I've received phone calls in the last hour from two economists I respect, one of them Larry Lindsey, the other in a position where he'd prefer not to be named. Both have government experience, neither is alarmist by nature, and they say this:

The huge European bank Fortis is apparently about to fail. The ripple effect on the American banking system could be disastrous, with bank runs, liquidity crises, and stock sell offs possible Monday. Wachovia may well fail next week. As Larry put it, this really will be 1933 soon if we don't move rapidly to stabilize the banking system.

And here's the bad news: the current bailout bill, whatever its merits and likelihood of passage, does nothing to address this.

Congress should pass by Monday simple legislation doing two things:

1. Giving the FDIC authority to provide unlimited deposit insurance through the FDIC for transaction accounts in banks.

2. Authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to provide unlimited protection of principal in money market funds through the Treasury's exchange stabilization fund.

Maybe my acquaintances (and I) are too worried; maybe this legislation wouldn't quite be the right solution. But I wanted to sound what may be, unfortunately, a needed alarm.

In light of the decision in the UK to provide preliminary sex education for six-year old schoolchildren, the Times Online asks five children where babies come from and gets some priceless answers.

Today marks a special day at the Weekly Standard. Mary Katharine Ham, the Mary Tyler Moore of the blogosphere and the real star of the O’Reilly Factor, officially joins our team to fill the capacious blogging gap left by the on-leave Michael Goldfarb. (Actually, we expect her to more than fill the gap but don't tell Goldfarb.) The wit, wisdom and pluck that has distinguished Ms. Ham’s work will now distinguish these very virtual pages.

We are very excited about welcoming Mary Katharine – please check the blog frequently for her observations and insights.

Boston
Things are pretty grim up here, and not just because John Kerry’s reelection is a certainty. Many of us are sitting shiva for Tom Brady’s knee while the TV sports anchors are replaying Tom Brady’s injury like it’s a latter day Zapruder film, pointing at his left knee and saying, “Down and to the right – down and to the right” Yes, the unthinkable has occurred. The man we consider the best quarterback ever, a winner of three Super Bowls who has started every game for the franchise since Week 3 in 2001, is out for the year after taking a mere 17 snaps. It’s the Curse of the CBS Scene.

For those legions of Patriot haters out there eager to write us off - and yes I’m using “us” even though I technically don’t play for the team – I have some bad news. The Patriots are still going to be an excellent team. Walk through it with me analytically. The Patriots will still have one of the three best defenses in the league, just like they always do. They’ll still have the best coach in the league, just like they always do.

On the other side of the ball, three of their linemen are All-Pros. They have a strong corps of running backs. Their receivers are the best in the league. Even if they have mediocre or sub-mediocre quarterback play, their offense figures to be above average. You combine one of the league’s best defenses with an above average offense and the league’s best coach, you have not just a contender but a potential champion. And let’s not forget, the Patriots have a nucleus of stars who know how to win.

A few other notes about the Patriots’ quarterback position. In an email exchange with Bill Kristol last week, he taunted me that the Patriots were one Brady injury away from oblivion. I responded that on that team playing in that system, either he or I would be a Pro Bowl quarterbacks if we got the job.

Unfortunately, neither of us did get the job so my relative prescience will not be tested. Instead, the Patriots have given the position over to Matt Cassel, Tom Brady’s longtime understudy. This is Cassel’s fourth season with the Patriots as Brady’s back-up. If he were incapable of doing the job, the Patriots would have replaced him long ago. Let’s not forget that this is the team that said farewell to mainstays like Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy and Adam Vinatieri. The Patriots don’t keep anyone around for sentimental reasons. Most people are predicting the Patriots to win 9-10 games and be a borderline playoff team. It’s actually much more likely that rather than descend into mediocrity, the Patriots will have a brewing quarterback controversy when training camp convenes next summer.

That said, there’s no overstating what a sad week this is for a Patriot fan. As you get older, you become increasingly aware that great athletes have short careers. When I was a kid watching Larry Bird, I never thought he would get old. I was just about 19 when Bird won his final championship in 1986 and was at his absolute best – the best to ever play the game. About 18 months later, Bird hurts his heels in a game in Cleveland and was never the same player again. Wade Boggs got old fast, too. Roger Clemens never got old, but that was a special case.

Brady was already on the wrong side of 30 before Sunday’s injury. When he returns, he’ll be one year older and beyond the age when recovering from serious injuries comes easily. The sad possibility is that Tom Brady may well never be the same. The sad fact is he has lost one of his prime years, a year which figured to be one of the greatest individual seasons in NFL history.

But life goes on. And so will the Patriots.

"Here’s the leader of the Chinese team, at the age of 20, Cheng Fei. She is one of the many who has been taken away from her family—not screaming and yelling out the door—but from the age of 3, and they may see their parents once a year. At one point she called her parents, said she wanted to come home. They knew that gymnastics could change the family life and they told her no, you stay with the program, and with the program she has stayed til these Olympic Games so crucial to the image of gymnastics and her country."

—Al Trautwig, NBC Olympic commentator, during the women’s gymnastics team final, August 13, 2008

Rasmussen has a poll up whose results will chill the hearts of those of us who enjoy (and occasionally guest-host) conservative talk radio shows:

Nearly half of Americans (47%) believe the government should require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary, but they draw the line at imposing that same requirement on the Internet. Thirty-nine percent (39%) say leave radio and TV alone, too.

A few quick observations on this poll that tellingly did not use the freighted term "fairness doctrine:"

1) For those of us who find the thought of a Fairness Doctrine comeback an obscenity, merely asserting that the notion of “public airwaves” has become an anachronism will fail to move the ball forward. Until talk radio shows it can wield the same influence without using the public airwaves, the argument over the equitable use of the public airwaves is an intellectually valid one. If, on the other hand, we’re able to transfer our success and influence to satellite radio, then a potential return of the Fairness Doctrine will cause no concern.

2) The easiest way out of this potential mess is if we could find some liberals who don’t stink at talk radio and can master all the aspects of the business, including the crucial yet decidedly unglamorous part of selling advertising. Gotta pay the bills, you know. Can’t we find one American liberal capable of true talk radio success?

3) Imagine what the numbers in a similar poll would look like if it were conducted in the wake of an Oklahoma City type tragedy that could be demagogued by cravenly opportunistic pols. (For those with short memories, Bill Clinton partly blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on talk radio engendered “extremism.” Even though his lips were moving, the telltale sign of a Clinton fabrication, many people believed him.)

4) Would our political class ever make such a frontal assault on free speech? The existence of a campaign finance reform bill that I will not name suggests we should be afraid – very afraid.

Prof. James Duane of the Regent University School of Law recently gave a lecture before a classroom full of students on why people should never talk to the police. To use his words, "it cannot help," and he quotes Justice Jackson that it is never a good idea under any circumstances. Now you may assume Prof. Duane is a liberal law professor type, but in fact he teaches at Regent, a law school founded by Pat Robertson. Though he doesn't say so, I suspect he fancies himself a conservative or libertarian.

The timing of Prof. Duane's lecture is poignant, because in the last few weeks, Al Sharpton and other community activists have begun speaking out against the "Don't Snitch" movement. The fact of the matter is rap stars and other celebrities have devastated their communities by urging the people who look up to them to refuse to talk to the police. "We are no longer going to give refuge to those traitors that would hit our young, innocent people with reckless and mindless violence," said Reverend Al Sharpton.

Although some might fault Sharpton for waiting so long to take a stand, he should be applauded for finally acknowledging the horrible consequences the anti-snitch movement has had on black communities. Last year, one rap star told 60 Minutes he wouldn't report a serial killer to the police even if the guy lived next door to him. "I wouldn't call and tell anybody on him... I'd probably move. But I'm not going to call and be like, 'The serial killer's in 4E.'" Of course, many of this star's adoring fans can't afford to move. In a wonderful article, the Atlantic Monthly details how this movement got started and the grave consequences of it.

If journalism were a game of how many distortions you can pack into a single paragraph, Amy Wilentz's profile of Jimmy Carter in New York Magazine would win a Pulitzer.

It’s always been Carter’s nature to avoid the political fray. He likes to engage in intelligent conversation with powerful parties, he likes to resolve things in a mannerly, civilized way—but he doesn’t do politics, he doesn’t do down-dirty, he doesn’t do low-level horse-trading: no my-bowlegged-nag-for-your-glue-factory-gelding. Carter deals only in thoroughbreds. He insists on taking the high road, and he’s not about to change his plans—say, to cancel his visit to see Hamas—because it might somehow hurt the Democrats in 2008.

Despite Wilentz's curious assertion to the contrary, Jimmy Carter's conduct in the last 8 years has been more directed at entering "the political fray" than any former president in history. Never has a former president criticized a sitting president and vice president with such frequency and such vitriol. While most former presidents refrain from such judgments, Carter has shared his observations about the Bush administration as a matter of routine. He even threw a temper tantrum after Pope John Paul II died, claiming he wasn't invited to participate in the U.S. delegation -- despite the fact Andy Card twice invited him and he twice declined. And what to make also of Wilentz's characterization of Carter's meeting with Hamas? Since when did meeting with a ringleader of suicide bombers constitute the "high road"?

William Kristol pays tribute to Tony Snow in today's New York Times, as did Fred Barnes on Saturday on the homepage.

And in case you missed them over the weekend, there are many other remembrances of Snow well worth reading. Yuval Levin and Byron York write about Snow's positive impact on the White House. John Podhoretz takes a look at Snow's ascent as a writer, and Ed Morrissey writes about how gracious Snow was toward an upstart blogger at the 2004 Republican convention.

Snow's colleagues at Fox News honored him as well. Here's the Fox News Sunday panel discussion and a video narrated by Brit Hume:

Voice of America reports that the United States and the Czech Republic have signed an agreement to implement a missile defense shield.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg signed a deal to build a radar station southwest of Prague, which will be part of a missile-defense system the United States says is aimed at shooting down missiles that may be fired from Iran or North Korea.

Besides the tracking radar system in the Czech Republic, the United States plans to deploy 10 interceptor missiles in Poland. Washington wants the sites to be in operation by 2012.

Talks are reportedly also under way to station up to 250 American troops in the Czech military base in Brdy, to service the radar station.

