The (anti) Obama Chronicles

BARACK OBAMA ran an impressively disciplined presidential campaign. He has presided over a notably cohesive White House. But in the past fortnight things have started to go wrong. His latest review of strategy in the Afghan war has prompted charges that this president dithers while American soldiers die, and has provoked a rare public quarrel between the politicians and the military men. The timetable for reforming health care slips and slips, as does the effort to get a climate-change bill through Congress. And in the middle of all this Mr Obama and his wife Michelle found time last week to make a quixotic overnight dash to Copenhagen in the hope of winning the 2016 Olympics for his adopted city of Chicago.

What was intended to be another display of star power on a world stage ended in a flop. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) eliminated Chicago in the first round, for some reason rating the delights of Rio over those of the Windy City. Tall and athletic he may be, but in Copenhagen America’s president won nothing and the Olympic gold went to the portlier president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.


The Olympics, admittedly, are just games; the point, said the White House (afterwards), is that Mr Obama took the time to give Chicago’s bid his best shot. That has not stopped gleeful critics from depicting the failure as a symptom of bigger defects, notably Mr Obama’s overweening self-belief, and the naive trust they say he invests in unreliable foreigners, be they the bureaucrats of the IOC or the nuclear-arming ayatollahs of Iran. Rush Limbaugh, a conservative radio broadcaster, gloated that Mr Obama’s bad day in Copenhagen was the worst of his presidency, at least so far. “So much for improving America’s standing in the world, Barry O” sneered Erick Erickson, a blogger who runs the Red State website.

This debacle may not inflict lasting damage on Mr Obama. The delight some Republicans have shown in a setback for an American city could hurt them more than him. But the dash to Copenhagen was plainly under-prepared. It has bashed his reputation for a sure touch in public relations and added to the suspicion that he expects to achieve too much merely by deploying his celebrity power. Valerie Jarrett, a family friend from Chicago and one of the president’s very closest advisers in the White House, gushed before the Copenhagen trip that the Obamas would be a “dynamic duo” in Denmark. David Axelrod, another, complained afterwards of the IOC’s decision that there were “politics inside that room”. Isn’t the president of the United States supposed to know a thing or two about politics?

Nobody, however, can accuse Mr Obama of under-preparing for the far weightier decision he is pondering in Afghanistan. The administration has now spent several weeks conducting a methodical new review of its strategy, prompted by two deeply unwelcome developments: the crude rigging in favour of President Hamid Karzai in August’s flawed election and the leaked report from General Stanley McChrystal, concluding that the West faces certain defeat unless it adopts an ambitious new strategy, backed by a greater commitment of men (said to be 40,000, though the number has not yet been confirmed) and resources.

That General McChrystal’s report has divided the administration is no surprise: the war is now very unpopular among Democrats who have been encouraged by their success in imposing a rigid timetable for a full withdrawal from Iraq. The surprise is that it has prompted an unusually public quarrel. Vice-President Joe Biden rejects the call for an enlarged counter-insurgency campaign against the Taliban. His is said to be one of several voices inside the White House arguing for a smaller war directed mainly against al-Qaeda. But the merits of the case have now become ensnared in a debate about whether General McChrystal was insubordinate when he appeared to disparage the Biden idea in public. “You have to navigate from where you are, not where you wish to be,” the general told a questioner at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank in London. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”

The charge of insubordination sizzled rapidly through the media and up the chain of command. Writing in the Washington Post, Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale University, went so far as to invoke the spectre of Douglas MacArthur facing off against Harry Truman over the Korean war. He accused General McChrystal of “a plain violation of the principle of civilian control”. Jim Jones, the National Security Adviser (and a former general), said a president should be given a range of options, not a fait accompli. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, expressed continuing confidence in General McChrystal, but added that everyone involved in the review of strategy should provide their advice “candidly but privately”.

