Our old Netanyahu joke comes to mind this morning as we read this in the New York Times:

Mr. Obama met with Mr. Abbas and the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, for one hour — 15 minutes longer than scheduled — at the Muqata, the Palestinian president’s compound. Mr. Obama and Mr. Abbas sat down with a Palestinian flag between them and photographs of the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and of Mr. Abbas himself on the wall behind them.

We’d love to see that touching moment captured in a picture. Until we can find that photo, we’ll make do with this …

UPDATE: Thanks to alert reader Jim Hynes for telling us that Atlas Shrugs has the picture.  Boy, Arafat still looks thrilled.  The guy still giving great photo op.

Should be a no-brainer, but just in case, here’s a recommendation for Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person In The World Award tonight.

Husam Taysir Dwayat.

He’s the terrorist who killed three people and wounded 66 during his bulldozer rampage in Jerusalem today.

Certainly that’s the caliber of person Olbermann’s award is designed to recognize?

We love it when we can throw the red flag on folks who violate the Logan Act.  We love it even more when it involves Jimmy Carter.  And we love it even most when, for evidence, we can cite National Public Radio.  Here’s Daniel Schorr on “Things Considered”:

The Logan Act bans unauthorized U.S. citizens from negotiating with a foreign government. It was passed in 1799, and there are no recorded prosecutions under the law. Why is it an issue now? Two words: Jimmy Carter.

Click here for the audio.

By the way, where does the White House stand on all this Carter foreign policy freelancing?

From Wednesday’s press briefing with Dana Perino:

Q Thank you, Dana. Two questions. The AP in Kuwait quotes Secretary of State Rice as saying, “The United States is not going to deal with Hamas. And we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think meeting with Hamas was going to help.” And my question: Since the result of this telling was that Mr. Carter proceeded directly to violate this U.S. policy and meet with these terrorists, what is President Bush prepared to do to put an end to this one-man defiance of our policy which so gratified the terrorists?

MS. PERINO: Well, former President Carter is a private citizen, and he made a decision to not comply with what the State Department asked him to do. What I think the President would focus on is, if you go back to what reportedly Hamas said to former President Carter, that they were willing to take these steps for peace, that the very next day, that they went ahead and murdered many people at the Gaza crossing. And I think actions speak louder than words, and we remain very concerned about the situation. That’s why Secretary Rice was in the region.

Q If the President, as our nation’s chief law enforcer, fails to order Mr. Carter’s passport revoked, how many more people like Carter may want to plot U.S. policy in this regard, do you imagine?

MS. PERINO: I don’t know, you’ll have to take a national survey.

President Bush with Palestinian Authority President Abbas today:

“I assured the President that a Palestinian state is a high priority for me and my administration — a viable state, a state that doesn’t look like Swiss cheese.”

President Bush with Jordan’s King Abdullah in March:

“I said a state has got to be continuous — a contiguous territory; it can’t look like Swiss cheese.”

President Bush in Saudi Arabia in January:

“when I said contiguous, that means contiguous territory that does not — Swiss cheese.”

President Bush in Ramallah in January:

“Swiss cheese isn’t going to work when it comes to the outline of a state.”

Of course, some things are worse than cheese from the Swiss.  Like chocolate cake from the Germans.

Jimmy Carter gets this severe slapping from the Washington Post editoral page:

Mr. Carter justifies his meetings with familiar arguments about the value of dialogue with enemies. But he misses the point. Contacts between enemies can be useful: Israel is legendary for such negotiations, and even now it is engaged in back-channel bargaining with Hamas through Egypt. But it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.

Tough words.  Richly deserved.

Which makes this the perfect time to show the most popular Dry Bones cartoon ever published.  It appeared in the Jerusalem Post in 1977 but equally relevant 31 years later (the teacher in the cartoon is Israel’s then-prime minister Menachem Begin.  And no explanation needed for whom “Carter” refers to):

We learn this from today’s New York Times about America’s efforts to support the Afghan government in the war on terror:

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials.

Truly unfortunate.  But even more so considering this isn’t the first time we’ve under-supported the Afghans’ munition needs.

Readers of “Charlie Wilson’s War” might remember this passage on page 158

By the time Avrakotos came into the picture, the procurement operatives were buying just about any Lee-Enfield .303 ammunition available on the world market.  The Agency had already slipped more than 100,000 of these World War I-vintage rifles to the Afghans.

Well, at least we’re beyond World War I-era weapons to the Afgans.  Circa early Vietnam War is a bit more reasonable, eh?

We had been respecting the thawing of relations between America and France.  Heck, we even stopped calling those things Freedom Fries and went back to the real name, Death Sticks.

But today all those warm fuzzy feelings are doused by a cold bucket of reality water.  In its story today about the killing of top Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyah, the Washington Post reminds us of a reason to hate the French — a reason we had long since, and quite regrettably, forgotten.  But now it all comes back.  And it goes like this:

In one of the more dramatic episodes, Lebanese officials, exploiting a monitored telephone call, traced Mughniyah to Paris in 1985, only five months after the hijacking of a TWA jetliner, to which he had been linked. He was staying at the Hotel de Crillon, a luxurious hotel across the street from the U.S. Embassy. Tipped off by the Lebanese, U.S. officials asked French police to arrest him and turn him over. Instead, as previously reported in The Washington Post, French agents met with him several times over a six-day period, according to a source closely involved, and worked out an agreement to release him in return for the freedom of a French hostage.

Game back on!  Vive la hatred!

A sad day for us cold warriors turned terror warriors.

From the Washington Post:

Abdel-Rahman Shalqam and his wife received a personal tour of the White House, an official escort on Capitol Hill and a luncheon with executives from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum and Raytheon, as well as the U.S. trade representative’s office.

So began the official redemption of Libya yesterday, as the foreign minister of a country once equated with “barbarism” became that nation’s highest ranking official to visit Washington in 35 years.

You know, in the good old days of unmistakable bad guys and clear-cut bad guys, circa 1985, we battled the Libyans.  We fought them on our home soil.  And we were led by brave principled heroes like Marty McFly.