But the agreement faces major political hurdles. The accord has to be ratified by a divided Czech parliament where the government has just half the chamber's 200 seats.

If you're looking for some Independence Day-related writings, please see William Kristol's latest column on Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Roger Weightman of June 24, 1826.

With regret, the 83-year-old Jefferson wrote that his ill health compelled him to decline the invitation to travel to Washington for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of American independence. But then, perhaps knowing this would be his final word, Jefferson sets forth in stirring prose his faith in the universal significance of the Declaration of Independence:

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.”

Andrew Ferguson's essay in First Things "Lincoln and the Will of God" is also well worth your time this Fourth of July:

The question of why Providence should have willed such a calamity is foreshadowed in one final fragment to consider, written (most likely) in the early days of the war. In it Lincoln plays with the figure from Proverbs 25:11: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver."

To Lincoln, the image illuminates the distinction between the picture and the frame, between a thing contained and that which contains it. In his reading, the Union is the frame that contains the golden principle: the proposition of liberty and equality—that all men are created equal—advanced by the Declaration of Independence. "The assertion of that principle, at that time [of the Revolution], was the word, 'fitly spoken' which has proved an 'apple of gold' to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture."

Read together, the fragments show Lincoln's mind as it matures toward his two greatest utterances, the fullest expressions of his most fundamental ideas. These are, of course, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. They are not merely works of statecraft but homilies in a civil religion of his own devising, steeped in the cadences and rhetoric of the King James Bible. They were the consequence of Lincoln's deepest contemplation and belief, arrived at with some care and (we may suppose) discomfort. At Gettysburg, Lincoln explained why the country—the Union—was worth preserving. It was not any Union that was being ­preserved, it was a particular kind of Union: a Union dedicated to a timeless proposition that existed before the Union was even conceived.

In light of Sen. Jesse Helms's passing early this morning, we've posted on the homepage Fred Barnes's 1997 profile of the senator.

Page Six reports that Taki recently traveled to Brussels to defend his World Judo Championship title:

Taki Theodoracopulos, the elitist co-founder of The American Conservative, won the US National Judo Championship last year in Miami in the 90-kilo weight class and 70-75 age group. So last week, the aristocratic former playboy went to Brussels to compete in the World Judo Championships, a five-day event featuring 1,600 contestants from 29 countries. After winning nine three-minute matches, but losing two fingernails and suffering a black eye, Taki took the title. "Now I quit. I'll never do it again," he told Page Six. "I'm very banged up." Nothing a little R&R on his yacht in St. Tropez won't cure.

I do take issue with the characterization of Taki as a "former playboy." I'm sure Taki is every bit the playboy of his youth.

John Steele Gordon on Walter Nugent's Habits of Empire: "In all, 'Habits of Empire' is an excellent book as long as one ignores the historical claptrap of the postscript, which is an embarrassment to the author and publisher and an insult to the reader."

While consumer confidence continues to plummet, a new report from Pew Research shows that baby boomers appear most affected by the gathering economic gloom.

America's baby boomers are in a collective funk. Members of the large generation born from 1946 to 1964 are more downbeat about their lives than are adults who are younger or older, according to a new Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends survey.

Not only do boomers give their overall quality of life a lower rating than adults in other generations, they also are more likely to worry that their incomes won't keep up with inflation -- this despite the fact that boomers enjoy the highest incomes of any age group.

This finding from Pew is consistent with other polling I’ve seen and conducted myself. Those in the 50-64 age cohort have a lot uncertainty about the future--will I have enough money for retirement or to pay college bills, lose my job, etc.--without a high level of confidence about the answers to those questions. Surveys suggest reaching retirement age--and realizing many of those fears were resolved, unfounded or overblown--ameliorates a lot of anxiety and depression. This leaves older Americans a little more optimistic.

So, a message to depressed boomers? Hang in there folks, a better mood lies ahead. And if all else fails, remember, Medicare now covers Prozac.

Most of the letters responding to William Kristol’s New York Times column are sent directly to the Times, but occasionally correspondence ends up at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Here’s a letter about Monday’s column "Someone Else's Alex" that we thought would be of interest to our readers.

When I first saw that MoveOn.org ad, I felt a little manipulated, then frustrated, then sad.

It made me sad because in 1986, someone's baby, we will call him “baby John,” joined the Navy. Did John's Mommy want him to join the Navy? Not particularly. But, John had made up his mind and he was joining the Navy--period, end of discussion.

Fast forward twenty years to June of 2006, at a wonderful retirement ceremony with all of the flags flying, salutes, piping (that's a Naval tradition), and tears. John's Mommy and John's sons and family and friends were all present to acknowledge his twenty years of service to his country.

Tears were shed in joy for the appreciation and gratitude to have had the opportunity to devote half of his life defending freedom and democracy around the world. Yes, you guessed it, I am that John. That day in June 2006 and those tears were the culmination of a life defending a nation that afforded me the opportunity to go to sea and see the world, get a wonderful education, meet some wonderful people, make some lifelong friendships, and do it all in uniform while upholding some of the highest honors and traditions known to all of mankind. This was not a punishment, this was the ultimate privilege.

You see, I am proud of the Flag of the United States of America, and I am proud of the men and women who serve our country.

Thank God that that flag always waved over my head, day in and day out. It was always there and it always reminded me of who I am, what I've done. Sometimes, solemnly, it reminds me of those who have gone before me that are not with us today--but their memories, their contribution to society will always be remembered by their loved ones, friends, and fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

You see, service to your country isn't something that fits into every heart very easily because it involves sacrifice, and unfortunately, to so many people today, sacrifice is just a word, but to the men and women in uniform, it means honor, courage, and commitment. Those are words that can't just be thrown around because to live up to them requires genuine integrity and honesty, and all of these things I just mentioned are the values associated with wearing the uniform of any branch of service and they are not something taken lightly. When you commit to the uniform, you commit to the country. So, please, forgive me if I sound a little proud of my service to our country.

Just as I am proud of my son, my baby Alex if you will, who in January entered the service of his own free will. So, like so many others that have gone before him, his journey has begun, and as a mature young man, I feel the decision he has made is that of a patriot--to serve, to love, to defend. He is in very good hands now.

I see the same values and appreciation and gratitude in the faces of the men and women who journey to our nation’s capital everyday to witness the monuments that have been erected in honor of their service--I've seen them cry, sob tears of joy, relief, and sorrow as they recount days gone by, memories of a time they spent proudly serving America.

Their mothers, wives, girlfriends, and family didn't want them to go either, but America called and they responded, because that is what Americans do.

I'm sorry Alex's Mommy won't let him join the military. He may have been the one young Lieutenant who could have saved the lives of his platoon. Or he could have been the commanding officer of a U.S. Navy ship that was the only source of humanitarian relief in a country half way around the world--a country where his actions would be what people would remember of America. Or, he might have served as an Air Force pilot and earned a seat as space shuttle mission commander someday--but, I guess we will never know because Alex's Mommy won't let him join the military.

You see, it's easy to discount the service of the men and women in uniform who provide safety and freedom to our country everyday. It’s easy to diminish the importance of their contributions, because while they are busy defending freedom and democracy, we have the luxury to mock and criticize their service as being unworthy of baby Alex's time.

You see, it really doesn't bother me if MoveoOn.org doesn't want baby Alex to join the military. I'm sure Alex will most certainly find another alternative to fulfilling is his service/commitment to his country.

But don't worry because little Johnny, Tommy, Amy, Sally, and Timmy will always take his place. That is what we do: Men and women from across the country proudly serve their nation with the full faith and support of their families and friends. So if baby Alex will not join the military someday, then someone else will protect his Mommy for him. God Bless America always!

--John E. Boyce

Gary Hart in today's New York Times: "The Republican coalition -- composed of the religious right on social issues, the radical tax cutters or 'supply-siders' on economic issues, and the neoconservatives on foreign policy -- has produced only superficial religiosity, a failed war and record deficits."

This entire statement is arguable, to say the least. First, as Thomas L. Friedman acknowledges on the same page, the war in Iraq is not lost. In fact, right now we are winning it. As for deficits, the federal budget has been in surplus four times since 1969, from 1998 to 2001. The surplus occurred while there was a Democratic president and a Republican Congress (and a huge economic bubble). Congress passes a budget; the president signs it. The Republican Congress was just as responsible as Clinton for the surplus. Conservatism does not result in "only" deficits. Plenty of deficit spending has occurred, and will occur, under Democratic presidents and congresses. Barack Obama downplays a balanced budget and suggests his top priorities are making the American economy more equitable and providing health insurance to everyone. Both goals will require deficit spending.

What caught my eye, though, was Hart's assertion that the conservative coalition has produced "superficial religiosity." This makes no sense. What does it mean? How does Gary Hart know which expressions of faith are superficial and which are not? Does he somehow have access to peoples' souls? Has he taken confession? Does partisan affiliation determine whether one's religion is "real" or "superficial"?

Hart should go back to minding his own monkey business.

Like a lot of Celtics fans of a certain vintage, I’m stuck in permanent Larry Bird nostalgia mode. That means I tend to bore younger Celtic fans with my tedious memories. As is the case with many wizened Celtics fans, this reflex is involuntary. What I experienced as a young Celtic fan can’t be improved on. I was in the Garden when the Celtics and Larry beat the Lakers and Magic in Game 7 of the 1984 Finals. For a Celtics fan, it can’t get better than that.

But the 2007-2008 Boston Celtics were a remarkable team, a team that accomplished several things even the Bird Era Celtics never approached. This year’s Celtics went the entire season without getting blown out. Did you know that? Even when they were playing their fourth road game in five nights, the Celtics showed up, played hard and won. Even the best Bird teams submitted their share of stinkers. They had nights when they clearly had little interest being on a basketball court. This year’s Celtics elevated basketball professionalism in this town to a new level.

Allow me a brief digression - About a decade ago, I had a close friend who played for the Boston Bruins. One afternoon, the Bruins were losing a playoff series 3-1 and hosting Game 5 on their home ice. The Bruins won that game, and I walked out of the stadium with my friend and one of his teammates. As we passed the security guard, the guard said “Thursday!” in reference to the night the Bruins would host Game 7 if they could manage to win Game 6 on the road. After we were out of earshot, my friend and his teammate said to each other, “Yeah right. Thursday. Sure.”

