In the genuine historical miracle of Barack Obama -- it was only 43 years ago when African American voting rights remained unsecured -- the political miracle of John McCain has been largely overshadowed.

A few years ago, I heard writer Gerald Haslam explain his struggle to describe the difference between the Kern County burg of Bakersfield, Calif., and the San Francisco Bay Area city of Mill Valley, both of which are settings for his novel, "Straight White Male."

This editorial appeared in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times:

While the nation marveled at Barack Obama's presumptive capture of the Democratic Party's nomination for president last week and measured the country's racial progress against his achievement, the long march toward justice passed another milestone at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex in Florida. Before baseball's annual draft got under way, every team in the major leagues symbolically drafted a surviving member of the Negro Leagues. The 30 players chosen represent the hundreds of black and Latino players who were shut out of the majors in the 1920s, '30s and '40s because of their skin color.

Anew buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a U.S. attack on Iran: "national suicide." The term describes a supposed Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national, not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes purportedly have launched ruinous wars they reasonably could not have hoped to win, condemning their nations to destruction.

The following editorial appeared in Tuesday's Washington Post:

As the challenge from Iran has grown, the United States and its allies have repeatedly been tantalized by the possibility of driving a wedge between Tehran and its chief Arab ally, Syria. The two countries work together to sponsor the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip; removing Syria from the equation could cripple Iran's bid to become the dominant power in the Middle East. The problem is how to move the murderous and corrupt regime of Bashar al-Assad, which hosts Hamas' leadership and is under investigation by the United Nations for assassinating Lebanese politicians. Sanctions against Syria have been too weak to be effective, and most of the political bribes that might interest Assad would be self-defeating -- such as allowing him to restore Syria's political hegemony over Lebanon.

The following editorial appeared in Tuesday's Washington Post:

Of all the grim new economic numbers to emanate from the federal government of late, none was more depressing than Friday's report that unemployment in May reached 5.5 percent, up from 5 percent in April. This was the largest one-month spike in 22 years. And even though much of it was caused by an unusual increase in the number of new, young unsuccessful job-seekers, the higher rate is also a sign that the Great American Jobs Machine is sputtering -- and a possible harbinger of recession. There are now 8.5 million Americans who want work and cannot find it, an increase of 1.6 million in the last year, according to the Labor Department.

A friend e-mailed the other day to say she and her husband were off to France this summer. "I know, the dollar," she said. "But we're not getting any younger, and France is France."

In 2000 a Republican presidential candidate with no foreign policy experience answered critics by touting his team of eminent advisers.