May 19, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 34
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Last week we heard from Scott Beauchamp's commanding officer, Col. Ricky Gibbs. Gibbs said that Beauchamp had admitted to the investigating officer that his stories for the New Republic were false--or, as he put it later in the briefing, that, while Beauchamp had not "recanted," he "does not stand by the story." Col. Gibbs also said that Beauchamp was free to speak with the press. The New Republic's last update on the matter (on August 10) had suggested that the Army was preventing them from speaking with their author.
Now one of the bloggers from Blackfive has sat down with Beauchamp in Iraq. He does not report the substance of his conversation with Beauchamp, but he does have this to say:
What I can say is that he is not being held incommunicado in an undisclosed location with Dick Cheney, and that I found an interesting person that I enjoyed meeting.
The Army has officially said that Beauchamp is free to talk to the media, that he no longer stands by the stories, and that the stories are false. Which leaves us with this simple question: Have the editors at the New Republic spoken to Scott Beauchamp? And--if he’s choosing not to speak to them--do they stand behind his stories?
 Today's Huffington Post cherry picks a four year old
quote from Atkinson's report on IEDs. The Washington Post today prints the first in a series of stories by Rick Atkinson on the IED threat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon's response to it. The title of the piece: "'The IED problem is getting out of control. We've got to stop the bleeding.'" That quote is damning, but fortunately, it's also four years old:
By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."
It's heard to say where this series is going, and to be honest, I don't have too many complaints about the first piece. As a history of the IED problem, it seems accurate so far, ending in mid-2004 with the military's "Manhattan Project-like" approach to defeating the IED. I remain deeply skeptical of that approach, which the military pursued with little success in an attempt to find a technological rather than a tactical solution to the IED problem. There is no silver-bullet, miracle jammer, or armored vehicle that will completely eliminate the threat from the IED--the only real solution is to kill the bad guys who are building, facilitating, and emplacing these devices. But Atkinson seems to get that, quoting Admiral Macy in the introduction to the series:
"Americans want technical solutions. They want the silver bullet," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington, which now oversees several counter-IED technologies. "The solution to IEDs is the whole range of national power --political-military affairs, strategy, operations, intelligence."
And then Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England:
We've had people killed and injured, but we've probably saved five or 10 times that number of people by preventing attacks, or capturing and killing [insurgents], or getting caches of weapons, or disabling them."
Indeed. Here's the recent analysis from Former Spook:
In other words, the number of fatalities from roadside bombs and other IEDs has dropped by 64% in the past six months--a time when the overall ops tempo among U.S. forces has increased dramatically. During that period, Army and Marine units have entered a number of former terrorist strong-holds and cleared them, suffering fewer casualties than many analysts had predicted. And, the declining number of IED deaths shows that the troop surge is hitting the bad guys where it hurts most--in their bomb-making networks.
We're still a long way from defeating the IED, and further still from victory in Iraq, but this headline is a cheap shot at a time when the exact opposite is true--the military may finally be getting the IED problem under control, and as MRAP vehicles begin making their way over to Iraq, the situation is likely to improve even further. We still have to stop the bleeding, but there too, the trend is overwhelmingly positive. Atkinson's introduction appears cautiously optimistic, but the defeatist left, desperate for bad news, is sure to cherry pick the worst bits from this report, as the Huffington Post has done by putting up the four year old quote that Atkinson's editors chose to use as a headline. But that doesn't change the real story here: IED fatalities are down 64 percent over the last six months. What are the chances of a headline like that popping up in the Washington Post at the end of this series?
Yesterday, six of the top thirteen college football teams in the AP poll--all of them heretofore undefeated--lost to lower-ranked or unranked opponents. Upsets happen in sports.
And upsets happen in politics. Especially in multi-candidate fields where almost all of the leading candidates have never run for the office in question before, and where none of the candidates right now is drawing majority support in the polls. Should Hillary Clinton, who leads Barack Obama by about 40 to 23 percent in national polls, be favored over her less experienced opponent? Sure. But could Obama upset Clinton? Easily. He will have as much money as she has for paid advertising--and the punditocracy undervalues the importance of such advertising, while overvaluing the value of pundit-consensus-judgments. Obama is about even with Clinton (along with Edwards) in Iowa. If Obama beats Clinton in Iowa, he'll probably win New Hampshire--and then what? Probably an upset for the Democratic nomination that wouldn't be as big an upset as the D.C. consensus now believes it would be.
In politics, as in sports and in life, things change. Michigan suffered a stunning upset to Appalachian State, was trounced by Oregon--and has since won three games in a row. Momentum shifts. Fred Thompson was all the rage in the late spring-early summer. Then he delayed his entrance into the race, had an easygoing launch--and the pundits disapproved. But he's second right now in most national polls, and is tied for second in Iowa and for first place in South Carolina. Not bad.