They couldn’t wait for their season to be over. Their wives were a bit annoyed that they had won that afternoon’s game. On the day of Game 6, I had a dentist appointment and my dentist, a huge Bruins fan, expressed his optimism for that night’s game. I broke it to him gently that the Bruins not only wouldn’t win, but wouldn’t even show up. If had been paying for my tickets, I would have found the whole experience really irritating.

The men who play the games are human beings. Just like you have pouty guys at your office, professional sports teams have pouty players. And just like you may work for an organization that’s unfocused and indifferent to the quality of its work product, there are pro sports teams that are the same way. Professional athletes aren’t inherently more likely to live and die with their professional commitments than everyone at your office is.

And that’s what made this year’s Celtics team so amazing. They took every game with the complete seriousness. They showed up mentally every night. Playing a season that stretches over eight endless months, this was a remarkable achievement. These Celtics got the most out of their considerable talent - not just on some nights, but every night.

Until the playoffs, anyway. Once the postseason began, the Celtics inexplicably lost their confidence on the road. The team that had swept the Texas three-step, something that hadn’t been done in seven years, suddenly couldn’t win in Atlanta. Or Cleveland. Many of us feared that the Celtics were paper tigers. I actually wrote an ill-advised piece in these virtual pages suggesting that the Celtics just weren’t that good.

Yes, I’d like a mulligan on that one. The Celtics early playoff woes are traceable to the fact that they entered the postseason with a core that had little playoff success. Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Doc Rivers all had enormous question marks hanging over their careers as the playoffs began. For all of them, either a championship or at the very least a strong playoff run was necessary for their reputations. The pressure must have been suffocating, especially given how much this particular team wanted to win.

By the time The Finals had rolled around, the Celtics had rediscovered what had made them so special. When they fell behind by 24 in Game 4 against the Lakers, I told my brother, “It will be close – this team doesn’t get blown out.” Earlier in the series, it had become apparent that the Celtics were the much better team. In addition to having more talent, the Celtics worked much harder than the Lakers.

A friend emailed me yesterday asking why Phil Jackson seemed so indifferent to the proceedings. Even in the early 90’s when he had the best team in basketball by a country mile, Jackson always had a bit of that Zen detachment thing going for him. But in this series, he really seemed not to care. He knew by the time the series headed back to Los Angeles that he just didn’t have the horses. The Lakers didn’t have quite enough talent and not nearly enough heart.

Los Angeles was fortunate to stretch things out to six games. In Boston, we were frustrated that what should have been a sweep or at most a five game series went on so long. But it worked out perfectly. The Celtics got their reward in Game 6 where they played their best 48 minutes of the entire season. Everything came together – the energy, the desire, the skill.

For young Celtics fans, I imagine Tuesday’s clincher will assume the place in their hearts that 1986’s final game has in mine. On both nights, great teams played a perfect game when it mattered most. Tuesday night’s game was the signature of a great a champion.

Tom Wolfe brands television news reporters a gang of intellectually handicapped misfits.

"As newspapers are declining rapidly . . . I would just point out, all news today comes from newspapers. All of it. Television has never initiated a successful story in its life. When they have a big story, it's always wrong." He cited as an example Dan Rather's bogus story about George W. Bush's National Guard service and declared, "Idiots!"

White suits don't look good on the tube either.

Which is more obscene, this or that, I don't know.

It was an extraordinary weekend for Tiger Woods as he won his 14th major championship at Torrey Pines. A few random thoughts for the tiny subset of Standard readers who have been dying for some golf-blogging:

1) Tiger is the best golfer ever. Period. Jack Nicklaus, the previous holder of that title, won 18 major championships. Tiger is now within four of that mark, and you get the sense he’s not even halfway done. By the time he’s through, Tiger will shatter every record in the book. But even if he quit golf tomorrow to pursue peace in a Tibetian lamasery, Tiger would go down as the best ever. No one has ever dominated golf the way Tiger has the past decade. Really, the only issue is whether Tiger’s the most dominant athlete ever to play any sport. If you’re a golf fan and you appreciate greatness, then you’re fortunate to be living in the Tiger Woods era.

2) All of that said, Tiger can be a bit of a baby when things aren’t going his way. Of his 14 major championship victories, none of them have come when he didn’t enter the final round with the lead. Given how much better he is than his competitors, this is a shocking statistic. This weekend, Tiger was testing his surgically repaired knee. The announcers kept saluting his courage, but I kept thinking, “You know, he’s not exactly the first professional athlete to play injured.” And as injuries go, Tiger’s golfed-on scoped knee didn’t quite rank up there with Bobby Orr playing NHL hockey with a left knee that essentially had no cartilage.

Still, the fact that he was injured and wasn’t capable of being the normal Tiger Woods is the reason why this was such a defining weekend for Tiger. In an ordinary championship, Tiger is the most gifted player by a mile. His injury brought him back to the pack in that regard. And yet he still found a way to win.

3) (WARNING – GOLF ARCHITECTURE WONKISHNESS FOLLOWS. FEEL FREE TO SKIP DOWN TO #4) The venue for the championship, Torrey Pines in San Diego, is not a great golf course. Indeed, it’s downright mediocre. You have to marvel at the dearth of architectural imagination that designed an ocean-side golf course and yet featured an unbelievably dinky man-made water hazard on the 18th hole. Anyway, that’s how they built courses in the mid-20th century.

Still, Torrey Pines hosted a great championship, primarily because the course allowed for birdies. The 18th hole, a short par 5, yielded birdie and eagle opportunities. The same was true of 14, a 277 yard par 4 that the pros could reach with their tee shots. Many modern courses are built with the specific intention of being a non-stop grind that will pound the golfer into submission. The weekend at Torrey Pines showed that fun also has a place in golf course design.

4) Jack Nicklaus has frequently lamented over the years that no one ever plays well when they face off against Tiger. Nicklaus, of course, had no such luck – champions like Tom Watson and Lee Trevino not only played well against Nicklaus but routinely beat him.

If Nicklaus wants to be fair (which I doubt), he could acknowledge that Tiger deserves much of the credit for turning his opponents into jelly. It’s a pretty tall order when you’re playing someone who can not only hit the ball like no one else in history but is also the best putter the game has ever seen. If Nicklaus took the time to become the putter that Tiger is, Tiger would have to wait another decade to assault his records.

Anyway, Jack must have been moderately happy yesterday because the unheralded Rocco Mediate played great golf facing Tiger. (I kept telling my wife over the weekend that Rocco was a really fine player in the early 90’s before his back went blooey.) Rocco seems like the archetype of the kind of guy who does well against Tiger. Regardless of who he’s playing against, Rocco plays his own game. He stays within himself, and doesn’t get rattled because the other guy is hitting the ball farther.

It’s interesting that none of the young guns like Adam Scott or Sergio Garcia have been able to properly function against Tiger, but a series of grinders who are much more self-made talents – Bob May, Rich Beem, Chris DeMarco, now Rocco – have acquitted themselves rather well. There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.

In this week’s print issue of the Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz brought a much-deserved axe to the execrable film adaptation of the TV series "Sex and the City.” I don’t want to repeat what he said, but I do have some further barbs of criticism to hurl at the film.

First of all, you might be wondering what I was doing at a cinema watching “Sex and the City.” Suffice to say, there are certain things that a husband of a certain age willingly does to ensure domestic tranquility. Besides, and I admit this with some trepidation, I sort of enjoyed the TV series. The episode where Samantha took a new lover, Carrie used a lot of puns, Miranda was off-puttingly brittle and Charlotte endearingly clueless especially stood out. Even though I put up a stink as we trundled off to the cinema, I secretly wasn’t all that unhappy to see the movie. (Don’t tell my wife – as things stand now, I get to choose the next one.)

Even though I liked the show, I never understood why it sparked such passion among its fans. The characters were to varying degrees wretched people. Their defining characteristic was their narcissism.

That doesn’t mean the show failed to entertain. After all, the brood of gangsters and sociopaths that populated “The Sopranos” were a lot worse than the four horsewomen of the Metropolis. But I never could understand why "Sex and the City" fans loved the characters. Writing today, I find it somewhat distressing that 20-something girls were going out in vaguely feral packs to see the movie this weekend.

I think part of the reason why those who didn’t know better fell in love with the characters is that “Sex and the City” wimped out. “The Sopranos” will go down as the one of the greatest artistic achievements of the past 50 years because of its auteur’s brutal honesty. David Chase knew he was making a show about murderers, and he wouldn’t let the viewer love them. Many of the show’s viewers found “The Sopranos” frustrating because David Chase didn’t let Tony Soprano become a beloved figure like Vito Corleone. Tony was a sociopath and a killer, and Chase never shied away from that reality. For the viewers who really appreciated the show, Chase’s fidelity to this truth is precisely what made his show so brilliant.

“Sex and the City” showed four women who enabled each other to perpetually rattle along in a state of dysfunction. And yet by focusing to such an extent on their fashion sense and their sexiness, the show obscured its characters’ ugliness and glorified their pathologies. “Sex and the City” made it easy to love characters who were anything but lovable.

Ultimately, both the show and the movie ignored Truth in order to better focus on some really snappy outfits. Of course, the truth would have made the proceedings rather unpleasant (which much of the movie was, anyway). Supreme narcissists don’t have happy endings and their stories are sad ones, regardless of how fashionably they may dress.

While Americans remembered the servicemen and women who gave their lives for their country, a couple of people who wear make-up and costumes for a living marked Memorial Day weekend a little differently.

Benicio del Toro won the best actor prize at Cannes as the star of Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half hour biopic Che. For those who know Che Guevara only as a t-shirt icon, perhaps this would be a good time to for a Cliff Notes’ version of Hollywood’s favorite revolutionary. Via Slate:

Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination.

That’s quite a resume to live up to, so Del Toro’s acceptance speech was appropriately modest: “I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara.” (Fun fact: Benicio del Toro translates as Benny the Bull. Make your own joke.)

Meanwhile, in America, Jessica Lange gave the commencement speech at Sarah Lawrence College. Instead of encouraging the students to get a good job and make money, Ms. Lange took another tack:

"We are living in an America that, in the last seven and a half years, has waged an unnecessary war, established prison camps, condoned torture, employed corporate armies, eliminated the right of habeas corpus, practiced extraordinary rendition, and believe me, this is only a partial list," said Lange, who was most recently seen in 1982's Tootsie

Any guesses as to whether this scenario would bother her under a President Che?

