Sen. Obama is back in the United States. His tour of the Middle East and Western Europe is over. By any fair and rational measure, this trip was a resounding success. He was greeted very warmly by the troops in both Afghanistan and Kuwait. His meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki was preceded by the somewhat stunning news the PM supports his plan for a troop withdrawal timeline (stunning if you haven't keyed into the fact yet that the Iraqi people want us out!). He was met by a crowd of over 200,000 enthusiastic supporters in Germany. And finally, he was received well by both French President Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Brown. Again, by any rational measure this trip was great for Obama.

Which leads us to the irrational reaction of the McCain camp and the growing general consensus of the mainstream media regarding this trip. What, you didn't expect them to have a rational reaction, did you? Whether it is McCain's feigned outrage at Obama's "refusal to meet with injured troops", or Fox News' continuing story line that the MSM loves Obama more, and proves it by their coverage of him on this trip; the "forces aligned against Obama's Presidential campaign"'s answer to this successful trip by Obama seems to be, smear, distort, and outright lie if you have to in order to make the trip seem like a farce or a failure. It begs the question, why? Why not just cover the trip in a straight up, black and white kind of way, you know, like good journalist should do? Why is there always a "spin" in the reports of this trip, and why does that spin generally fall negatively at the feet of Sen. Obama? In a word, jealousy.

Sen. McCain said it best this past week when he mentioned that he was feeling ignored. And I can't really blame him for his anger and grumpiness at the moment (and we all know how angry and grumpy he can be!), Sen. Obama is getting the coverage and press from his trip that a candidate can only dream of getting. But that coverage should not be misinterpreted as bias by the media either by McCain, by the media itself, or by the gullible consumers of this spin. The coverage of the trip was so pervasive last week because of the nature of the "cover every bit of political minutia" media, and the compact nature of Sen. Obama's trip. I am quite confident that if McCain would have waited until now to schedule his own tour of the Middle East and "meet and greet" with European leaders, instead of doing it way back in the early spring during the middle of a bigger political story going on in the Democratic Primary, that he would benefit from the same level of media focus.

So, this week, until the "outrage" over the Obama trip dies down, try to not get too caught up in the hypocrisy of the accusations of "bad judgement" used by Obama in meeting with foreign leaders during a Presidential campaign (as McCain also did), the anger at Obama's cancelling an event with the troops (as McCain also did), or the myth pushed forward by the media, that the media is unfairly biased towards Obama (how does that even make sense for an entity to continuously blame itself, and not change itself???). Instead, let us all look up at the elephant in the room (pun intended), and call this thing for what it is; a big, ugly green monster known simply as jealousy.