'Regime Alteration?' — U.S. Wavers on 'Regime Change'

From the folks who brought you “man-caused disasters,” the Wall Street Journal notes the latest buzzword from the Obaministration:

After weeks of internal debate on how to respond to uprisings in the Arab world, the Obama administration is settling on a Middle East strategy: help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait.

Instead of pushing for immediate regime change—as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya—the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling “regime alteration.”

Alterations? First David Brooks admires Obama’s trousers, and now the whole administration sounds like more like a house of dry-cleaning than a functioning White House.

(Speaking of which, as Bryan Preston notes at the Tatler, gas is over five dollars a gallon in Florida. “Reminder: Your president can do something useful about this, but he won’t.”)