With the denouement of Spygate mercifully near, a fascinating piece appeared on an ESPN chat board. Written by a guy styling himself “NEInsider,” it ostensibly gave the Patriots’ side of the story. A sample:

We were wrong and made a mistake. We as an organization failed and it will never happen again…

Here are the simple facts I know about Spygate and WalkthruGate:

1. We taped defensive signals and offensive formation signals and we still have video of other teams taping us. They are of little value since no team uses the same signals even from game to game, quarter to quarter, and sometimes from series to series. We do it to FORCE the opposition to stay on their toes and change signals hoping they mix up signals and have a bad play that results in a big play for us. There are no offensive signals only formation signals which are useless and they were taped at the same time as offensive signals and WERE possibly even on the Spygate tape. Any claims are baseless on this…

3. We did not want the tapes destroyed. We preferred they be released since they basically proved we did nothing since some of the tapes destroyed were processed tapes that prove there was little value to us other than aggravating the other team . Several showed coaches waving to our videographer, several other with obscene gestures, coaches laughing at us, and some hot cheerleader video for the enjoyment of those given the boring job of processing video that had zero intrinsic value.

Interestingly, the word in the Boston sports media last night was that after Matt Walsh has his moment in the sun today, the Patriots would hit back and begin telling their side of the story. Obviously, after a year of mea culpas, the Patriots have begun talking to the media and are readying themselves to put this matter in perspective.

And then there was this shot across the commissioner’s bow:

5. Goodell has serious issues within the NFL ownership. He has not made friends with his inability to keep his mouth shut before issues are resolved within the framework of the NFL structure. The Niners organization is livid at him for the sanction they received over free agent contact since they never initiated the contact and in this case everyone really does it.

6. The Kraft family was a Goodell supporter and will never openly criticize him but they are livid over the way Spygate was handled and the fact Goodell hung them out as "Cheaters" when he absolutely knew it never helped during a game and then on national TV aknowledged frivilous accusations like phone tampering etc. when he stated more punishment would be added if necessary instead of doing the right thing and stating such claims were baseless without proof since he knew we could never tamper with phones since we never knew what system or what frequency was availbale to us until game time. A little clue on this one. Not having Robert and Jonathon Kraft on your side makes job security an issue since they are the deal makers and the ownership most willing to compromise to help the smaller market teams. In other words they have lots of friends in the NFL ownership circle.

Of course, this chat board post could have been written by a psychotic living in his parents’ basement. Even so, every word in it rings true to me, especially the part about Goodell really making a misstep in having irritated the wrong guys.

In a short while, Goodell will appear before the media, fresh from being enlightened by Matt Walsh. Hopefully that press conference will end the official part of this affair, and the Patriots will finally be able to make their case.

Andrew Sullivan calls our attention to this essay by John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell which attempts to view our current politics through the prism of “The Godfather.” While this is of course a noble exercise since “The Godfather” can shed light on all areas of human endeavor, the authors are sadly clueless.

In the authors’ scheme, Tom Hagen “shares a number of philosophical similarities with the liberal institutionalism that dominates the foreign-policy outlook of today’s Democratic Party.” (See? Liberals can make even “The Godfather” boring!) Firebrand Sonny Corleone, meanwhile, is the neocon: “One can imagine that Sonny’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach would meet with the firm approval of arch-neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen, given their stance on how to deal with Iran.”

Michael Corleone is of course the ideal. The authors write, “In today’s foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist.” Left unsaid is who represents Fredo. I’m guessing Howard Dean. I’m also guessing that Moe Green is Bill Clinton, lecturing Obama on how he was making his bones while Obama was dating cheerleaders and later bragging to Obama how he had cut a deal with the super delegates, only to have things end rather poorly for him.

You don’t have to parse the essay very closely to discern the authors’ political biases. The crack at the neocons is especially risible. Far from rashly shooting first and asking questions later, people like Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen have spent lifetimes studying foreign affairs. One can disagree with their approach and their conclusions, but to argue that foreign policy for them is anything other than just business and nothing personal is ludicrous. Sonny responded to all provocations viscerally, a well known habit that made the fatal tollbooth ambush of him a reality. Neocons tend to gravitate to a more cerebral decision making process.

Still more ludicrous is lumping in Michael Corleone with the realists. Realists are guys like Warren Christopher, fellows who are forever constricting the definition of what can and what cannot be done. Can you imagine Warren Christopher pining for a meeting with the Turk and Captain McCluskey where he would go into the men’s room, find a hidden gun and then use said gun to – bada-bing! – blow the men’s brains all over his nice Ivy League suit? Even the trigger happy family neocon (Sonny) found that plan ridiculous at first. Or can you imagine Warren Christopher coming up with a plan so audacious that he would settle Christopher family business with all five of New York’s families on one blood-splattered Sunday morning so he could then peaceably consolidate power on the far more lucrative playing fields of Vegas?

In his blog post on the matter, Andrew Sullivan speculates, “I don't know whether Obama fits more the ‘liberal institutionalist’ role or the realist, more Tom or Michael. I'm hoping for a Niebuhrian fusion (Ed. Note – There they go making “The Godfather" boring again!), with the emphasis on Michael's cunning. As I said: hoping.”

Obama acting decisively and cunningly like Michael Corleone? Ah yes, there it is in bright blogging lights – the audacity of hope.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Boston Bruins had a player named Randy Burridge who became emblematic of the franchise. Burridge always gave the proverbial 110 percent, and was a good little player. Problem was, he did much better in the regular season than he did in the playoffs. Over the course of his career, he scored a goal once every 3.5 games in the regular season, but only once every six games in the playoffs.

The drop-off in performance wasn't really Burridge's fault. While other players loafed through hockey's endless regular season, Burridge hustled every night. But in the playoffs, more talented players neutralized Burridge's effort because everyone tries hard in the postseason.

Over time, I came to believe that the Bruins' desire for collecting self-motivated muckers like Burridge who always gave their all ruined the franchise. The team's front office minimized the value of talent, and that made them vulnerable in the playoffs. Year after year, management refused to learn that talent was the ultimate difference maker, since everyone tries when the games matter most. To memorialize the Bruins' obsession with effort and lack of concern with talent, I even gave this peculiar disease a diagnosis--Randy Burridge Syndrome.

I hate to say it, and I pray that I’m wrong, but I think I may be seeing a touch of Randy Burridge Syndrome in this year's Boston Celtics. When the Celtics signed Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen in the off-season, I wasn't sold. But I underestimated what a special player Garnett is.

Garnett's a magnificent talent--everyone who follows basketball knows that. But what I don't think you can understand until you watch him play on a day in/day out basis is what a fanatical competitor he is. Garnett approaches every game as if it means everything. Basketball aficionados rightly lauded Larry Bird's hungry-hearted efforts, but take it from a guy who saw most of the games in Bird's career--his intensity level was nothing like Garnett's.

Throughout this past season, the Celtics fed off Garnett's intensity and brought a unique level of commitment to each game. The Celtics showed up every night, and that's an enormous rarity in professional sports where the regular seasons are endless. As evidence of their daily effort, the Celtics went the entire season without getting blown out. I think they lost by double digits only once. Again, trust me--it wasn't like this with the Bird teams. There were games (like say the third game on the road in four days) that Bird and his teammates would play indifferently and get slaughtered.

My concern with this year's Celtics, admittedly based on a small sample of only five playoff games, is that they won't react well when their intensity is finally matched. In their series with the Atlanta Hawks, the Celtics have played two of their worst games of the season. The fact that the younger, more athletic Hawks equaled the Celtics' effort in those games seemed to bewilder the Celtics. The Celtics will probably get by the Hawks, but more talented teams that are ready to finally start trying lay in wait.

The good news for the Celtics as they try to bring home their 17th championship banner is that they still may be the most talented team in the league. The Randy Burridge Syndrome Bruins never had such luck. The bad news for the Celtics is that the regular season, when the Celtics looked like the best team in the league by some margin, was something of a mirage. The Celtics may be a bit better than everyone else, but if they are the best team in the league, it isn't by much.

How the Celtics respond to that reality will determine how successful they are in the playoffs.

And here I thought it was Pershing Missiles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, not boring soap operas.

After a long hip parade of unironic countercultural icons such as Luke of "Cool Hand Luke" and Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Dallas" created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love: an establishment tycoon who's always controlling politicians, cheating on his boozy wife and scheming against his own stubbornly loyal family. But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu ("Dallas, you merciless universe!" ran the French lyrics added to the wordless theme song), viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.

Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie "The Grapes of Wrath" in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies' westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies -- and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars. "Dallas" functioned similarly.

Next up: unifying the Korean Penisula with The Hills.

Last night marked American Idol's second annual installment of “Idol Gives Back,” an episode of the wildly popular talent competition in which Hollywood mobilizes to raise money for a plethora of noble causes. Virtually everyone who is someone or was someone made an appearance –entertainment luminaries like Bono, Brad Pitt and Reese Witherspoon fell into the former category. Fossilized former funnyman Robin Williams, doing the same shtick that was tired fifteen years ago, fell into the latter, less desirable category.

The show consisted mostly of celebrities traveling around the globe to see the world's most impoverished people, and then urging the viewers to give money so that we might ease their suffering. Miley Cyrus and her father Billy Ray Cyrus journeyed to a patch of Appalachia reminiscent of "Deliverance" to visit with what had to be America's poorest and most forlorn family. Young Miley pronounced the parents "extraordinary" in a moment of pitch perfect Hollywood condescension. Personally, I would have held off on awarding them “extraordinariness” until they explained why they had all that garbage on their front lawn. Young rockers Daughtry journeyed to Uganda where things are really bad, yet thoughtfully lightened the load of the suffering natives by pleasuring them with a song.

Raising money for those in need is always a fine thing, and yet the tone of last night’s show was somehow wrong. There are some entertainers who really commit to a cause. Bono and Brad Pitt from last night's show fall into that category. So do guys we particularly admire like John Ondrasik and Gary Sinise, who have quietly devoted considerable time and energy to supporting and entertaining our troops. With minimal fanfare, Sinise has made dozens of trips for the USO in recent years.

