mediators recently resigned in frustration, calling for a new approach.

Goldstone predicts (hopes?) “[t]his crisis should galvanize the Security Council to take serious action.”

Indeed it should, but will it? 

The Security Council – comprising England, China, France, Russia and the U.S. - can suspend prosecution for at least a year, and the historical record suggests that the Security Council will continue to shrug its shoulders and wring its hands and do nothing. The New York Times takes the Security Council to task for its years-long failure to act:

There is legitimate concern that Sudan’s government may vent its ire - even more than it has - on aid workers, United Nations peacekeepers and the people of Darfur. But the prosecutor … is fulfilling his internationally mandated responsibilities.

That is more than we can say for the United Nations Security Council, which has been unconscionably passive over the burning of villages, the bombing of schools and the systematic rape of women in Darfur. We hope it will finally be shamed into action. …

The Security Council has barely given Sudan a slap on the wrist. China - which has major oil interests in Sudan and has shamelessly increased arms sales to the regime - has used its veto power to block stronger penalties, enabling even more brutality.

The Times calls upon the Bush administration to “rally Security Council action and to directly pressure Sudan … by jamming Sudan’s official communications network” and enlisting the UN and NATO to enforce a no-fly zone “to ground the planes and helicopters Khartoum uses to bomb civilians and supply militias.”

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has “offered only an ambivalent response” to genocide charges being filed against Bashir against Sudan's president because “the administration is reluctant to take steps that lend legitimacy to a court whose jurisdiction it has questioned and whose treaty it refuses to sign,” reports The Associated Press:

The Bush administration opposes the court because of suspicions that its jurisdiction is too broad and fears that American servicemen fighting abroad or the officials who command them might not be safe from politically motivated prosecution.

The administration's mixed feelings about the ICC are not new. Despite its frequent criticism of the ICC, it effectively allowed the investigation of al-Bashir when it abstained on a U.N. Security Council resolution in 2005 instead of using its veto. That gave the court the authority that led to Monday's indictment. …

The move against al-Bashir may be raising another concern, however, because it is an indictment against a current head of state.

However, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia’s Charles Taylor were both sitting heads of state when international war crimes courts charged them in 1999 and 2003, respectively.

Yes, the administration has legitimate reasons to oppose the ICC, but there always seems to be some pressing geopolitical consideration that puts Bush in the position of being an accessory to genocide by not seeking or enforcing justice on behalf of victims. At least he’s consistent in his belief that there are worse things than genocide.