This situation in the Middle East escalated today. Israel entered Gaza with troops and tanks.
I was out for a couple hours, but looks like this development has been "Breaking News" with wall-to-wall coverage on MSNBC and CNN this afternoon. Initial reports are starting to come in from Gaza. Here are links to three different sites with recent updates:
Haaretz
Reuters
Al Jazeera
UPDATE: Clearly, this crisis is going to land in Obama's lap, like so many others. I just remembered the way Condi Rice found out that Hamas had won the elections. It helps explain how out of touch the Bush administration is and was. Condi was at the gym and read it on the t.v.'s crawl. Seriously. She was the Secretary of State, but had no idea. I wrote about it in November, 2007 based on a column by Maureen Dowd:
That same year, in another instance of spectacular willful ignorance, she was blindsided by the Hamas win in the Palestinian elections.
As she described it to Bumiller, she went upstairs at 5 a.m. the morning after the Palestinian elections in 2006 to the gym in her Watergate apartment to exercise on her elliptical machine. She saw the news crawl reporting the Hamas victory.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’ ” she said. She kept exercising for awhile but finally got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department. “I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’ and they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness! Hamas won?’ ”
When she couldn’t reach the State Department official on the ground in the Palestinian territories, she did what any loyal Bushie would do: She got back on the elliptical.
“I thought, might as well finish exercising,” Rice told Bumiller. “It’s going to be a really long day.” It was one of the few times she was prescient on the Middle East.