The problem with last night's show is that it reflected maximal fanfare mixed with minimal involvement. The celebrities swooped down on an area of misery, and then left as quickly as they came. You couldn't help but get the sense that many of the celebrities participated in the festivities primarily to get their mugs before American Idol's tens of millions of viewers. And that led to the disquieting inference that the world's most fortunate people were exploiting the world's least fortunate people for a photo-op.

More than anything else, the evening was about entertainment community figures engaging in unseemly self-congratulations for their nobility in caring about the poor. Worse still, the self-congratulations was misplaced. While the evening was called “Idol Gives Back,” the giving in question wasn’t being done by “Idol” but rather by the many parties that Idol had shaken down. Idol got Gordon Brown to promise $200 million worth of mosquito netting for Africa. And, of course, Idol expected its viewers to give until it hurt.

Truly, it's hard to see exactly what American Idol actually gives when it purportedly “gives back.” With last night’s extravaganza, the show expanded its brand, extended its reach and solidified its standing at the top of the Hollywood heap. Near as I could tell, Fox sold advertising for the evening, and didn't funnel the advertising revenue to either Uganda or Appalachia. In other words, just as was the case on Tuesday's ordinary episode of American Idol, Idol and its partners were turning a profit in a business as usual fashion as regards the bottom line.

It's nice that American Idol can do well and do good at the same time. But the self congratulations and the dilletantism still grate, even more than one of Robin Williams's "comedy" routines. “Giving back” is I guess particularly easy when you tap others to do the giving.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Katie Couric is on her way out at CBS. After two years of Couric compiling “record-low ratings" and with her ratings currently having a trend line that resembles a ski-slope, CBS will finally cry uncle and part ways with its $15 million/yr. news reading starlet.

I would imagine that few readers of this site watch any of the network newscasts. If you gather news and opinion on the internet, you're by definition a high end news gatherer, and the networks direct their broadcasts at low end news gatherers. Much of the 22 minutes of “news” they disseminate each night really isn't news at all but rather "features" aimed at delivering their viewers from problems that purportedly bedevil them. For instance, significant portions of a given broadcast will instruct the viewer how to avoid a predatory mortgage or how to finally gain relief from his lower back pain. In other words, if you actually want to get the news and you're watching a network newscast, you've come to the wrong place.

Nevertheless, it's worth noting that more people watch Katie Couric each night than the king of cable, Bill O’Reilly. Much more. While the networks' nightly newscasts are ghostly anachronisms that harken back to the era when we had three real channels to choose from, their evening news shows still garner a lot of eyeballs – a total of well over 20 million between the three of them. But that number will continue to shrink as Americans gather the news they want in more efficient ways.

CBS, however ineptly, gamely tried to reinvent the nightly news formula to remain relevant in a new media era. How was the network to know that Couric's trademark perkiness and strange fireside interviews would repel viewers rather than attract them? What CBS's Couric fiasco most ably demonstrates is that the networks don't have the first clue what to do with the many eyeballs that Walter Cronkite (not to mention an oligopoly) bequeathed them. Maybe producing an actual news show could pause the decline, but the network nightly newscast's slide into irrelevance remains inexorable and inevitable.

Reports earlier this month that U.S. school kids didn’t know squat had me shrieking O tempora! O mores!

Half of high-school students could not say what the Renaissance was.

Fewer than half can place the Civil War in the half-century 1850-1900.

But I’m feeling not so bad today, because we learn our comrades across the pond don’t know anything either:

Nearly half of the UK population does not know what the Magna Carta is, according to a YouGov poll.

The survey commissioned by the British Library found 45 per cent of the 2,000 people questioned had no knowledge of the English charter.

And only 32 per cent knew that it set written limits on the authority of the monarch.

Since the Brits are really, really smart, or at least sound that way, the world can’t be all bad, right?

It you haven't seen this already, you will enjoy it very much. Guaranteed, or your money back! Careful about spraying coffee on your monitor if that kind of thing gets you in trouble at your place of work.

Now that Eliot Spitzer's reign of error has mercifully ended, what can a responsible analyst do but irresponsibly speculate about Spitzer's future? The most common opinion is that we won't have Eliot Spitzer to kick around anymore. Spitzer will retire to private life, accept employment at some white-shoe law firm and begin making a couple of million dollars a year defending the kind of people he used to so vigorously prosecute.

I don't think this scenario adds up. First of all, Spitzer's family has money. Scratch that – Spitzer's family has MONEY. His father is said to have a net worth in the mid-nine-figure range. What's more, Spitzer is a rapaciously ambitious guy. Remember, this is a fellow who without remorse persecuted innocent people to further his ambitions. Such a man isn’t going to abandon his dreams just because he had a rough week. He's more likely to focus every fiber of his being on a comeback, however implausible such a thing may seem at this hour.

So how does Eliot Spitzer come back? It’s easy! He'll drop from the radar for a bit, but soon enough he'll be popping up on Oprah's couch lamenting the damage he did and how he let his addiction ruin not just his life, but harm the people he loved the most (most especially himself). Spitzer will doggedly stay on message. He'll use the terms "addiction" and "disease" with obnoxious frequency.

In a separate theatre of operations, Spitzer will devote his life's work to righting his previous wrongs. I bet he'll suddenly discover a passion for eradicating the human slave trade, something the left is oddly indifferent to (but shouldn't be) and relates more than tangentially to the prostitution trade. Spitzer's wealth, not to mention his ruthlessness, would actually be of great service if he decided to focus his energies on this scourge.

After a couple of years of taking trips to Africa and posing for photo-ops with former slaves that he personally delivered from bondage, the media will discover what a wonderful guy the new, humble Eliot Spitzer is. Meanwhile, Spitzer will publish a book that unequivocally expresses his contrition but reminds the reader frequently that an awful disease held him in its grasp.

Some time around 2012, there will be a semi-vulnerable NY Republican congressman who lacks a serious opponent. A former celebrity governor who's willing to toss several million of his own dollars into the race will interest New York's Democratic party. And Eliot Spitzer will be back in the game.

As I mentioned yesterday, Matt Stoller of OpenLeft.com is one of the leading lights of the progressive blogosphere. It is thus with a measure of sadness that I must make note of a post Stoller made this morning. Under the headline “Is the Bush Administration Going After Eliot Spitzer?,” Stoller darkly notes, “Spitzer is clearly one figure willing to stand up to Bush.”

I have to confess to feeling disappointed, nay outraged, by this ludicrous post. This is worst than “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” redux. It confirms the nagging fear that even the most intelligent progressives see the boogieman Bush hiding in virtually every closet.

As intimated, I can't help but take this post personally. Part of my job at the Weekly Standard is to satirize and parody the excesses of the angry left. How am I supposed to satirize these people if they're determined to so thoroughly satirize themselves?

A crusading career prosecutor who ostentatiously railed against prostitution rings in the past gets caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, and the left wing blogosphere instinctively gets angry with Bush. You couldn't make such things up.

The intertubes never forget. Below is one of Eliot Spitzer's campaign ads from the last campaign cycle.

Ken Langone was one of the lions of Wall Street who had the misfortune of having his reputation stand in the way of Eliot Spitzer's ambitions. Last night, CNBC's cameras caught up with Langone, and he wasn't shy. The best part came when he responded to the question, "What’s next for Eliot Spitzer?"

"You know, we all have our own private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anyone else's."

Click here to watch the entire three minute interview. (Readers with a known allergy to Schadenfreude are strongly cautioned against following the link.)

A few weeks ago, Entertainment Weekly compiled a list of the "50 Smartest People in Hollywood." Checking in at number five was Will Smith, the star of the current hit "I Am Legend." Smith was the highest ranked performer on the list, edging out the sixth ranked Meryl Streep. After Streep, you had to go all the way down to thirteen to find another purported Hollywood brainiac who does their work in front of the cameras. (That would be Northern Kentucky University dropout George Clooney, in case you were wondering.)

Smith must feel some pressure now that Entertainment Weekly has crowned him the smartest actor in Hollywood. Thus, he has taken to giving pronouncements on historical matters while he expands on his philosophy of seeing the good in everyone.

“Even Hitler didn't wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.’ Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.”

What a canny student of humanity! It’s quite a comfort that the Hollywood community has so forcefully weighed in on all matters regarding the war with radical Islam. Those actors sure have a lot to offer.

Assuming this comment reaches a wide audience, Smith will have to submit to extensive sensitivity training as well as a highly public display of cross cultural rehabilitation. Abe Foxman, please call your office after sundown.

What in the name of Katharine Graham has happened to Beltway high society? According to this New York Times article, DC swells are throwing parties where they force their guests to consume food that hails from--you better sit down--Costco.

Actually, the Times story displays a wonderful ignorance regarding Costco and what it brings to the table, as it were. As most people know, Costco is a wholesale shopping “club.” Few people know, however, what “club” means in this context.

If you pay Costco's membership dues, you get to buy stuff "at cost;" Costco's profits are limited to its membership dues. In other words, the company doesn’t make any profit on the products it sells. This business model requires an unusual amount of discipline. Markups are limited to cover only operating expenses. Costco, unlike retail stores, doesn't sell its products at the highest price the market will bear. This is the main reason why you can find some amazing bargains there.

Costco's business model has attracted consumers from every end of the economic spectrum. The chain's constituency is not limited to put-upon housefraus looking to save a few bucks on paper towels or seeking a great price on sixteen pounds of nutmeg. Value appeals to everyone. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Costco's former CFO for a book project I was contemplating, and he glowed when he spoke of the upscale demographics of Costco's clientèle. Costco also sells some very pricey products; it's currently the world’s largest diamond dealer.

So what of these DC parties where Costco is supplying the grub? Costco offers high quality. You can go to a Costco butcher and get Niman Ranch prime beef, just like the best stuff that better butcher shops carry. (The best butchers carry dry-aged prime beef, but that’s for special occasions.) For what it's worth, you can't get prime beef at most Whole Foods markets.

None of this means that the DC party-makers doing their prep work at Costco will be springing for the good stuff. Nevertheless, neocon overlord Richard Perle manages to find some nice product there. “I just bought chanterelles there the other day,” Perle stated, “and they often have fresh shiitake mushrooms.”