Meanwhile, Giuliani is doing well nationally--but his supporters have to be worried by his apparent inability to move above what looks like a 30-percent ceiling. Romney probably has put together the best campaign of the GOP contenders, and he's done very well so far in polling in Iowa and New Hampshire. But his supporters have to be worried that Romney's early leads there may be beginning to dissipate as the other candidates begin focusing on, and advertising in, those states.
On the other hand, Giuliani could stay in front, and Romney's impressive early showing may turn out to be for real. Plus, McCain is still in the hunt. We don't know. What we do know is that it would be amazing if things stayed just as they are. Politics is dynamic--especially the politics of a multi-candidate race with a new and compressed primary schedule. It's unlikely that a present snapshot will capture a three-months-off future outcome. And this, too, we know: conventional wisdom is often wrong. Now, one could respond: So are strained attempts to contravene conventional wisdom! To which I'd have to say: Fair enough.
During the September 5 GOP debate in New Hampshire, Mayor Giuliani had this little noticed dig at Governor Romney:
New York City was, during the years that I was mayor, the safest large city in the United States. In fact, in 2000, which was one of the last years that I was mayor, it was 191 for crime in the country.
For example, in Boston, there was a 59 percent greater chance you'd be the victim of a crime than in New York City. In many other cities, there was 100 to 300 percent greater chance that you'd be a victim of a crime than in New York City.
One of the things I accomplished as mayor of New York City was the impossible.
Besides Giuliani's logical fallacy--if something is impossible, can you really accomplish it?--there are a couple of things to note about this statement. One, Giuliani left office in 2002, while Mitt Romney didn't become governor until 2003. So a direct comparison is, strictly speaking, unfair.
Two, the crime discussion is probably only beginning. For an example, read this Boston Globe story, which reports that "newly released figures show that murders were up 7.5 percent in the Bay State and 25 percent in Boston from 2002 to 2006 while Romney was governor."
Now it should also be noted that assault and rape figures fell during the same period. And a Romney spokesman told the Globe that the former governor has "a strong record on public safety."
Furthermore, I'm not sure crime will be the dispositive issue in the 2008 GOP primary. In fact, I'm pretty sure it won't be dispositive. But the Globe story suggests that for every ad that runs in Iowa attacking Giuliani's positions on abortion, gun control, immigration, etc., etc., there will be another ad attacking Romney's flip-flops and, of all things, his record on crime.
According to NBC's First Read blog, Newt Gingrich will not run for president. Apparently Gingrich received notice only yesterday that he would have to shut down his American Solutions project before running. This was enough, it seems, to prevent Gingrich from announcing.
Note that it was not a perceived lack of pledges that reportedly convinced Gingrich not to run.
House minority leader John Boehner of Ohio and Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have labored long and hard to make an issue out of Democratic phoniness in supposedly cleaning up the dubious practice of earmarks. Remember earmarks? Those are the items of special interest spending--pork in its purest form--that senators and House members stick into bills without any deliberation or vote. Indeed, earmarks are largely hidden from public view.
Democrats promised that once they controlled Congress they would reform the process and put a spotlight on earmarks. They've done some reforming, but have still found ways to keep many earmarks from being exposed to the light of day. Boehner, who has never authored an earmark, pointed this out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Thursday. Coburn and DeMint have been screaming bloody murder. So you might think earmarks are on the verge of becoming a good Republican issue.
Nope. And there are several reasons for this. It was under the 12-year Republican reign in Congress that the number of earmarks skyrocketed. It was the crooked use of earmarks that sent Republican congressman Duke Cunningham to jail--he traded them for money and gifts--and put other Republicans in hot water. At the moment, Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is Capitol Hill's most famous earmarker. He's under investigation by a federal grand jury--and earmarks are part of the probe.
Last year Republicans actually took steps to reform earmarks, but those steps weren't enough. It didn't change the story line, popular with the media and Democrats, that Republicans alone are the abusers of earmarks. This idea dovetailed with the "culture of corruption" that Democrats accused Republicans of cultivating.
The result: It's hard for Republicans to pass the blame for earmarks to Democrats. But there is a way, one most Republicans balk at, especially those on the House and Senate appropriations committees. It's simply to propose to ban earmarks altogether and ask President Bush to veto any spending bill with earmarks in it.
My guess is that nothing short of a death-to-earmarks stance will lift the burden of earmarks from the backs of Republicans. When something is killing you politically, the only way out is to get rid of it entirely.
