And this guy wants to be our president:
An advisor, Daniel Kurtzer, to Barack Obama says that Obama didn’t realize what he was saying to AIPAC when he used the term ”undivided” in reference to Jerusalem.
Holy crap, that’s just bad.
Archive for the 'Politics' Category
This AP headline just pisses me off:
War bill helps Iraqis, may ignore Katrina victims
NEW ORLEANS - A long way from Iraq and the war debate in Washington, Herman Moore sat outside a tent in a downtown New Orleans homeless camp, trying to make sense of a proposal that helps Iraqi war refugees but will likely exclude Hurricane Katrina victims.
First of all, am I detecting just a hint of bias in this headline and first paragraph?
Second of all, this is a war spending bill. Why should a war spending bill contain spending unrelated to the war? Domestic spending in this bill can be described in one word: Pork.
Do I really need to say this? No I don’t, but I just can’t help myself: If you’ve prosecuted and jailed prostitutes as Attorney General, it’s probably not the brightest idea to patronize them.
This article by Victor Davis Hanson is a good example of why he’s a professional writer and I’m not.
First, he briefly explains how the Republicans have fucked up in the past few years, bringing us to the brink of electing the most liberal candidate since George McGovern. Then he articulates many of the fears many of us have of an Obama presidency. These are many of the same themes I’ve touched on here. The professional vs. non-professional comparison is left as an exercise for the reader.
Hanson also touches on the racial double-think going on among Obama supporters:
So now we are in this Orwellian paradox of seeing Obama’s base turn out in record numbers on the basis apparently of race, but on the other hand the implied warning that if anyone else were likewise to consider that fact, then he would be racialist.
Finally, he touches on the McCain “affair” non-story.
Here is an interesting article which argues that a Fred Thompson is not only desirable, but inevitable.
Conventional wisdom is hardening around the proposition that Fred Dalton Thompson is too lazy, ill-prepared, tired, old, lackluster, inexperienced, inconsistent and bald to make a successful run for President.
Of course, conventional wisdom rarely gets anything right. When it does, it’s only by accident.
In this case conventional wisdom is not just wrong but comically so. Thompson will win the Republican nomination for two reasons. First, he’s a very impressive candidate. Second, there’s no realistic alternative. He will win the general election for the same two reasons.
The author then goes on to compare Thompson to his Republican and Democratic rivals. He also asserts that Thompson is the best candidate to return the Republican Party to the ideals preached by Reagan. I don’t agree with the entire article (particularly “[Roe v Wade] is a travesty, which puts [Guliani] squarely on the wrong side of the culture war”), but it’s an interesting take on an interesting candidate. Go read.
Update, Feb 2008: Maybe conventional wisdom was right after all. Bummer.
I ran across this article today, which sums up the lies and selective memory of the left. Excerpts:
Yet even stipulating–which I do only for the sake of argument–that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was “a slam dunk.” This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with “high confidence” was that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.”
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and–yes–France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix–who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past–lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
More…
But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.Finally, Mr. Clinton’s secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained “absolutely convinced” of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
And more…
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush’s opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force–if necessary–to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”
Byrd: “The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.”
Read the whole thing.
The “Bush lied” meme has become quite entrenched in anti-war thinking. However, this article quite convincingly shows that “Bush lied” is itself the great lie.
My own opinion about the drubbing the Republicans received last night:
It was well deserved. Was it a referendum on Iraq? Partly. But more importantly, the Republicans had abandoned their principles of limited government and fiscal discipline. Instead, they embraced pork, entitlement, and corruption. They’re now paying for it.
I just wish I could say that the Democrats might be better.
Today’s New York Times clearly admits that Saddam had the knowledge to build an atom bomb. (Original article here, via Drudge Report. Article reproduced here.)
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
Despite the expected anti-Bush spin, this pretty much destroys the “Bush Lied” meme, doesn’t it?
It’s pretty obvious that if Saddam had been left alone, the sanctions and controls imposed on him after the Gulf War would have come to an end. (They were already falling apart by 2003, thanks in no small part to certain European powers.) Once sanctions were gone, he would then have been free to restart his weapons programs — or sell his knowledge to interested third parties, such as Al-Qaida.
Mark Steyn has published a well-argued editorial piece on the failures of the United Nations:
Can the U.S. force the UN to reform itself? Look at it this way: With hindsight, the UN was most effective when it was least effective—that’s to say, the four decades between Korea and the Gulf War, when the Cold War’s mutually-assured vetoes at least accurately represented the global stand-off. Now, however, we’re in a unipolar world. As a result, the UN is no longer a permanent talking-shop for the world’s powers but an alternative power in and of itself—a sort of ersatz superpower intended to counter the real one. Consider the 85 yes-or-no votes America made in the General Assembly in 2003: Arab League members voted against the U.S. position 88.7% of the time; ASEAN members voted against the U.S. position 84.5% of the time; Islamic Conference members voted against the U.S. position 84.1% of the time; African members voted against the U.S. position 83.8% of the time; Non-Aligned Movement members voted against the U.S. position 82.7% of the time; and European Union members voted against the U.S. position 54.5% of the time.
I have saved the article on my blog for your reading pleasure. Originally published by Hillsdale College, here.
This is yet another reason I cannot support the Democrats:
“The idea that we are going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.” — Howard Dean, DNC chairman