Someone needs to protect Obama from his defenders, especially from Jack Cafferty:

They call it the Rust Belt for a reason.  The great jobs and the economic prosperity left that part of the country two or three decades ago.  The people are frustrated.  The people have no economic opportunity.  What happens to folks like that in the Middle East, you ask?  Well, take a look.  They go to places like Al Qaeda training camps [bold mine-DL].  I mean, there’s nothing new here. 

Sometimes I think that the people who want to stop Obama from getting the nomination should just get out of the way and let his defenders and supporters keep talking and writing.  Whether it’s Roger Cohen talking about Obama’s Indonesian lessons or Cafferty mentioning Al Qaeda recruits in the same breath with voters in the Rust Belt (presumably as a way of complimenting the latter: “They may be bitter, but at least they haven’t started trying to blow things up!”), Obama’s defenders seem intent on compounding his difficulties and making his candidacy radioactive.  Never mind that radicalised recruits for terrorist cells tend to be the alienated well-educated professionals from fairly comfortable family backgrounds–who thinks bringing up Al Qaeda is such a great idea when talking about dissatisfied Pennsylvanian voters?  Meanwhile, you have to marvel at Cohen’s split-minded claim that Clinton’s reference to her own family heritage is an indirect slap at Obama, as if most people would have any way of knowing that his mother was a “secular humanist” or his stepfather was a Muslim without Obama’s supporters constantly dredging up details of his family life, and then he can turn around and offer fulsome praise for the Builder of Cultural Bridges and incessantly remind his readers of Obama’s Muslim ancestors without batting an eye.  He seems to think that repeatedly mentioning these things in a very widely-circulated newspaper helps his candidate.  It really doesn’t.