Fred Barnes writes in with a preview of this weekend's Beltway Boys:
This week's "Hot Story" is "Talk . . . Bomb?" It's mainly about the Democrats and how bad they were in their Dartmouth debate on Iran--except for Hillary. She gets a separate "UP" arrow for her performance, especially as the lone Senate Democratic presidential candidate who voted for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution to designate the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group. It's a largely pro-Hillary show, based on her being the most hawkish of the Democratic presidential candidates.
Actor Kevin Spacey is zinged in the "Buzz" for his lovefest with Hugo Chavez. And the New York Times's "public editor" Clark Hoyt is praised for his courage as ombudsman in telling the true story of the paper and that MoveOn ad calling Gen. Petraeus a traitor.
You can watch Beltway Boys on the Fox News Channel tonight at 6 p.m. The show is repeated at 11:30 p.m. Saturday and again at 6:30 a.m. Sunday. All times are EST.
I hated middle school, but if anything could have made it better...
Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force presented a "retired" J-6 jet fighter to a middle school in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality on Tuesday, to provide a real teaching tool for the school.
The fighter plane will be used as prop for trainee pilots who are attending a pilot training base which lies in Ba County Middle School, Chongqing municipality, the Chongqing Economic Times reports.
The 120 students in the pilot trainee program can get in touch with a real jet fighter in the future besides taking lessons.
Many students didn't sleep well during night before the aircraft arrived as they were so excited. When they were informed the plane had been sent to school the next day, students rushed to the playground, and touched it. Some of them even climbed onto it after teachers approved it.
When the kids sit in the cockpit, do they pretend they're in a dogfight with an F-22, or strafing pro-democracy protesters?
HT Alert 5
The Missile Defense Agency reports on a successful test today:
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced today it has completed an important exercise and flight test involving a successful intercept by a ground-based interceptor missile designed to protect the United States against a limited long-range ballistic missile attack. The flight test results will help to further improve and refine the performance of numerous Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) elements able to provide a defense against the type of long-range ballistic missile that could be used to attack an American city with a weapon of mass destruction.
The interceptor was launched from the Ronald W. Reagan Missile Defense Site, located at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. For this exercise, a threat-representative target missile was launched from Kodiak, Alaska.
Reuters notes that the "threat-representative target" was intended to simulate an incoming North Korean missile:
A U.S. interceptor missile on Friday shot down a dummy warhead replicating an incoming North Korean missile in the 7th successful test of Boeing Co's long-range missile shield, a witness told Reuters.
"We got it," said Riki Ellison, president of the private Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. "It was a success."
 Merkel says goodbye to the Dalai Lama after meeting at the chancellery.
(REUTERS/Markus Schreiber/Pool) Even before the brutal crack-down in Burma turned the international spotlight on China’s cynical unwillingness to pressure the military junta in neighboring Rangoon, it was German Chancellor Merkel who--by receiving the exiled Tibetan leader Dalai Lama last Sunday in Berlin--decided to send a clear signal to Beijing emphasizing the importance of protecting fundamental human rights. Merkel was not only the first German chancellor to meet with the Dalai Lama. She also decided to receive him at her official residence for what was billed as "private and informal talks" about the Dalai Lama’s "work as the Buddhist Tibetan religious leader and his commitment to his Tibetan homeland." Ever since China forcibly annexed its Himalayan neighbor in 1950 and launched a tough campaign of repression against the native Buddhist Tibetans, Beijing has viewed any international red-carpet treatment for the "god king" as a threat to its political legitimacy and territorial integrity.
In the run-up to the Merkel-Dalai Lama talks, China had tried hard to prevent the sensitive meeting from happening. Last Friday, for instance, Beijing summoned the newly arrived German ambassador there to warn against the potential negative political and economic fall-out for relations between the two countries. Beijing also canceled several senior-level bilateral meetings during this week’s UN General Assembly opening session in New York for "scheduling reasons." According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, the meeting "grossly interferes with the internal affairs of China," "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and seriously undermines China-Germany relations". While the Merkel government stressed the peaceful nature of the Dalai Lama’s international campaign to achieve autonomy--though not independence--for Tibet and confirmed its continued commitment to the "One China" policy, the German Chancellor nonetheless seized the opportunity to demonstrate that she is not willing to sacrifice her own political beliefs and principles on the altar of close political and economic ties with a rising China.
Merkel’s timing in sending a human rights message to Beijing was carefully chosen, coming just a few weeks after the chancellor’s trip to China (which was overshadowed by reports of PLA cyber attacks against German government computers), and less than a year before the start of the 2008 Olympics. Despite the blustering, Beijing knows too well that it would be counterproductive to make too big of a deal of the Dalai Lama visit, especially since it does not herald any major shift in Germany’s China policy. Just today, the ruling conservative CDU/CSU Bundestag group announced that Chancellor Merkel will give a major major foreign policy address on Asia at a conference in Berlin on October 26. She will leave for another Asia trip right after the speech, thus emphasizing the region’s growing political and economic importance.