But as we all know, when the Grey Lady latches onto a narrative it sticks with it, regardless of what the facts show:

Catering by Costco is a style statement, like drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

“Reverse chic is a very powerful phenomenon in status-oriented circles,” said David Kamp, the author of “The United States of Arugula” (Broadway, 2006), a book about the American fine-food revolution. “I think Costco is the same thing. It gets discovered.”

Chanterelles indicate reverse chic? Who knew?

For those wondering why Democrats in Congress get such terrible grades in Gallup's latest polling, it might be because of moves like this one:

House and Senate Democrats have inserted at least 18 previously undisclosed earmarks into the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies spending bill totaling more than $24 million, while taking steps to limit access to key budget documents prepared for appropriators by federal agencies.

Republicans wasted little time in attacking the new spending and accusing Democrats of hypocrisy. “The new majority just doesn’t seem to get it. They came to power by criticizing Republican abuses, and were justified in doing so. But now they are committing the same abuses,” Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), said in a statement...

But in addition to new earmarks, Democrats again appear to be targeting reforms to the appropriations process backed by Senate conservatives that passed earlier this year. The bill includes language prohibiting federal agencies from providing their “budget justifications” to any committees in Congress other than the appropriations committees. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a longtime critic of the appropriations process, earlier had cut a deal with the Office of Management and Budget to begin providing those budget justification documents to the public since, unlike the president’s yearly budget submission, the justifications provide a detailed breakdown of the specific projects that will receive federal funding.

It's stunning that Congressional leaders would propose a new law to block Congress and the public from simply reviewing the details of the federal budget. The Appropriations Committee rewrites the president's proposed budget as a matter of course, but now they are attempting to head off questions about their spending decision by ensuring that only appropriators know the details of the president's proposal. The arrogance of the move is mind-blowing.

So much for transparency and openness in government.

David Freddoso has more on this at the Corner.

We've chronicled the shift in recent months in the attitude among the netroots towards moderate and conservative Democrats. Just a few months ago, the paramount goal of the left was achieving Congressional majorities--even if it meant backing Democrats who occasionally voted with the president. But the impotence of the Democratic majority seems to have changed everything. Now the netroots have turned their fire on the 'Bush Dogs' (which we first wrote about here).

The latest news to warm the heart of NRCC Chair Tom Cole is this item from OpenLeft:

As difficult as it is to believe, there are even varying degrees of loyalty to Bush within the 41 Bush Dogs. The following six Democrats not only voted for a blank check on Iraq, not only voted to continue warrant-less government spying on American citizens through FISA, but also voted against S-Chip...

At this point, if you favor an endless Iraq war, warrant-less spying on American citizens, and denying poor kids health care, why on earth is someone a Democrat? Let me rephrase that, since this goes beyond partisan self-identification: how can you do those three things and sleep at night? Funding an open-ended occupation of a foreign country that has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, while spying on those within your own country who oppose that war, and then denying health care to poor children seems like a pretty good definition of not only a bad Democrat, but simply a bad person. I don't typically utilize moralistic language of this sort, but that is a pretty heinous combination of votes for anyone to take, Republican or Democrat. Oh, and all three of those positions run contrary to the constituents of these districts, too.

If primary challenges were to appear against any of these Democrats, I would support them...

All six of the representatives that Bowers identifies represent Republican districts. One has a Republican edge of 16 percentage points! While few are regarded as top-tier races in 2008, that's only because the members are viewed as fitting their conservative districts quite well. For a Democrat to encourage a primary from the left is to say--as Bowers essentially does--that it doesn't matter whether the district is held by a Republican or a Democrat.

That is a perfectly legitimate point of view--one mirrored at times on the right. But while it's understandable, it's a shortcut to minority status. I'm reminded of one of Professor Larry Sabato's signs that a party was about to lose majority status:

Democrats seemed capable of just about one thing in 1994: hemorrhaging seats in Congress. Powerful Illinois Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D) blew it in a district typically safe for his party after his indictment in a check kiting scandal, Nevada Rep. James Bilbray (D) was felled after it was revealed days before the election that his aide stood to profit millions from lands legislation he had sponsored, and Democrats frittered away more open seats than we care to count by clumsily nominating the weaker (and typically the more liberal) of two candidates in primaries. After all the wreckage had been surveyed, Democrats had lost a grand total of 54 seats, more than enough to forfeit their House majority.

From the perspective of one month out from Election Day, it's difficult to imagine how Republicans could suffer losses in a range anywhere near what Democrats suffered twelve years ago. But it's still a familiar picture: this year, the GOP has been giving away seats in Congress as if they were extra pairs of upper-deck Washington Nationals tickets.

If Bowers and other activists are serious about trying to knock off conservative Democrats in conservative districts, and replacing them with sure-fire losers in the general election, they'll get no argument from here. Right now many Democrats think that they have seats to burn in 2008. But in politics, trends can turn on a dime. The seats that activists give away today, they may wish they had back tomorrow.

The Land of Lincoln book tour comes to San Francisco tonight, when the book's author, WEEKLY STANDARD senior editor Andrew Ferguson, is set to discuss the book and sign copies at 6:00 PM at the Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St.

In case your not familiar with the book, here's a little bit about it from the Scrapbook:

THE SCRAPBOOK is feeling like a proud papa these days--or maybe a doting uncle. That's because our friend and colleague Andrew Ferguson has just published Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America (Grove/Atlantic, $24), and in THE SCRAPBOOK's considered opinion, if there's one book every STANDARD reader must devour this summer, it's Land of Lincoln.

Why do we say this? First, WEEKLY STANDARD readers already know Andy's hallmarks. He's a writer of exceptional skill, incapable of producing a dull sentence. He carries wisdom, erudition, and startling insight with a lightness and finesse that must be read to be believed. There's his understated wit, discerning eye, and instinct for the absurd. His reporter's antennae are exceptionally well-tuned; Andy never fails to capture the felicitous detail. And all these talents are on display in Land of Lincoln.

So what, you ask, another Lincoln book? To which we reply: This is not just any Lincoln book. Like many Americans, Andy Ferguson (born and raised in Illinois) grew up with a fascination for the sixteenth president, whose life and death are so central to the story of America. But what intrigues him about Lincoln is not so much the familiar facts--the log cabin birthplace, the Gettysburg Address, the homely face and mordant jokes--as the shadow Lincoln casts over his countrymen. Since the assassination at Ford's Theatre in 1865, Lincoln's drama has been cast and recast, the essentials of his life have been plumbed and reinvented, the meaning of Lincoln--to politics, history, folklore, psychology--has evolved with every succeeding generation.

So Andy embarks on a road trip in search of Lincoln's America. Or America's Lincoln. We meet collectors who accumulate sacred relics, scholars who try to make Lincoln "relevant," Abe Lincoln impersonators, management gurus, and a galaxy of people whose vision of Lincoln gives meaning to their lives.

Land of Lincoln is about a journalist's quest, but it's also a matchless portrait of our times, certain places, the national character (both hilarious and poignant), the complex life of a deceptively simple man, and the meeting of the present and past in our country. THE SCRAPBOOK cannot think of a better introduction to the great subject of Abraham Lincoln, or a funnier, more trenchant and affecting postcard from America.

Click here to see the full book tour schedule, and click here to purchase your very own copy.

The boss's latest column for Time is up:

About three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, think the country is on the wrong track. About two-thirds of the public disapprove of the job performance of President Bush, and an even higher number disdain Congress. The media are excited about the prospect of a wealthy businessman running for President as an independent who could tap into broad public disgruntlement with the partisan politicians in Washington.

2007? Yes. But also 1992. The main difference between the two situations is that Michael Bloomberg is richer--and saner--than Ross Perot. But one similarity might be this: the American people were wrong then and may be wrong now.

Go read the whole thing to find out why "despite the gloom and doom from critics left and right (including, occasionally, me), the world seems to present the usual mixed bag of difficult problems and heartening developments."

A nice piece from TWS contributor Martin Morse Wooster appeared in yesterday's TCS Daily, seems very appropriate for the holiday.

BALTIMORE—It's a lovely early summer day in the Chesapeake Bay, and everyone with a boat knows it's time to grab the bathing suits and some crabs and head for the water. The Bay is jammed with sailboats, speedboats, and other pleasure craft.

But the fun-seekers crowding the waters are about to see something few Americans in this century have seen. Two deadly Japanese bombers, a Zero and an Aichi D3A, are coming in from the southeast.

The Zeroes approach menacingly, their lime-green fuselages glistening in the bright summer sun. They dive and swoop towards the water, coming closer, ever closer, getting ready to unleash their payload.

Luckily, the Americans have protection. One lone ship stands between the Zeroes and downtown Baltimore. It fires its 20-caliber machine guns towards the Zeroes, the weapons swooping clockwise as the Japanese planes head west. Finally, three American bombers show up: a P51D Mustang, a P-40E Warhawk, and a lumbering B-25J Mitchell bomber.

American firepower saves the day. The Japanese planes belch white smoke as they slink off to their eastern base.

Go read the rest, and enjoy the barbecue.

The good folks over at the New York Times finally got around to taking a look at Indoctrinate U in the education section yesterday. As we might have expected, the Times’s take on the film was less than flattering--indeed, the author seems to use Evan Coyne Maloney’s film as little more than an introductory device to tell us how few restrictions are placed on free speech on campus.

Maloney has done a fine job dismantling the Times piece, which went so far as to praise university administrators for reopening newspapers they'd previously shut-down for what they perceived as objectionable political content:

Oddly, one of the examples cited in the article (but not the film) was the case of a student paper published by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent and Conservative Student Alliance. The paper was de-funded and shut down for a year after publishing a piece criticizing the school’s funding of special “social centers” for minority and gay students. But because the paper was eventually allowed to start publishing again--the following year--the Vassar case is presented as one in which “[u]ltimately, free speech was respected.”

Sorry, but shutting down a paper for a year is not a benign event, and it is certainly not one in which we can say “free speech was respected.” If Homeland Security shut down the Times for a year after exposing ways that we track terrorist financing, I’m sure they’d understand my position on this.