Mr Obama acted this week to fend off Republican claims that fear of his own wavering allies on Capitol Hill is weakening his commitment to a fight that he has always called vital to America’s security, both during the election campaign and since assuming office. On October 6th he invited 30 congressional leaders from both parties to the White House and told them that although he had not decided whether to send extra troops he was contemplating no “dramatic” reduction. The next day his security team convened again to continue their review, focusing this time on conditions in Pakistan. A final decision, says Harry Reid, the Senate’s majority leader, would probably come in “weeks, not months”.

Whether the right description of this timetable is “leisurely” (Senator John McCain) or “thorough” (the administration), the process has certainly been messy. The spat with General McChrystal, Mr Obama’s own recent choice to command in Afghanistan, invites the charge that he is not giving his generals the resources they need. If he does not send the general his extra troops, senior Republicans who have so far restrained their criticism will charge that the president is appeasing his party by endangering America’s fighting men overseas. Mr McCain has already called on Mr Obama to give “great weight” to his commanders’ views. But wading deeper into a war that this week entered its ninth miserable year will stoke the fears of the Democratic leadership in Congress that Mr Obama is sinking into a new Vietnam.

It is a fateful choice, and history is likelier to remember the decision itself, not the circumstances in which it was made. But Mr Obama’s failure to keep General McChrystal in line has made the politics of it very much harder. From Kandahar and Copenhagen (where Mr Obama faces a second ordeal in December at the climate-change summit) a cold wind is blowing through the White House. -The Economist 10/8/09

Weak Himself, Obama Draws Strength From Bush
By Michael Barone
In trying to understand what is happening in the nation and world, we all employ narratives -- story lines that indicate where things are going and what is likely to happen next. We can check the validity of these narratives by observing whether events move in the indicated direction. If so, the narrative is confirmed. But if things seem to be moving in an entirely different direction, it's time to discard the narrative and look for another.

When Barack Obama took office, most Americans and certainly most of the press had a narrative in mind. Call it Narrative A. The financial crisis and the ensuing deep recession had removed the blinkers from voters' eyes and moved Americans away from reliance on markets and toward reliance on government.

The new president's call for hope and change would be followed by enactment of big government policies -- a big-spending stimulus package, government-led health care reform, restrictions on carbon emissions and the effective abolition of the secret ballot in unionization elections. The new president's powers of persuasion would sweep Republicans along and make for bipartisan change.

It certainly seemed plausible. New Deal historians had taught us that economic collapse increases support for big government. Opponents of the Obama program seemed incoherent and demoralized.

But Narrative A looks increasingly shaky. The unions' anti-secret ballot bill is going nowhere, and neither, it seems, is carbon emissions legislation. The stimulus package is widely regarded as a failure, and the Democrats' various health care bills are not winning majorities in polls. If anything, Americans are more leery of big government than they were a few years ago.

Moreover, the balance of enthusiasm has shifted. The tea parties and town halls have shown that millions of Americans are strongly opposed to big government measures. The Obama e-mail lists that brought in so much money and so many volunteers in 2008 now seem unable to get a few dozen people to a rally, and Democratic fundraising is alarmingly low for a party in power.

So it may be time to advance a Narrative B. It goes something like this. George W. Bush's inability to produce progress in Baghdad and New Orleans, along with floundering by congressional Republicans, led voters to give Democrats majorities in Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008. But the huge flow of dollars designed to staunch the financial crisis (TARP), finance bailouts and fund the stimulus package raised fears that government would crowd out private-sector growth.

In this narrative, Democrats' big congressional majorities owe more to perceived Republican incompetence and to the $400 million that labor unions poured into Democratic campaigns than to any change in fundamental attitudes toward the balance between markets and government.

Narrative B does a better job than Narrative A of explaining the unpopularity of the Democrats' big-government programs and the unwillingness of many Democratic officeholders, especially those facing voters in 2010, to support them. It does a better job of explaining the shift in the balance of enthusiasm from 2008 to 2009.