Domestically, Angela Merkel got rave across-the-board political and media reviews for receiving the Dalai Lama, including from the opposition FDP and Green parties. Only SPD Chairman Kurt Beck, whose party is a member of the ruling Grand Coalition and who would surely like to take Merkel’s post after the next general elections, slightly criticized the chancellor, indicating that he would have chosen a more "neutral ground" for such an encounter. As an editorial in the left-leaning Berliner Zeitung put it:
"The chancellor's resolve is to be welcomed because a policy of cozying up to Beijing, such as that pursued by (former Chancellor) Gerhard Schroeder, is of no use to anyone and only covers up existing conflicts. The small disturbance will not undermine bilateral relations: The Chinese are reliable and sensible enough to be able to distinguish between tactics and strategy. They wanted--as did Merkel--to send out a signal, and they have done so. Neither side has any interest in further turbulence."
"The real tests lie ahead. The Olympic Games are taking place in Beijing next year and China will soon be the world’s biggest export nation. Beijing’s global influence is growing --and with it the temptation for other countries to not look quite so closely at the human rights situation there. Merkel is thus to be applauded for continuing to defy, in all friendliness, Germany’s biggest partner in Asia."
During the past two weeks or so, Germany seemed to be gripped by a certain "Dalai Lamania" as the Tibetan spiritual leader was on a non-stop political and media tour across the country. For Chancellor Merkel, the meeting in Berlin was also an important opportunity to reach out to centrist voters by once again stressing her personal commitment to the protection of human rights (remember her frank criticism of Russian President Putin in that regard). Traditionally, it had been the SPD party and the Greens who were widely seen as the champions of "soft" issues such as human rights; the tenure of former chancellor and Putin buddy Gerhard Schroeder notwithstanding. Gearing up for the next general elections to be held by the fall of 2009, Merkel is smartly expanding her party’s appeal to the rapidly growing number of swing voters in Germany. One final observation: While the Dalai Lama’s campaign to improve the human rights situation in Tibet in the face of Chinese repression is certainly a worthy cause, it was astonishing to see how otherwise strictly secular politicians from the SPD, Green, FDP, and Left party (and even some CDU folks) bowed down before the "god king," referring to him as "His Holiness." It should be pointed out that these are the same people who generally refuse to address Germany’s top Catholic and Protestant leaders Karl Cardinal Lehmann or Bishop Wolfgang Huber with their appropriate titles, opting instead for a more informal, i.e. less respectful, "Herr Lehmann" or "Herr Huber."
From the Wall Street Journal: Why We're Winning Now in Iraq, by Frederick W. Kagan.
From HughHewitt.com: Activism vs. Punditry, by Dean Barnett.
From the Washington Post: France Flips While Congress Shifts, by Charles Krauthammer.
From the Guardian: Struggling Alone, by Vaclav Havel.\
From the Atlantic: Outsourcing Conflict, by Robert D. Kaplan.
Scenes from Burma
Over at Town Hall, Patrick Ruffini has what may be the most perceptive post of the week. Here are the key grafs:
On Hannity last night, Newt said he would collect pledges over the Internet. That means he's almost certain to reach the $30 million goal he's set for himself. Whether he can actually raise that amount is another matter entirely.
If I'm a person of modest means but I want Newt to run, I can "pledge" to max out at $2,300. Heck, I can even throw in the wife to up it 46 Hamiltons. That doesn't mean I will actually give that much.
Newt would need only 14,000 of his fans to flood the site with $2,300 "pledges" in order to declare a broad public groundswell for his candidacy.
Writes Ruffini: "Newt is either totally naive (highly unlikely) or knows exactly how the Internet game is played. This deal is rigged."
The high point of the Gingrich non-campaign campaign was his debate with Mario Cuomo at Cooper Union. That was in February. I've been assuming he won't run.
But Ruffini may be on to something here.
Via Ben Smith, this Jeanne Cummings piece on John Edwards's decision to accept public matching funds makes a lot of sense. Basically, Cummings writes, Edwards had no other choice:
The simple fact is that Edwards was never going to keep pace with the Democratic front-runner, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, or the upstart campaign of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
This decision will limit Edwards's ability to compete in the coming air war, but it's still way too early to declare any serious candidacy over. Edwards has an opening if Obama fizzles and the peace party rejects Clinton.
Edwards's decision on 27 September came a day after the Service Employees International Union delayed their presidential endorsement. Coincidence?
It's a common refrain of Rudy Giuliani's that leadership involves doing things that are unpopular. Here's an ABC News article in which Giuliani says:
Leadership is about sometimes doing the things you know are right, and then it's your job to educate the public, as opposed to just, you know, taking a CNN poll or a Bloomberg poll or a Fox poll and let that run the country.
