As a reasonably optimistic person, I try to look on the bright side whenever possible -- unless bright-side facts are completely blotted out by bleak ones.
Example: In a recent e-mail blast, former Republican senator Rick Santorum urged readers to be heartened by Middle East developments that may have been obscured by bad news elsewhere. There was even good news, he wrote, coming out of Iran. To wit:
"A new poll in Iran suggests that Iranians want more democracy and less theocracy, including the power to elect their Supreme Leader," Santorum wrote, referring to recent findings from the polling group Terror Free Tomorrow. "Three-quarters also wished for normal relations and trade with the U.S."
Gee, that sounds swell -- so long as you don't read the rest of the poll results. These include the finding that roughly six in 10 Iranians support Iran's military and financial assistance for Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq and assorted Palestinian terror groups. The good news (I guess) that Iranians want to elect their Supreme Leader directly is overridden by the bad news that they will probably elect someone who supports global jihad. This makes it tough to buy into Santorum's happy-dappy assessment.
Similarly, consider the reaction to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent trip to Iraq. Conservatives seem to agree -- I say "seem" because few pundits have actually ventured an opinion on this momentous visit (in itself more than passing strange) -- that it was a "debacle" for Iran, as the headline of Amir Taheri's New York Post piece called it.
Huh? In last week's column, I called the visit a Mesopotamian slap across the American face -- a symbolic outrage, at least, to the U.S. troops who continue to be killed and maimed by Iran in Iraq.
But no. According to my fellow conservatives, the visit was a Good Thing. Far from catching Iraq two-timing with a barbaric rival of the United States, it rather demonstrated, as Taheri put it in his oft-cited column, "the limits" of Iran's influence in Iraq.
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