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With the world's eyes again focused on Bahrain thanks to both a high-profile motor sports event as well as continued political strife, last week would have been a tough one in which to declare one's support for the ruling regime. Yet that is exactly what Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations did, earning him much derision on blogs and social networking sites.

On Twitter, Husain first praised Bahrain's foreign minister, Khalid al-Khalifa, as "visionary" and then disparaged what he referred to in scare quotes as the "opposition," as if the Shiite Bahrainis who have been protesting for greater representation these past 15 months are some artificial construct and not 75 percent of Bahrain's population. Husain's tweets and subsequent blog post, however, seem to...