Apparently, this principle extends to answering phone calls from your wife while addressing the National Rifle Association. According to the Fox News / Opinion Dynamics poll Marc Ambinder cites here, a whopping 81 percent of voters would prefer that presidential candidates wait until finishing their speech before taking a cell-phone call.
Yesterday National Review Online featured a piece on American energy policy by John McCain that can be found here. McCain writes that "America's dependency on foreign oil is a major strategic vulnerability for our nation."
In short, McCain proposes to "implement an energy plan that won't be another grab bag of handouts, a full employment act for lobbyists, nor another round of tax breaks and other subsidies to big oil." Remember: "Change Begins with Us"!
My favorite part of the McCain essay--and the full article is well-worth your time--comes toward the end:
The barriers to nuclear energy are political not technological. We've let the fears of 30 years ago, and an endless political squabble over the storage of nuclear spent fuel, make it virtually impossible to build a single new plant that produces a form of energy that is safe and non-polluting. If France can produce 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power, why can't we? Is France a more secure, advanced, and innovative country than we are? Are France's scientists and entrepreneurs more capable than we are? I need no answer to that rhetorical question. I know my country well enough to know otherwise.
Since Sarkozy's election and France's policy shift on Iran, conservatives have--rightly!--been reluctant to engage in Franco-criticism. Which is what makes McCain's riff so refreshing.
This week, the world has been watching the violent government crackdown on the pro-democracy uprising in Burma. "Citizen journalists" have been responsible for much of the reporting by cell phone text messages to bloggers worldwide. But the Burmese government blocked Internet access and cell phone lines in an effort to curb news distribution.
Via Instapundit, the Wall Street Journal reports:
In the age of YouTube, cellphone cameras and text messaging, technology is playing a critical role in helping news organizations and international groups follow Myanmar's biggest protests in nearly two decades. Citizen witnesses are using cellphones and the Internet to beam out images of bloodied monks and street fires, subverting the Myanmar government's effort to control media coverage and present a sanitized version of the uprising….The events are a trial by fire for so-called citizen journalists, who cover events that professional journalists can't get to. The Myanmar government has successfully kept out many reporters, some of whom are filing their stories about events in Myanmar from India and Thailand.
Bill Toddler at Pajamas Media has great coverage of the "Internet warriors," the "behind the scenes computer-savvy students have given the world a front row seat into the junta's brutal repression via the Internet." He notes:
While the Junta play "Whack-a-Mole" with the bloggers their violent crackdown on the red robed Monks has backfired in ways they never imagined. Within Burma the images of bloodied tiles in monasteries and troops charging crowds of unarmed civilians has only furthered the pro-democracy movement’s cause and increased its popularity. The same bloggers have also opened a window on Burma for the world to see into.
Mike Nizza at The Lede discusses "Ko Htike, an expatriate Burmese citizen living in London," who first reported the murder of a Japanese journalist at the hands of the junta.
OnDeadline reports that Ko Htike is having difficulty reporting due to the blackout, but some bloggers are "funneling the latest news and rumors to a widget."
Michelle Malkin is keeping an eye on the latest regarding the Internet blackout. She has some of the latest videos, too, so keep a watch on her blog.
Gateway Pundit also has an informative news roundup.
In an informative editorial, NRO editors note: "The last time protests on this scale rocked Burma, in 1988, the junta had killed 3,000 people before the dust settled." Hopefully, the current crackdown won't finish in the same way.
But, unfortunately, as Ed at Captain's Quarters says, "The end of Internet access will damage the ability of the activists to get images and stories of brutality out to the world. However, that will probably make little difference, because the world hasn't exactly rushed to the aid of the Burmese. Oh, the world has issued their own version of "challenge documents" in condemning the actions of the military junta by condemning them in diplomatic terms for their crackdown on peaceful demonstrations -- but they have done little to put pressure on Burma to end it."
For all the latest updates, keep checking the widget and Burmanet News.
Lawmakers deplore 'frightening' state of Army readiness:
Members of the House Armed Services Committee expressed concern Wednesday that the sustained combat in Iraq and Afghanistan has reduced the Army's ability to respond to any new conflict.
"The Army has degraded to an intolerable point," Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., said. Recalling the so-called "hollow Army" that came out of 10 years of war in Vietnam, he said, "The parallels are alarming. We cannot afford to break the Army again."..
"Today's Army is out of balance," said Casey, a four-star general. "The current demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply."
Although he believes "the next several decades will be ones of persistent conflict" and the Army cannot accurately predict when and where the next war will occur, Casey said, "we are consumed with meeting the demands of the current fight and are unable to provide ready forces as rapidly as necessary for other potential contingencies."
