ARE THERE ANY ALLIES LEFT TO OFFEND? (via Bryan Francoeur):

Obama's Turban Anxiety: That the president would cancel a Sikh temple visit over a knotted handkerchief shows the old, bold Obama is gone—he now governs in fear. Tunku Varadarajan laments his gutlessness. (Tunku Varadarajan, 10/22/10, Daily Beast)

Barack Obama has become a Sikh joke. The 44th president of the United States, a man who offered himself up to the world as the cosmopolitan alternative to the Little Americanism of the Bush years, has dropped plans to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar—the Vatican, as it were, of the Sikh religion—on his state visit to India in early November. As The New York Times reports, the president would have had to cover his head with a knotted handkerchief on his visit to the shrine, in keeping with Sikh religious tradition, so the White House invertebrates scuttled plans to go there out of fear that images of Obama with a cloth on his head would reignite rumors that he is a Muslim.

The president is frightened of shadows. As a critic once said of a famous actor's portrayal of Lear, "He played the king as if someone else was about to play the ace." The White House's decision to skip the Sikh temple is not proof so much of paranoia, though it has that in abundance, but of cowardice. This is one of those rare episodes that have the ability to distill a political essence, rather like Jimmy Carter being jumped by a rabbit. The old, bold Obama is gone: He now governs in fear, with a keenly pusillanimous regard for birthers and other boo-birds, the noisy, self-regarding elements of the American political fringe.