It still may be possible for Democrats to jam through some of their health care proposals, and tax rates are scheduled to go up when the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010. The Democrats may be able to make basic policy changes because of accidental advantages. In the framework of Narrative B, government-directed health insurance and vastly enhanced union power would be reactions to George W. Bush's inept handling of Iraq before the surge and his hapless response to Hurricane Katrina.

Narrative B doesn't explain all current developments satisfactorily. Voters still have a lingering distaste for Republican politicians and give higher (or less low) ratings to the Democratic than the Republican Party. Republican policy proposals, while not nonexistent as the Democrats charge, have not caught the public's attention and may prove no more popular than the Democrats' health insurance and cap-and-trade proposals. And Democratic proposals may turn out to be more popular than they are today.

But overall Narrative B has done a better job so far of explaining 2009 than Narrative A. Which suggests that it's time that fans of Narrative A who don't like Narrative B to come up with Narrative C.

Obama's Foreign Policy Suspends Disbelief
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- Last Thursday, the president's "engagement" with Iran began. This Wednesday, the U.S. war in Afghanistan will enter its ninth year. And U.S. foreign policy is entering a White Queen phase.

In "Through the Looking Glass," Alice says she is unable to believe the White Queen's claim to be 101. The Queen responds, "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes." Alice: "There's no use trying, one can't believe impossible things." Queen: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Regarding Afghanistan, the president might believe he can effect a Houdini-like escape, uninjured, from the box his words have built. Regarding Iran, he seems to believe its leaders can be talked or coerced (by economic sanctions) out of their long, costly pursuit of nuclear weapons by convincing them that such weapons do not serve Iran's "security."

On March 27, the president announced "a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." He said his "clear and focused goal" was to prevent the Taliban from toppling Afghanistan's government, and to prevent al-Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan or Pakistan. U.S. forces "will take the fight to the Taliban" in Afghanistan's "south" and "east" but "at the same time, we will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan security forces."

On Aug. 17, the president reiterated his belief that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is "not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity." This was two months after he replaced the U.S. commander there with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, directing him to assess the resources required for the strategy. The general has done that. But the president does not yet want to discuss troop numbers. Why not?

The president's national security adviser, Jim Jones, a former four-star Marine general, told The Washington Post that before deciding on troop levels, the focus must be on strategy: "The bumper sticker here is strategy before resources." So, is the president reassessing his March 27 strategy? If so, why?

Perhaps because fraud devalued Afghanistan's election. But it was not a sunburst of new information that President Hamid Karzai is corrupt. Or did the president believe, as only the White Queen could, that Karzai had reformed?

Granted, counterinsurgency -- especially when it includes the nation-building implicit in McChrystal's assessment -- requires a reliable partner. But, again, Karzai was a known commodity on March 27. Besides, a presidential strategy is half-baked if its author decides it is dubious after its first collision with difficulty.

Regarding Iran, what did we learn when we learned about the secret nuclear facility in the tunnel? That Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons? We knew that. That Iran lies? We knew that, too. We did, however, learn something when the president, at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, went public with his knowledge of the facility.

On one side of the president stood France's president. On the other side stood Britain's prime minister, who said Iran's behavior would "shock and anger the whole international community." Not quite. The leaders of Russia and China were not standing with the president.

China has contracted to provide Iran with gasoline, a commodity that could be central to what Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls "severe" sanctions that he thinks might cause Iran to change course. Russia's real leader, Vladimir Putin, was not even in Pittsburgh. Russia's Potemkin president, Dmitry Medvedev, did say something that only the White Queen could believe means that Russia will participate in serious pressure on Iran: Sanctions are not "the best means of obtaining results" but "if all possibilities" are exhausted, "we could consider international sanctions." Over to you, Queen.

Gates says "the only way" to prevent a nuclear-capable Iran "is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons, as opposed to strengthened." But to accept that formulation requires accepting two propositions that would tax the White Queen's powers of belief.

One is that possession of nuclear weapons would make Iran less secure. Question: If Saddam Hussein had possessed nuclear weapons in March 2003, would the United States have invaded Iraq? Iran's leaders probably think they know the answer.

