Running Numbers

On the official website for the Republican National Committee, there has been a counter to "Track How Long Since Barack Obama Was in Iraq" for several weeks. Conservative webmasters and bloggers were encouraged to embed the code in their pages. Now the counter is frozen at 925 days.

In rhetoric, this is what we could colloquially call "asking for it," a term not necessarily present in Aristotle but certainly derived from the schoolyards in which other great theorists of public speech probably learned their trades. Now Obama is benefiting from a huge amount of media attention from his journey to the Middle East.