Let me finish tonight with why there's little support for the Libya campaign.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that the Democrats are generally anti-war. Nor to understand why so many Republicans are failing to back the president's effort to prevent a bloodbath by Gadhafi. President Bush said we shouldn't blame Muslims for 9/11. Senator McCain said that President Obama is a good American. These are not the sentiments of the Republican Party today.
Forty-six percent of Republicans - just about half - believe President Obama is himself a Muslim... and they don't mean that as a compliment. Fifty-one percent believe he was born in some other country.
Given the Republican party's attitude toward Muslims, given that half of them don't think Obama is a true countryman of theirs, why would they back an effort by president Obama to save the lives of Muslims in Libya?
Mitt Romney says Obama doesn't believe in America and what it stands for.
Mike Huckabee said recently that Obama was brought up in Kenya, grew up loving the Mau Maus.
Newt Gingrich said that this Mau Maus background of Obama's is the best "predictor" of his policy choices.
Want to know what Obama wants to do next? Just figure what the Mau Maus would want to do?
Michele Bachman long ago dismissed the president as downright, "anti-American," said it right here on the show. Add to this the drumbeat from some on the right that the United States is being taken over by "sharia" law - that our laws are being construed to mandate strict adherence to the Koran.
I cannot remember when the foreign policy of this country was so shrouded in this kind of hateful atmosphere. People believe that the president is not really an American, that he is a Muslim and therefore one of "them," one of those over there in Africa and the Mideast plotting against us. Just listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and their relentless hatred of foreigners, the president being one of them.
Of course, they don't back Obama in this difficult effort in Libya. Ask them if they support any effort by Obama. Ask them if they support any effort to save Arab lives?
Sarah Palin, back from her day and a half being trooped around by the right-wing in Israel, says the United States should have no say whatever in the effort to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians. We should just rubber-stamp every Israeli in the Palestinian territories. This is like Huckabee's statement that if there is a Palestinian state it just can't be in Palestine.
This kind of dismissive hatred of the Islamic world, this dismissive hatred of our President, whom half the Republicans believe is "of" the Islamic world - is the kind of bumpkin, anti-foreigner thinking that makes any sort of US foreign policy discussion from them a joke - at the very time we need to be deadly serious in what we're doing in the world.