The other proposition is that Iran's regime seeks nuclear weapons merely to enhance the nation's security and not also for regional hegemony or the enjoyment of the enlarged status that comes from being a nuclear power. To believe that, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.

The new CIA

Stand up guy

Leon Panetta actually seems to care about the agency he runs. Today he turned on Nancy Pelosi in defense of the integrity of the CIA. Bravo.

Even the Huffington Post seems to have turned on the erstwhile Lefty standard bearer, Ms. Pelosi.

"There are some people who project sincerity and integrity, but Pelosi's just the opposite. She comes across as a duplicitous partisan hack. A Tom Delay with tits, yet lacking the balls and efficiency. Whereas Delay was ruthless and resolute, Pelosi's simply an ineffective trainwreck."

Only the crass delivery gives away the fact that that was a quote from a Lefty Pundit.

The perpetually angry left

The political left in this country has been angry for so long now that when the term "The Left" is used, it's understood that they're angry. The phrase, 'the angry Left' is redundant.

Just take the Left's childishly angry response to the recent Tea Party protests. The big thing for Lefty bloggers and pundits is to use the gay bashing term "tea baggers" to describe the protesters. Those protests, by the way, were probably some of the least angry protests in human history. The Left's reaction to the protests were far angrier than the actual protests. Lefty thinkers like Jeanie Garafolo's angry charge that every protester is merely a white supremacist had more vitriol and anger in it than the sum total of all the protests themselves. So it's childish gay bashing jokes and cartoon like levels of anger from the Left as usual in response to the Tea Party Protests.

And now the (far) Left is downright hysterical that Obama is hesitant to prosecute former members of the Bush administration for essentially being too successful in thwarting an attack on American soil in the immediate days following 9-11 by using enhanced interrogation techniques that were at the time fully legal. If the angry, backwards looking Left wants to conduct kangaroo courts and show trials like a banana republic regime persecuting those whom with which they disagree politically, I say bring it on. I can't wait to see what happens when the American people see that the Left has now taken to punishing and prosecuting certain public servants in the Bush Administration in order to satisfy a political vendetta. Public servants who were in good faith doing what they could to successfully protect us. The whole thing is pricelessly irrational.

All of this anger and hysteria on the left begs the question, why in victory is the Left still so angry?

To answer that question let's consult an article penned by Byron York, frequent commentator on NPR, the ultra right wing talk radio network that I listen to daily.

These should be happy times for liberals and the Democratic party as a whole. They control the White House and both houses of Congress, while opposition Republicans are leaderless and lost. So why do some Democrats, particularly those farther to the left, appear so angry?

If you doubt it, just watch a few minutes of MSNBC, where the recent nationwide series of "tea parties" to protest federal spending and taxes set off an angry, almost manic response. The most telling came on Keith Olbermann's program, during which the actress Janeane Garofalo, who plays an FBI computer geek on “24,” denounced the tea parties as "racism straight up."

"Let's be very honest about what this is about," Garofalo said. "It's not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes…This is about hating a black man in the White House."

Garofalo linked the tea parties to what she described as a peculiar feature of the conservative brain. "The limbic brain inside a right-winger, or Republican, or conservative, or your average white power activist -- the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person," she explained. "And it is pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring." (The limbic brain is the deep portion of the brain that mediates, controls and expresses emotion.)

Now, it's possible Garofalo was joking; she used to do comedy. But she didn't seem to be joking, and her comments were consistent with a long and dishonorable history of attributing political conservatism to mental abnormality. And as she spoke about the alleged anger on the right, Garofalo herself seemed visibly angry. Why were she, and Olbermann, and many others on the left, so apparently troubled by a virtually powerless opposition?

I asked William Anderson, a friend who is a political conservative, a medical doctor, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard. "They are angry, but I think they are also scared, and I think it's because they have a sense that their triumph is a precarious one," Anderson told me. Democrats won in 2008 in some part because of the cycles of American politics; Republicans were exhausted and it was the other party's turn. Now, having won, they are unsure of how long victory will last.