The general cited the "stress and strain" on soldiers, their families and Army support systems and said equipment is "wearing out at a far greater pace than expected."
As Bush seeks $190B more for war, Dems signal protracted battle looms:
As the Bush administration took its case to Congress Wednesday for an additional $190 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Democratic leaders downplayed calls for swift action on the massive spending package, foreshadowing a protracted battle over new funding for the U.S. military involvement in Iraq.
At a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, which was repeatedly disrupted by raucous anti-war protesters, Democrats were skeptical of comments made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Congress should pass the fiscal 2008 supplemental spending bill “as quickly as possible and without excessive and counterproductive restrictions.”
When asked before the hearing whether there was a sense of urgency in taking up the supplemental funding package, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told The Hill, “Not for me, there isn’t.”
If Congressional leaders truly believe that the military is overstretched, shouldn't it be a priority to fund ongoing conflicts, rather than allow them to further deplete current inventories?
And while we're on the topic, it would be entirely appropriate to consider legislation to expand the army:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that he intends to approve a $2.8 billion plan to accelerate the Army's growth by 74,000 soldiers over the next four years, even as the Army's top official suggested that the need for support troops in Iraq could grow -- rather than decrease -- as limited drawdowns of combat forces begin.
"The issue is, if the brigades come down, will the soldiers outside the brigades go up? If so, how much?" Army Secretary Pete Geren told defense reporters yesterday. "As the mission shifts more to training, more to supporting, what will be the requirements in those areas?"
Several Democratic presidential candidates--including Senators Obama and Clinton--support an expansion of the army. Hopefully Geren's initiative will get a warm welcome on the Hill.
President Bush on 27 September:
"Endless hours sitting in an airplane on a runway with no communication between a pilot and the airport is just not right."
When was the last time Bush flew commercial? Any guesses?
In any case, let's hope the administration has read the Wall Street Journal editorial on FAA reform that can be found here.
Yesterday I received the following fundraising appeal from Chris Dodd:
Hey,
I only have a few seconds on my way back to Washington from last night's debate.
The fundraising quarter is wrapping up and we're just short of hitting our goal. Will you chip in $23 and put us over the top? You can contribute here:
http://www.chrisdodd.com/deadline
I'll be in touch soon.
Chris
And today I get a fundraising appeal from Barack Obama that has "Hey" as its subject line:
I'm just now leaving New York, and you've got me fired up. Nearly 25,000 people came together last night for the rally. . . .
We're still shy of our goal of 350,000 people giving to the campaign by Sunday's deadline.
Make a donation now and get us there:
https://donate.barackobama.com/match
More soon.
Barack
Now, it's nice that Chris Dodd and Barack Obama are pretending to be friends of mine. And there's no doubt I'd enjoy being their friend, too. But why the psuedo-informality? Isn't that a little, you know, contrived? Shouldn't someone running for president present himself more formally? It's not like I'm giving a buddy five bucks to pick up a six pack before the game. They are asking me to give them potentially thousands of dollars to support their campaign to become the most powerful individual in the world. Presumably those people who are most inclined to donate to them can see through a silly gimmick like this.
A reader writes:
The Democrats' attitudes remind me of 1984, when it was assumed that Mondale had a lock on the election, since the people would reject Reagan (recession being fresh in their minds) and return to the "natural governing party," the Democrats. So, they pandered to their core constituencies, especially Big Labor, promised big social programs and higher taxes, and had their heads handed to them in November.
Fast-forward 24 years, and things look very much the same. The only real difference is a) we're at war; b) their core constituency is dominated by Big Anti-War; and c) to pander to them the Democrats have to work for a US defeat in Iraq. All while promising big social programs and higher taxes.
Hmm . . . Mondale with a big shot of McGovern thrown in. That's a powerful mix, and the Democrats may well wake up with a helluva hangover on November 5th, 2008.
Goot point! I'd disagree with two things, however. One, the war is unpopular (for now), so if the Democrats continue to criticize it without lurching toward McGovernism, it probably won't hurt them. Two, presidential contests are, in the end, between two individuals, so if the Democrats have a strong candidate versus a weak Republican, they'd be helped. As respected as Mondale may have been in 1984, Reagan was certainly the better politician.
Start working on those letters to the editor. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts--and again, if you don't send criticism, I won't mind!
The Pentagon's Blogger's Roundtable series featured Col. Ricky Gibbs this morning. Gibbs is the commander of the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Multi-National Division-Baghdad, and one of the 5,000 soldiers under his command is Scott Thomas Beauchamp. I asked Col. Gibbs whether the stories told by Scott Thomas Beauchamp in the New Republic were true, and whether his command was "stonewalling" and preventing Beauchamp from speaking to the media, as the New Republic claimed in its last statement on the case on August 10.
