Left-wing critics have denounced Rupert Murdoch’s excellent news operation and superstar blogger Matt Drudge for featuring a "lying photograph" of Obama apparently ogling Mayara Tavares, 17, a junior G8 delegate from Brazil, but after five or six viewings of the video which supposedly debunks this little scandal, for all I know Obama could have been sneaking a peek or totally oblivious or neither, and "neither" is by far the most interesting alternative.

There was never any photo, lying or not, and this thing began with a frame extracted from a video, so there probably isn’t a hi-rez version anywhere which would definitely track the Presidential eyeball either somewhere or nowhere, and all we will ever have is an ambiguous canvas where the left-wing paints innocence and the right-wing paints over a whole string a legitimate sex-scandals starring Senator Ensign and Governor Sanford, and so on.

While the right-wing was stacking its chips on "ogling" and the left-wing was going all in on "not ogling," Obama’s National Security Advisor General James Logan Jones was explaining an American military operation in progress somewhere in the wild-and-wooly opium empire of Helmand…

"Where are the Afghan troops? Where’s the economic plan? Where is the government?" Jones said.


General Jones was expressing the puzzlement of American commanders in Afghanistan during a telephone interview with the Washington Post from Italy, where he was traveling with President Obama at the same G8 conference where Obama either ogled or didn’t ogle Mayara Tavares, and if the Washington Post reporter had really wanted to uncover a little truth instead of just recording a quote from "a White House official close to the President," he would have asked General Jones about ogling, because Jones is a sharp-eyed bureaucratic courtier s’il en fut, and if anybody knows what Obama was looking at, or not, it would be General James Logan Jones.