"They see that they have a very small window of opportunity to do all the things they want," Anderson continued. "They see the window of opportunity as small because they know in their deepest hearts that the vast majority of the American people wouldn't go for all of the things they want to do." So they are frantic to do as much as possible before the opposition coalesces. And the tea parties might be the beginning of that coalescence.

Then there is the question of self-image. Watching Garofalo and Olbermann discuss the tea parties, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they saw themselves as two good people talking about many bad people. "One of the things about narcissism is that it looks like people who are just proud of themselves and smug, but in fact narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state," Anderson told me. "People who are deeply invested in narcissism spend an awful lot of energy trying to maintain the illusion they have of themselves as being powerful and good, and they are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might prick that balloon."

Again, the tea parties could represent a threat. What if the protesters weren't racists, weren't violent, weren't mentally defective? What if their point was legitimate, or even partly legitimate? Those are questions better batted down than answered.
Finally, there is the sense of anxiety and fragility that stems from the liberals' newly-won power. They control everything in government, and some fear what the responsibility of governing is doing to them.

Their president of hope and change has chosen not to prosecute the authors of the Bush-era "torture memos." He is escalating the war in Afghanistan. He seems determined to bail out the nation's richest bankers. For some on the left, it can be difficult to abide those actions and still maintain the image of one's self atop the moral high ground. So they lash out at the easy target presented by the tea parties.

And that is how political triumph can produce anger and unhappiness. Don't be surprised if there is much more of both in the days to come.

-Byron York Washington Examiner 4/20/09

Ideology vs. pragmatism

If the left wants to define slapping someone in the face and putting a caterpillar in close proximity to someone as torture then they are watering down the term torture. If this is to be the new wussified definition of torture then I have no problem advocating torture as newly defined by those who incessantly seek to coddle our sworn enemies.

It's that simple. If these enhanced interrogation techniques are to somehow be considered torture, then I'm for torture.

Oh and newsflash for the zillionth time: The Geneva Conventions do not apply to enemy combatants seeking to kill civilians.

A Bitter Pill

Because of the tireless and unending Bush Bashing of the last eight years I was hoping that we could have at least a month or two where the president wasn't a primary source of the nation's ire. A honeymoon would have been nice, a respite from the ever present trashing of the commander in chief.

But the way Barack Obama has been acting the last couple of days is making that impossible.

And I was someone willing to give Obama a chance. Like an arranged marriage, I was willing to try to make the best of it. I had hoped that Obama's pragmatism and penchant for political expediency would win out over his left leaning ideology.

If Obama turned out to be a Ronald Reagan, great. Unfortunately, at this point he's looking more like a cross between LBJ and Jimmy Carter.

Hope and change?

More like fear and same. Within a week or so of the inaugural address the hopeful tone has all but evaporated into the frosty Washington DC air. In its place arguably the same kind of fear mongering that the Left endlessly accused the Bush administration of perpetrating to get things done. The difference of course being that the threat of terrorism is very real and the need for a pork laden spending bill to beat back "The worst financial crisis since the great depression", much less evident. (The stagflation of Jimmy Carter's early eighties was worse).

If Bush had done what Obama is trying to do he would have shoe-horned every Republican pet project into the Patriot Act. That is the equivalent. It's using an emergency to reward the special interests of your political party! With this so-called stimulus bill, the Democrats are doing an end run around the normal budget appropriation process in order to foist upon us their usual political agenda. They are using a financial crisis to lavish their supporters with billions of dollars of federal cash. They can't stuff the bales of cash out the door fast enough, it seems. We're told that it's such an emergency that we don't even have time to think it through really, just sign it. Hurry, hurry, hurry, it doesn't matter what we do, we have to do something, anything! This stimulus bill debacle is madness.