In response to the first question, Gibbs said that he had directed an investigation into Beauchamp's allegations and determined them to be false. "The incidents did not take place," Gibbs said. And Beauchamp "admitted that himself" to the investigating officer. For clarity, I asked Gibbs again, did Beauchamp admit the stories were false? "He did admit to the investigating officer that the incidents did not take place."
At the end of the call, Gibbs returned to the subject of Beauchamp's confession to say that "Beauchamp did not recant," but that "he does not stand by the story." This caused some puzzlement among the folks on the line. OnPoint's Andrew Luben Marvin Hutchens asked the Colonel to clarify, does Beauchamp stand by the stories? The Colonel again answered that he does not, and that he is free to speak to the press but has chosen not to. If Beauchamp does not stand by the story, that might explain why he has no interest in talking to the press.
Still, if the investigation has concluded that the incidents did not take place, Beauchamp has signed a letter consenting to that conclusion, as we understand he has, and he no longer stands by the stories, one wonders how that doesn't amount to a recantation. I think it's probably just semantics.
That may be enough to keep him out of trouble with the Army, but how can the editors at the New Republic continue to stand by a story that their own author will not defend? At least we know when those editors say that they "refuse to rush to judgment" they are being honest.
The Lombardo Consulting Group is due to release the latest edition of their election monitor. Here's a preview:
For the last two months we have refrained from commenting on the national and statewide polling on the Presidential race because, quite frankly, nothing was really happening. The fact is that from May to August the race for both major party nominations has been pretty much frozen in place; there's been very little real movement on either side. Other than the intensification of the McCain slide there was no real shift in the underlying political plate tectonics of this campaign. Until this week.
The other major findings are that the Clinton campaign is beginning to resemble the 1999 George W. Bush campaign in its institutional strength; Obama continues to negate the rationale for his candidacy by refusing to attack Clinton; Giuliani's attack on Move On and Clinton was the boldest, most successful political move during September; Michigan may matter more than you may think; and
A just released CBS News survey shows that job approval rating for the Democrat controlled Congress is at 27 percent, which is 6 percent BELOW the President's job approval rating. While people still generally see the Democratic party better able to handle most issues, the perception gap is not as great as it was a year ago. Republicans are still at a structural (more voters say they are Democrat than Republican) and attitudinal disadvantage, but it may not be as big a determinant in the Presidential race as we once thought.
Democrats, like the Republicans before them, are in danger of hubris. Many Democrats assume 2008 is a lock, so it's just a question of winning the party's nomination. The strategy for this is to pander to as many Democratic special interest groups as possible. But you know what happens when you assume . . .
Just a note to let you know that, at the moment, the email address at the bottom of our posts isn't functioning correctly. I'll make an announcement once the address is up and you can send me your thoughts, criticisms, and so forth.
On second thought, if you don't send criticism, I wouldn't really mind.
It's been three months since Cindy McCain has penned an entry to her blog. As Fred Willard's character in A Mighty Wind might say, "Wha' happened?"
Cindy McCain is a charming lady and a wonderful advocate for her husband. But if she doesn't want to blog--and really, who can blame her?--the McCain folks should probably take down that part of their website.
Via Instapundit, Mark Steyn makes a few observations about Katie Couric's problem with the word 'we:'
Before Katie Couric's confession that "saying 'we' when referring to the United States" makes her uncomfortable fades from the news cycle, two observations:
1) You'd be hard put to find anything more institutionally uninterested in the world than TV news. "CBS World News Headquarters" is all headquarters and no world news.
2) It does help explain one of Katie's sillier comments, a few years back when the space shuttle Columbia crashed. On the Today show, she saluted the fallen crew as follows: "They were an airborne United Nations - men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli…."
No, they weren't an "airborne UN". They were an airborne America. For a start, if there was such a thing as a UN rocket, the Israeli guy wouldn't get anywhere near it, except on a one-way ticket to establish the viability of Ahmadinejad's new designated homeland for the Jews on Planet Zongo. I doubt even an EU space shuttle would be eager to admit any astronauts from the Zionist Entity. As for the "Indian woman", Kalpana Chawla was the American Dream writ large upon the stars: she emigrated to the US in the Eighties and was an astronaut within a decade. There's no other country on earth where you can do that. And I'll bet she had no qualms about using the dread "we" word.
When the shuttle crashed, Abu Hamza, Britain's famous firebrand imam, claimed it was God's punishment "because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam". God bless the old Islamofascist nut but at least he'd grasped the particulars of the situation, instead of just peddling witless one-worldist delusions. Perkiness doesn't make them any more attractive.