I’ve already written up my own thoughts on the film, so I won’t go into it any more here. But it is useful to contrast the treatment this documentary received with that of another controversial flick making the rounds: Sicko. A.O. Scott reviewed the new Michael Moore picture for the Times in a modestly celebratory manner. While Maloney’s film is dismissed as “just a pastiche of notorious events,” Moore’s is praised for making an “argument [that] is illustrated with anecdotes and statistics--terrible stories about Americans denied medical care or forced into bankruptcy to pay for it; grim actuarial data about life expectancy and infant mortality; damning tallies of dollars donated to political campaigns.”

Those interested in seeing some other “anecdotes and statistics” that argue America’s health care “crisis” is overblown and that socialized medicine is dangerous to your health can check out Free Market Cure, a project brought to us by one of the primary financiers of Indoctrinate U, Stuart Browning.

Dean Barnett writes the definitive post on today's Times poll on the attitudes of Americans aged 17-29. Barnett notes that the poll was cosponsored "by that most reputable of news agencies," MTV, and then informs readers that he will analyze the numbers himself, "unguided by Adam [Nagourney's] insights."

Once again, I haven’t read Nagourney’s coverage, but I assume his lead derives from the results to this tendentious question:

50. Which do you think would be better for the country: 1. Having one health insurance program covering all Americans that would be administered by the government and paid for by taxpayers, OR 2. Keeping the current system where many people get their insurance from private employers and some have no insurance.

62% of the kids would opt for the socialist experiment of a single payer system. In a way, I guess this is good. I think it was Churchill who said “If you’re not a communist when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re still a communist when you’re old, you have no brain.” Good to see the kids have their hearts in the right place, even if the phrasing of the question drove them to that particular place.

What I found really interesting about the poll was Question 62. The question in question asked, “As a result of the United States' military action against Iraq, do you think the United States is more safe from terrorism, less safe from terrorism, or hasn't it made any difference?”

31% said “more safe”, 19% said “less safe”, 47% said “no difference” and 2% said “don’t know.” All I can say is, “Huh?” After being pounded over their young heads for half a decade that Iraq has been a fiasco on every level, the kids lean in the direction that it has made us more safe? Maybe the headline to this poll should be, “Old media’s influence increasingly marginalized.”

Go read the whole thing--it doesn't get better than Barnett writing on "the self-esteem generation."

WWS pal Tim Slagle writes in with word on Al Gore's epic global warming concert series, which is to feature musical performances from all seven continents broadcast live on July 7. Unfortunately, it seems that the concert that is to take place on Antarctica will not quite have the star-power that Gore had sought:

Nunatuk warms up the crowd, but they may need more lighting
for the show--the sun never rises at the camp in July.

According to Linda Capper, representative for the British Antarctic Survey, the Antarctic leg of the Live Earth Show will not be a “Major Concert” as Al Gore once promised. In fact according to Linda: "We have a house band--five of our science team. They are very good indie rock-folk fusion.”

The Rothera Research Station is under British jurisdiction, and home to only 22 winter residents. July 7th is mid winter down there and it is completely inaccessible by plane or boat. But that didn’t deter the Oscar winning star of An Inconvenient Truth. Back in February, Gore’s office contacted the BAS requesting a flight into Rothera. The questioned Linda “about the possibility to fly an artiste [no-one specific] into to the research station in July.” When Al Gore was informed that July is winter in Antarctica, and completely inaccessible, Linda Capper suggested letting the scientists play. She actually sent a cameraman down to Rothera in March on one of the last flights of the season, to film a video of the band.

The band is called Nunatak, which is a Greenlandic word for an exposed summit of a ridge mountain or peak not covered with snow. As for audience, according to Linda: The remaining 17 [residents] will be the audience on location.

So Gore's attempt to rock Antarctica in the name of global warming was stymied by the fact that the continent is so darn cold as to be virtually uninhabitable and completely inaccessible at the time of the event. Still, if you want a glimpse of Nunatuk, you can check out the roughly 75 hours of event coverage that NBC Universal will serve up.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has a full-time position available for a staff assistant. This is a clerical position working with the editors. Duties will include answering phones and emails, updating our website, research, and record-keeping. Candidates should address a cover letter and résumé to hr@weeklystandard.com.

From Kristol's latest column for Time magazine, now available here:

In the old days, historians--at least some of them--were patriotic and moralistic. No longer. We live in what Andrew Ferguson, in his brilliant new book, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, calls "a wised-up era." Now, Ferguson explains, "skepticism about the country, its heroes and its history" is "a mark of worldliness and sophistication." Ferguson is himself a worldly and sophisticated observer of contemporary America. (Full disclosure: he also happens to be a colleague of mine at the Weekly Standard.) But his guided tour of the often amusing, sometimes bizarre ways we remember Lincoln today leads us gently from being wised-up toward wisdom.

Lincoln expected that America would become a nation doubtful about its heroes and its history. In his astonishing address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., on Jan. 27, 1838, on "the perpetuation of our political institutions," the 28-year-old Lincoln foresaw the inevitable rise in a modern democracy like ours of skepticism and worldliness. Indeed, he worried about the fate of free institutions in a maturing nation no longer shaped by a youthful, instinctive and (mostly) healthy patriotism.

Such a patriotism is natural in the early years after a revolutionary struggle for independence. To the generation that experienced the Revolution and the children of that generation, Lincoln explained, the events of the Revolution remained "living history," and those Americans retained an emotional attachment to the political institutions that had been created. But the living memories of the Revolution and the founding could no longer be counted on. Those memories "were a fortress of strength; but what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls." So, Lincoln concluded, the once mighty "pillars of the temple of liberty" that supported our political institutions were gone.

Go read the whole thing.

From this week's Scrapbook:

THE SCRAPBOOK is feeling like a proud papa these days--or maybe a doting uncle. That's because our friend and colleague Andrew Ferguson has just published Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America (Grove/Atlantic, $24), and in THE SCRAPBOOK's considered opinion, if there's one book every STANDARD reader must devour this summer, it's Land of Lincoln.

Why do we say this? First, WEEKLY STANDARD readers already know Andy's hallmarks. He's a writer of exceptional skill, incapable of producing a dull sentence. He carries wisdom, erudition, and startling insight with a lightness and finesse that must be read to be believed. There's his understated wit, discerning eye, and instinct for the absurd. His reporter's antennae are exceptionally well-tuned; Andy never fails to capture the felicitous detail. And all these talents are on display in Land of Lincoln.

So what, you ask, another Lincoln book? To which we reply: This is not just any Lincoln book. Like many Americans, Andy Ferguson (born and raised in Illinois) grew up with a fascination for the sixteenth president, whose life and death are so central to the story of America. But what intrigues him about Lincoln is not so much the familiar facts--the log cabin birthplace, the Gettysburg Address, the homely face and mordant jokes--as the shadow Lincoln casts over his countrymen. Since the assassination at Ford's Theatre in 1865, Lincoln's drama has been cast and recast, the essentials of his life have been plumbed and reinvented, the meaning of Lincoln--to politics, history, folklore, psychology--has evolved with every succeeding generation.

So Andy embarks on a road trip in search of Lincoln's America. Or America's Lincoln. We meet collectors who accumulate sacred relics, scholars who try to make Lincoln "relevant," Abe Lincoln impersonators, management gurus, and a galaxy of people whose vision of Lincoln gives meaning to their lives.

Land of Lincoln is about a journalist's quest, but it's also a matchless portrait of our times, certain places, the national character (both hilarious and poignant), the complex life of a deceptively simple man, and the meeting of the present and past in our country. THE SCRAPBOOK cannot think of a better introduction to the great subject of Abraham Lincoln, or a funnier, more trenchant and affecting postcard from America.

Ferguson will begin his book tour on June 9 in Naperville, Illinois. Click here to see the full schedule, and click here to purchase your very own copy.

Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner in 28 Weeks Later.

You’d be hard pressed to argue that 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later are inherently conservative movies (and you’d probably hear some complaint from series creator Danny Boyle if you did), but there are certainly some conservative undertones. If the sequel, released on Friday, was meant to be an allegory for the evils of the Iraq war (as some have claimed), it’s a terribly confused one. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s look at a few aspects of the series that merit closer attention (SPOILERS FOLLOW. Stop reading now if you don’t want the film ruined).

In the original, the film kicks off when a group of do-gooding PETA/Earth Liberation Front types break into an animal testing lab to free some cute, cuddly monkeys. Except these cute, cuddly monkeys are infected with the Rage virus, the disease that ends up destroying England. Instead of listening to reason, the radicals threaten the scientist who discovers them with bodily harm and release the animals.

Similarly, in 28 Weeks Later, an American sniper refuses to fire on a crowd of civilians who are quickly being turned into rampaging zombies by their infected countrymen. This action is supposed to gain our sympathy--indeed, the sniper pays the ultimate price for refusing to kill, and later helping to escape, the child within his scope’s sight. His refusal to follow orders and his imploring a helicopter pilot to carry the child to the European continent and safety, however, will lead to millions, if not billions, more deaths, as the boy is a “carrier” of the disease. He doesn’t show any symptoms, but he can infect others through his saliva and blood. The final scene of the movie is that of a cadre of zombies rushing the Eiffel Tower--by transporting the boy to the mainland, one American soldier with a conscience has doomed the Eurasian landmass to a nasty, horrible death.

My basic point is this: In both films, liberal good intentions are the catalyst for the deaths of millions of people. Another example from 28 Weeks Later: if the military doctor overseeing the case of an infected survivor had followed her superior’s orders and promptly killed the woman, the plague wouldn’t have been reignited (we also wouldn’t have had a movie, but you see my point).

Also, the portrayal of the militaries in the two films is fundamentally different. In 28 Days Later, the British military is depicted as a group of sadistic rapists. In 28 Weeks Later, the American occupiers of Britain are depicted as benevolent, if incompetent. Once the virus breaks free again, it’s hard not to agree with the decision to firebomb the affected area in hopes of containing the outbreak and saving the rest of the “green zone” from infection and certain death. Even the use of nerve gas is understandable in the context of the film. A.O. Scott, the superlative film critic for the New York Times, said it best in his review: “It is only when things spin out of control that the inherent brutality of the situation becomes clear, but here again the movie poses intractable conundrums rather than scoring easy points. To the soldiers and the survivors alike, there are only bad choices, and doing what seems like the right thing--firebombing an open city or rescuing children from the bombs--can turn out to have horrendous consequences.”