And it could be Obama's political death. He's been trying to scare us that "we will never recover" if we don't pass this bill. I'm afraid that Obama's political career will never recover if this thing passes and then fails to deliver as it will inevitably do according to any economist who understands the basic principle that we will have to raise taxes down the road to pay this thing off. And we'll have to pay this off right around the time that the inflation caused by this will be kicking in according to every economist who's name isn't Paul Krugman.

In one of Obama's recent partisan fear mongering speeches he proclaimed that, "somewhere a business is closing its doors". He has yet to explain how rewarding Democratic special interest groups and simply stuffing cash out of the doors will have a tangible effect on the businesses in danger of closing. A temporary payroll tax suspension will have a tangible effect on businesses and employees, irreversibly increasing the size of government and causing inflation down the road can only harm, not help the private sector economy Obama claims to be interested in helping.

A now we're told by Obama that tax cuts are "the failed policies of the past".

Really? That's interesting considering that Obama actually campaigned on tax cuts. How many times were we told that there would be tax cuts for 95% of Americans? Yet in place of tax cuts were getting the largest increase in the size of government since the New Deal.

Obama promised over and over in the campaign to go through the federal budget "line by line" and eliminate wasteful programs. Well, here's his chance to live up to one of his hollow promises. Don't hold your breath. Like the promise that he wouldn't appoint lobbyists and the promise that he would bring a new tone to Washington. So much for the new tone, in Washington DC it's business as usual as Obama is now digging in his heels in a one-sided partisan defense of Nancy Pelosi's Democratic spending extravaganza.

For Barack Obama the more things change, the more things stay the same.

I really am fairly surprised that Obama is behaving with such a tin ear. The people are starting to turn against this bill, so to entrench yourself in defense of it in its current form strikes me as politically tone deaf. And I've always known Obama to do what is politically expedient, just ask Reverend Wright.

I have been avoiding directly criticizing the President for about as long as I can on this blog. The issues are too important and Obama is acting far too partisan for me to keep that up anymore. For Barack Obama the honeymoon is over and the bloom is off the rose. Any notion of Obama as a transformational or transformative leader has been swept aside.

And unless a serious overhaul takes place, this bill that is being stuffed down our throat will be a bitter pill indeed.

Doctrinal confusion

"Charlie Gibson's gaffe..." Damn right.

7 years

Rescue workers remove a Father Judge, a parish priest from one of New York's fire halls. Father Judge was administering last rites to a firefighter who was killed by one of the many bodies that fell to the ground after people leapt from the tower to their deaths, when he too was struck by a body and killed.

It seems to me that if President Bush is solely responsible for the sub prime mortgage crisis and for high gas prices, as some would have us believe, then he is also solely responsible for keeping America safe from terrorism for 7 years.

I for one have never bought into the narrative, that has been peddled for years now, that George W Bush is worthless. He has done more to confront the threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism than any other world leader in history. To me that is far from worthless, it's priceless.

grand slam & smack down

In case you missed Sarah Palin's killer speech last night, like Barack did, here it is in it's entirety. It's gonna be pretty tough for McCain to top this speech, but clearly, picking Sarah as the VP nominee was a stroke of genius.

Fred Thompson, thy hitter of home-runs

Many of the pundits were raving about Joe Lieberman's speech last night but I was partial to Fred Thompson's, I thought his speech was excellent.

He delivered a masterful blend of story telling and red meat dispensing. Fred Thompson knows how to get my conservative leaning juices flowing. He used his acting skills to regale the hall with perhaps the most interesting and compelling account of John McCain's POW experience and then he delved into some of the reasons as to why Obama is decidedly unprepared and unqualified to be president. Here are some of the best lines of the night delivered by Fred Thompson.

On McCain's Hanoi Hilton experience:

We hear a lot of talk about hope.

John McCain knows about hope. That's all he had to survive on. For propaganda purposes, his captors offered to let him go home.

John McCain refused.

He refused to leave ahead of men who'd been there longer.

He refused to abandon his conscience and his honor, even for his freedom.