3) On the other hand, Miss Couric's reluctance to say "we" may simply reflect the fact that, given her current ratings, the plural may be a tad presumptuous.
The folks on the Left are beside themselves today--thinking that by dint of a truncated quote, they will succeed in shutting down Rush Limbaugh and taking him off the air. Before lining up next to the folks from Crooks and Liars, FireDogLake, Media Matters, ThinkProgress, Huffington Post, and the rest, at least read the full transcript. In Limbaugh's comments after the exchange quoted by the left, he makes clear he is referring to people like Jesse MacBeth--a 'phony soldier' the left would understandably like to forget.
Limbaugh's offhand comment was poorly chosen. It's clear that there are 'real soldiers'--real by anyone's criteria--who oppose the war in Iraq and they're entitled to their views. But much like the recently manufactured controversies over Bill O'Reilly's comments, and President Bush's comment about Saddam having killed "all the Mandelas," the left is trying to pull a fast-one by taking Rush's statement out of context.
It's also clear and undeniable that the political left has eagerly stood behind fakers who spout tales about Iraq that are at times false, or ridiculous, or both. From Jesse MacBeth to Scott Thomas Beauchamp, liberals and anti-war moonbats have suspended logic and reason to embrace people because they liked what they had to say, regardless of whether the tales made sense, or their credentials were as they claimed.
Limbaugh is big enough to defend himself and his healthy ego. But his attackers ought to render his comments honestly and own up to their own embarrassing record.
According to the AP, that's the number of Americans for whom there has never "been a time when there wasn't a Bush or Clinton in the White House, either as president or vice president." I'm one of them!
The rest of the AP story concerns political dynasties. It doesn't contain much new information. There's a quote from . . . David Gergen, the conventional-wisdom machine who worked for both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Still, it's always worth remembering that intangible concerns--do we really want two families dominating the executive branch of the federal government for more than two decades?--play a difficult-to-quantify role in voters' decisions.
Which is why, in the end, a candidate who embraces change might have broad appeal.
Bill Kristol called in from the road to encourage you to read WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor John Podhoretz's latest column.
Here's Pod's take on the Dems:
At this point, a little more than three months before voters show up in Iowa and New Hampshire, it's clear that none of Hillary's foes has the stomach to fight with her. Any that did would have been making a major issue on Wednesday out of her campaign's relationship with indicted mystery multimillionaire donor Norman Hsu.
Since none of them did, it's fair to speculate that they're all playing for second place already. Or that they're hoping she'll respond catastrophically in the wake of some unforeseeable event (as with President Bush and Hurricane Katrina), handing them an opening.
And here's Pod on the GOP:
The only way his rivals can take him down is for Giuliani to lose big in Iowa and New Hampshire. This, in theory, might cause a gigantic momentum shift toward someone else who could then obliterate Rudy's leads in the big states, maybe take Florida away from him and then change the plotline on Feb. 5.
So if Rudy wins in New Hampshire, then it's very, very difficult - absent the unforeseen event - to see how anyone stops him.
Rudy could win without the Granite State. But it's hard to see how he loses if the big story on the evening of Jan. 8 is Giuliani toppling Romney in New Hampshire.
This is the best articulation so far of the "frontrunner" theory of the race. That is, the national polls will end up determining the results of state races.
But Bill points out over the phone that there's just as much evidence that the frontrunner theory is wrong. Obama is within 5 points of Clinton in Iowa in the RCP average of state polling. And this is two months before the serious advertising wars begin. Who's to say that Obama or Edwards won't gain in the coming months and end up trouncing Clinton in Iowa, thus throwing the Democratic race into disarray?
On the GOP side, the CNN/WMUR poll certainly shows that Romney's early-state lead is soft. But Giuliani has only gone up by a couple of points, whereas McCain is surging and Thompson is in a comfortable fourth place without, well, campaigning.
In other words: This is the most volatile and open-ended presidential primary in recent memory.
Beijing is taking some heat for blocking, along with Russia, a UN security council resolution condemning Burma, but the Communist party has other things to worry about besides international opinion and an Olympic boycott. The friendly junta that gives China an outlet to the Indian Ocean is facing a big challenge. Worse, the Chinese people are watching their neighbors--not far off Europeans--protest bravely in the face of overwhelming force.
Last night, my friend Kejian in Hangzhou skyped me. He says popular Chinese internet bulletin boards are dominated by statements of support for the democracy protests in Burma. Volunteers are translating news from English sites that are not blocked by censors. And, my friend pointed out, photographs don’t need translation. Later he reported that censors were starting to block and delete a lot of Burma postings.
One hopes it is no coincidence that President Bush announced he would attend a ceremony next month to hon | | | |
