I spoke to several of the bloggers who had accounts locked and every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive.

Not all members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy are exactly unimpeachable, but this kind of chicanery seems more prevalent among the Left.

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.

But then, what do I know? I’m just an Typical White Person.

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.

Good reading.

• Cut and run: Let me be very clear right here: We are winning in Iraq. Despite this, the Democrats continue to insist on “bringing the troops as soon as possible”. Does “as soon as possible” mean when the job is done or now? My money is on the latter, and it will be an unmitigated disaster. Cutting and running in the face of Islamist violence would indeed be a change from the current administration, but not a good one.
• Higher taxes: High taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains discourages savings and investment. The Bush “tax cuts for the wealthy” recognized this by cutting these taxes. Isn’t the building of wealth a good thing? I suppose not, since the Democrats will be looking to raise these taxes again.
• Wealth redistribution: Along with higher taxes will be even more social programs to “help the poor”. What this really amounts to is taking money from people who work hard (higher income taxes) and save diligently (higher investment taxes), and giving it to people who neither work nor save (welfare). This has the effect of encouraging people to not work. What kind of change will happen when enough people stop working because they can collect a check from the government? The societal-collapsing kind, that’s what.
• Department of Medical Visitations: If you think your insurance company’s bureaucracy is bad, just wait until you get the government involved! Do you really want to consult the Department of Medical Visitations when you need surgery? Do you really want to stifle life-saving innovations through draconian price controls? Obviously there needs to be some changes in medicine, but there’s the Good kind of change and the Bad kind of change. Socialized medicine is the Bad kind.
• Further energy dependence: Conservation is good, but as long as we continue refusing to develop our domestic energy resources, we will continue to be dependent on others for our energy needs. I suppose this isn’t really a change, but simply a continuation of current foolishness.
• Enabling criminals: Democrats don’t explicitly set out to increase crime, but that is the practical effect of changes they like to implement, like more gun control.

That’s just what I’ve come up with off the top of my head. Maybe change isn’t such a good thing after all.

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.

Or, maybe it’s because of the stunning incompetence of the Republican Party. With a Republican Congress and Republican Presidency, there was an opportunity for great things (or, at least things that didn’t suck as badly as Democratic things). Instead, we got a bunch of stupidity. They passed on many opportunities to do something constructive, like fix Social Security, build a damned wall against Mexico, or undo some the damage of the Clinton years. They did none of those things. But you could definitely count on them to stick their noses where they didn’t belong, like between a doctor and her patient’s uterus. And they got more excited about some brain-dead woman in Florida than about making sure I’m not throwing my salary away on social services that won’t be there when I retire.

The one truly constructive thing they did was allow the moronic “assault weapons” ban to expire. Of course, that accomplishment simply required them to do nothing.

And what about fiscal discipline? In 1994, the Republicans replaced a thoroughly corrupted Democratic Congress that pissed money away to their cronies while not giving a flying fuck about the rest of us. And in 2006… the Democrats replaced a thoroughly corrupted Republican Congress that pissed money away to their cronies while not giving a flying fuck about the rest of us. And, what do I expect this newfangled Democratic Congress to do? Why, piss money away to their cronies and not give a flying fuck about the rest of us! New boss, same as the old boss. I think it’s time to explore term limits.

When the Republicans weren’t doing stupid things, they allowed the Democrats to paint them as doing stupid things. “Bush lied about Iraqi WMDs!” is the classic example here. “Bush Lied” is itself the big lie. The entire world agreed that Iraq was a WMD threat before the war. Now that the war has gone south (thanks largely to the Iraqis themselves), many people are simply practicing selective memory. The problem here is that the Republicans have not pushed back against this disinformation. They’ve sat on their asses and allowed the Left’s “Bush Lied” meme to become accepted in political discourse. Stupid!

As it turns out, Saddam did have WMDs, just not in the amounts the world had feared. People can be forgiven for missing all the press coverage of chemical munitions, chlorine bombs, and nuclear technical documents, since, um, the press hasn’t been covering it (that goes against the “Bush Lied” meme, after all). Essentially, Saddam was bluffing about the size of his WMD capability, and he didn’t expect the United States to call his bluff. After all, we hadn’t called the bluff in the Clinton years.

As for the war itself, “mismanaged” seems to be a good euphemism. General Petraeus seems to be going in the right direction with classic counter-insurgency tactics, if reports from embedded milbloggers are any indication. Too bad we didn’t do that in 2004. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

As for the Muslims — especially the Arab Muslims — all I can say is that’s a pretty fucked up religion. Most religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, are intrinsically messed up anyhow, but Islam takes the cake — hence its elevation to “fucked up”. And I’m not going to qualify or justify that statement; the Muslims do that themselves. There is a significant number of complete whackos in that faith, and the rest of them are simply enablers that do nothing to contain their whacko brethren. Westerners who still buy into the “Religion of peace” baloney after all the bloodshed perpetrated by Muslims all the way back to Muhammad are just willfully ignorant.

Maybe there’s still hope for those people. The kinder side of me still holds out hope. Our efforts to build a democratic Iraq are ultimately based upon that hope. But many days I have my doubts.

So it’s safe to say that I feel let-down. I’ve been let down by a Republican Congress that stank as badly as the Democrats they replaced. I’ve been let down by a bunch of Shiites that are more interested in settling scores than building a country.

And I’ve been thoroughly embarrassed by George W Bush, whom I confidently voted for, twice. It’s not that he’s an idiot. It’s that he’s stubborn and a very poor communicator, which together are essentially fatal bugs. I guess that when the Queen of England (or Helen Mirren, anyhow) declares that she “was a mechanic during the ‘war’”, she was referring to the American Revolutionary War. I wish John McCain had won the 2000 primaries. Or Joe Lieberman, for that matter.

I fully expect the new Democratic Congress to stink, and I also give the Democrats about a 70% chance of winning the White House in 2008. Trying to make things somewhat better by debating politics right now is somewhat akin to standing on the beach and commanding the tide not to come in — I expect to get all wet. And since no one else reads this blog anyhow, I expect it to be all wet on an empty beach.

In any case, all of the bloggers in my blogroll are better political writers than I am. Go read.

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.

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.

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.