He refused, even though his captors warned him, "It will be very bad for you."

They were right.

It was.

On tele-prompters:

Because John McCain stood up our country is better off.

The respect he is given around the world is not because of a teleprompter speech designed to appeal to American critics abroad, but because of decades of clearly demonstrated character and statesmanship.

On Democrats:

To deal with these challenges the Democrats present a history making nominee for president.

History making in that he is the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for President. Apparently they believe that he would match up well with the history making, Democrat controlled Congress. History making because it's the least accomplished and most unpopular Congress in our nation's history.

Together, they would take on these urgent challenges with protectionism, higher taxes and an even bigger bureaucracy.

And a Supreme Court that could be lost to liberalism for a generation.

This is not reform.

And it's certainly not change.

On taxes:

A President who feels no need to apologize for the United States of America.

We need a President who understands that you don't make citizens prosperous by making Washington richer, and you don't lift an economic downturn by imposing one of the largest tax increases in American history.

Now our opponents tell you not to worry about their tax increases.

They tell you they are not going to tax your family.

No, they're just going to tax "businesses"! So unless you buy something from a "business", like groceries or clothes or gasoline ... or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small "business", don't worry ... it's not going to affect you.

They say they are not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the "other" side of the bucket! That's their idea of tax reform.

In conclusion, a salute to McCain:

Tonight we are being called upon to stand up for a strong military ... a mature foreign policy ... a free and growing economy and for the values that bind us together and keep our nation free.

Tonight, we are being called upon to step up and stand up with John just as he has stood up for our country.

Our country is calling.

John McCain cannot raise his arms above his shoulders.

He cannot salute the flag of the country for which he sacrificed so much. Tonight, as we begin this convention week, yes, we stand with him.

And we salute him.

We salute his character and his courage.

His spirit of independence, and his drive for reform.

His vision to bring security and peace in our time, and continued prosperity for America and all her citizens.

For our own good and our children's, let us celebrate that vision, that belief, that faith so we can keep America the greatest country the world has ever seen.

Fred Thompson, thy hitter of home-runs.

in memoriam

who's ready?

I love it when Hillary Clinton attacks Obama with ads that highlight the fact that Democrats are ill equipped to protect us from our enemies. I guess the Obama people probably imagine that their candidate is being "swift boated" in this ad.

The below video is a funny spoof that lampoons Hillary but of course doesn't make the point that Obama is at all prepared to deal with any international crisis any more than she is. This whole argument should serve as a warning to voters that both Democratic candidates are unfit to be president.

Fateful Moment

Pakistan's interior ministry said Friday that Benazir Bhutto died from hitting her vehicle's sunroof when she tried to duck after a suicide attack, and that no bullet or shrapnel was found in her.

Ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema said the opposition leader had died from a head wound she sustained when she smashed against the sunroof's lever as she tried to shelter inside the car.

"The lever struck near her right ear and fractured her skull," Cheema said. "There was no bullet or metal shrapnel found in the injury." -AFP

Killed

Pakistani television is reporting that Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in what appears to have been at least a two pronged attack involving several suicide bombings and a secondary gunman attack. This is terrible news.

Backtrack-abee

At this point Mike Huckabee has distanced himself from his own belief that illegal immigrants should be entitled to pay instate tuition as well as distancing himself from his own disbelief in Darwin's Theory of Evolution. The other day Huckabee raced to assure Larry King, of all people, that his own disbelief in evolution would in no way change or effect his public policy if elected president.

Today Huckabee, in response to Condi Rice's ardent defense of Bush foreign policy, is essentially backtracking on his comments about the Bush administration's "bunker mentality" as he called it. He's parsing, dodging, and weaving even suggesting that he was not responsible for writing his own commentary which appeared in the most recent issue of "Foreign Affairs Journal".

Huckabee is man who seems to come out proudly and say the wrong thing and when pressed on it, rather than admit he was wrong, he prefers to backtrack and/or obfuscate. "Did she actually read the article?", he said today in an obvious attempt to muddle the issue by suggesting that his criticism of the Bush Administration has been some how misinterpreted or taken out of context. No Mr. Huckabee, nice try though. We all knew what you meant. We've heard the exact same refrain countless times from your leftie brethren and other agenda driven critics of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

I'd have more respect for Hackabee if he just flopped and said," I was misinformed or mistaken and I'm sorry, I was wrong." Instead we have this bad Bill Clinton impersonation of parsing the truth. "My comments were taken out of context." Yeah... sure they were.

Benazir Bhutto

There is an interesting yet deadly serious situation developing in Pakistan. Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, has been and hopefully will be in the future, a valuable ally in the war on terror. Lately however, he has taken certain anti-democratic steps in order to restore order in his country. Among other things, he has suspended the constitution thereby making public political demonstrations illegal. The political opposition leader is a politically charming woman by the name of Benezair Bhutto. Obviously, the fact that she is a woman is likely incompatible with any Taliban-style Islamic fundamentalism. This makes her an appealing figure in the mind of anyone seeking to bring modernity to the greater Islamic world.

However interesting Bhutto may be as a political figure, this situation obviously puts the Bush administration the difficult position of having to choose between supporting an ally or supporting democracy. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Let’s just hope that Bhutto survives the Muslim fundamentalist assassins seeking to silence her by committing violence upon women, which by the way, is supposedly incompatible with the teachings of Islam.

Painted into a corner

Let's examine the general Democratic position on the war in Iraq using some simple logic.

If it is fair to say that anti-war Democrats want out of Iraq as soon as possible, then one would be justified in assuming that good news coming from Iraq would be welcomed by Democrats because now the conditions under which we can responsibly withdraw from Iraq are perhaps beginning to present themselves.

But in the upside down world of anti-war Democrats, there is no way that any kind of good news coming from Iraq is compatible with the political agenda that they have pigeon-holed themselves into at this point.

The reason is, Anti-war Democrats have carved out such a niche as the cheerleaders of bad news from Iraq, that good news, even news that theoretically may advance their proposed agenda of withdrawing, is bad news for them.

This kind of divorce from any kind of logical progression is what happens when Democrats chose political posturing over seeking the truth and serving the American people.

It will be interesting to see which way the Democratic presidential candidates twist in the wind vis a vis Iraq given the forthcoming positive news from Iraq.

Switching Gears

Bad News = Good News

In the bizarro, topsy turvy world that is the mindset of a congressional Democrat, positive news from Iraq, that our armed forces are making progress, is terribly unfortunate news. Such was the sentiment expressed by House Majority Whip James Clyburn earlier this week. Clyburn warned his own party that a upbeat assessment delivered by General Patreus in the fall would likely cause a schism between the far left/Move on .org/Daily Kos wing of the party and the more moderate "Blue Dog Democrats" who came to prominence as a result of the 2006 mid term elections.

I wonder if some of these Democrat actually listen to the words that come out of their own mouths. We now have a public declaration by Democrats that a successful war effort is incompatible with the agenda of one of the two major political parties. I find this jaw-dropping moment of candor to be almost refreshing, if it wasn't so inane. Democrats might now have to stop parroting that they "support our troops". I would love to ask a Democrat, how is it that you can support our troops while at the same time be routing for their failure? As logic has never been a strong suit of the left, I imagine that my query will go unanswered.

Posturing

Barrack Obama proclaimed the other day that he is for the unilateral invasion of Pakistan in order to kill or capture OBL. It's fairly amazing that Obama seems to have no compunction about threatening Pakistan, a nuclear power and ally in the war on terror. While it is reassuring to see that Obama actually concurs with President Bush that Islamic terrorism represents a fundamental threat to America's security and way of life and that it should be aggressively confronted, I do notice that Democrats always seem to be in favor of a different war than the one we are fighting. This sabre-rattling speech by Obama the other day was vintage disingenuous political posturing.