So my colleague Mike Goldfarb calls me this afternoon and the first thing he asks is what do I make of Carmela Soprano reading Rebel-in-Chief by THE WEEKLY STANDARD's own Fred Barnes. I warned him not to read too much into this--some of us are still trying to understand the deeper significance of Gay Vito’s son defecating in the shower. And why must we be subjected to it? In any event, I will try to keep my impressions short.

First, we must remember this is Hollywood and Carmela’s reading Rebel-in-Chief is probably meant to reflect poorly on her and her sense of judgment. Carmela’s support for this highly unpopular president (remember, she voted for him) is the same as her standing by Tony Soprano. Both are equally repugnant and, of course, murderers of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Some think Carmela should leave her loutish husband. While she’s at it, she ought to leave that loutish president. Her husband may be arrested any time. Her president may be arrested anytime as well, for war crimes. All in all, a bad sign.

Second, who’s to say that just because Carmela is reading the book, she's actually enjoying it? For all we know, she might hate it. (Then again, who wouldn’t like it? “Crackling with fine reportage and analysis. Barnes knows this subject better than anyone,” said Rich Lowry. “I know Fred Barnes and I thought I knew what he knows about President Bush. Boy, was I wrong. This book is a revelation. I couldn’t stop reading it,” said Brit Hume. Rebel-in-Chief is also now available in paperback for just $11.86 at Amazon.)

It should also not surprise us that Carmela is a conservative. Remember in the second season when A.J. asks his mother “Why are we here?” Carmela’s response: “Because of Adam and Eve.” In the first episode of this season, when Bobby talks about putting up a wall between us and Mexico, Carm adds “Amen.” Not that Tony Soprano thinks any different. After all, he has now joined the war on terror by providing a cell phone number of a possible terrorist to the feds. This goes back to my first point, that Tony Soprano and Bush are the same, at least in the eyes of his wife, though in some respects Tony is more like Clinton.

But like I said, we shouldn’t read too much into this.

The 2007 Milblog Conference was held yesterday at a hotel just outside of Washington. The event was sponsored by our friends at Military.com, and while I did not attend last year's inaugural conference, everyone seemed very pleased with this year's turnout. THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD's own Bill Roggio was there to address some of the issues surrounding blogging from the front as part of a panel that was chaired by milblogger extraordinaire Matthew Burden of Blackfive. Roggio is something of a celebrity in this crowd and was interviewed by a camera crew from CNN for a segment to air sometime today between 2 and 4 pm (if I get more precise info on the time of that broadcast I will post in an update).

QandO and RedState, among others, were liveblogging the event, which featured a number of lively panel discussions on everything from mainstream press coverage of Iraq to how the community could best support the troops in the field. There were more than a few bloggers who stuck up for the mainstream press, but there was almost no one who thought that the U.S. military was doing an effective job of getting its message out. The Army public affairs office (PAO) was a favorite target for those in attendance, and this despite the fact that the Army tried to put its best foot forward by sending a number of representatives to the conference.

Likewise, the milbloggers were pretty much unanimous in their support of the war--they want the soldiers home, but not until they achieve their mission of a stable, democratic Iraq. Still, there were some dissenting opinions. In general, there are really two sets of bloggers covering the military--the milbloggers, who include active duty servicemen, their family members, and veterans-turned-journalists, and the techbloggers, who are a bit more of a mixed bag of veterans and milgeeks (I, too, would be a milgeek in this taxonomy). The techbloggers tend to be a bit more liberal and mainstream than their milblog counterparts. For the most part though, the politics of the war were largely ignored in favor of a serious discussion about how best to inform the public about what the troops are doing, and how best to support those troops while they're doing it.

And here is where I think the milblog community deserves a lot of credit. This conference was in no small part a celebration of the troops and the civilian organizations that support them, particularly an organization called Soldiers' Angels and its Valour-IT program. I heard some wonderful stories today about just how important this group is to the soldiers serving in Iraq and to the wounded soldiers coming home (check out Chuck Z's blog From My Position...On the Way! for more on that). The men and women behind this program are absolutely single-minded in their devotion to providing the troops with whatever it is that they need at any given time. I strongly urge our readers to support them by clicking through and making a donation.

On a final note, there was one character in particular who stands out in my mind as the group's most enthusiastic blogger/activist/all-around-lunatic. That would be the man behind the blog Castle Argghhh!, who provided much of the event's comic relief. His claim to fame: his blog is ranked number one by Google for the search "I bayoneted myself." Definitely a site you'll want to bookmark if you have even the slightest interest in the milblog phenomenon.

Also, here's the taped message the president sent in, which was played early yesterday morning as the conference got underway:

The Campaign for America's Furture hosted a debate today between the editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, William Kristol, and Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect--part of a day-long event at the National Press Club called "Failure of Conservatism: The Big Con."

The day's events can be seen here, and included panels such as "How Conservatives Get the World Wrong," "How Conservatives Get Government Wrong," "How Conservatives Fail Economics," etc., etc. There's even a panel this afternoon that asks "Is the Conservative Era Over?"

So anyway, not really much to report. Kristol went into the lion's den and tried to be reasonable, at one point conceding that "the Bush administration isn't the most competent of administrations." Otherwise, I thought he made a pretty persuasive case on the merits.

His opponent wouldn't yield an inch: conservatism has failed horribly, "progressivism" is the only option. The only thing that really made my ears perk up, Kuttner said:

one of the things Bush managed to slither out of was responsibility for 9/11...if he'd been paying attention the plot would have been foiled...instead it became a pretext for permanent emergency.

This brave statement earned Kuttner a nice round of applause. I just wonder, if Clinton had been paying attention, would the USS Cole not have been bombed, or the embassies in Africa, or the first attack on the World Trade Center? Maybe if FDR was paying attention, he might have foiled the attack on Pearl Harbor. The fact that such a lunatic statement was embraced by what I suppose is a mainstream progressive audience...pretty frightening.

You can watch the debate C-SPAN.

Senator McCain had a conference call with a number of bloggers this afternoon, and McCain certainly made some interesting points.

In response to comments yesterday by Mitt Romney that we shouldn't "move heaven and earth" or "spend billions" trying to capture Osama bin Laden, which we commented on earlier today here, McCain said that he disagreed: "We'll devote every effort this country can make to get him," the Senator said.

On the supplemental, McCain said that he understood "the absolute drop dead date" to be sometime in early June, but he also said it was important that the president veto the current bill if for no other reason that the $20 billion in pork that Democrats have stuffed into it. He said the pork was being "used as a vehicle to buy votes," and that it was "obscene and corrupting." He also said that it would be a mistake to wait until that "drop dead date" before passing a clean supplemental.

On the issue of same sex marriage, the senator said he was personally opposed to the legislation just passed in New Hampshire that would legalize civil unions for gay couples, but that he did believe that this was a matter best left to the states--that he was a "strong federalist."

On the media coverage of the Iraq war, McCain said that "suicide bombers continue to be the focus of [press] efforts, but there is progress being made." He went on to say that "the thing that concerns me as much as anything is the Maliki government," pointing to its decision to take a two month recess this summer as particularly worrying. He also said there had been "dramatic improvement in Anbar," but that General Petraeus continued to be concerned about the suicide bombers and equipment coming into Iraq from Iran and Syria. Overall, he said that there was "measured but slow progress" taking place in Iraq.

On energy, McCain spoke of the "huge national security component to the need for energy independence," and then treated us to the only blatant pander of the afternoon by pointing to the importance of "corn oil" in Iowa as an alternative source of energy. More important, he emphasized the need for nuclear power: "We need [more] nuclear power badly."

When asked about what kind of justices he might appoint to the Supreme Court, McCain said that he would not impose a litmus test, but he did say he thought a "strict interpretation" of the Constitution was critical, and that he would look for someone with "life experience" rather than just focusing on judicial experience. Specifically, he said that he would want someone who had military or business experience, "real world experience" he said.

When asked whether he would be able to peel off any of the states that voted for Kerry in 2004, McCain said that "if you look what happened in Ohio and other midwest states [in 2004] it's not good," but that he would look to put California in play in 2008 to offset those negative trends: "I'm going to compete in California," he said, adding that Republicans can no longer afford to write off the biggest state in the Union.

And on defense spending, McCain was asked whether he was in line with Romney, who recently endorsed the Heritage Foundation proposal for spending a minimum of four percent of GDP on national defense. McCain said that he would see to it that defense spending continues to rise, but that "what we do is more important than how much money we spend," emphasizing the need for serious reform in the acquisition process. Specifically, he said that the cost overruns on the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) were "disgraceful," that "missile defense has to be fully funded," that "the greatest challenge is to get costs under control," and that the "heads of services have to be more involved in the acquisition process."

He speculated on whether what money we are spending is being spent in the right areas, asking "are we spending enough on intelligence" and "do we need a half-billion dollar aircraft?" Presumably that is a reference to the F-22, and on that he answered his own question saying that "I think we happen to need these," but his point was clear: reforming the acquisition process will be a central theme of his defense policy. To that end, he said he would "get the smartest guys in America" into the Pentagon to get a handle on how the military deals with the defense industry.

I asked McCain about CSAR-X, as issue which was likely of no interest to anybody else on the call, and he responded that he had been traveling the past week and didn't know if the Air Force had met his deadline for delivering all the relevant paperwork. When I interviewed folks for that story, some were concerned that the rigors of the presidential campaign would prevent McCain from delving too deeply into this issue, as he had done in relation to the 2001 scandal over the Air Force's deal with Boeing for refueling tankers. McCain said he'd pass along an update as soon as possible, but it seems that the senator's hectic schedule does call into question his ability to keep the focus on oversight--which, in all fairness, is not the biggest issue he faces right now.

For more coverage of the call, I'm sure John Hideraker will have something up at Powerline shortly, as will the Bluey Blog.

Update: Eyeon08 has posted, so has Hit and Run, and Little Miss Atilla, who has a way better caricature than I do.

Update 2: And Dean Barnett wasn't invited. What does Nelson say?

It attracted little attention the other day when Harry Reid said:

like it or not, George W. Bush is still the commander in chief — and this is his war.

In 1994, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey infamously stated on the House floor 'your president is just not that important for us.' Liberals were outraged, and Armey was (rightly) criticized widely in the media. Michael Barone recalls the incident in this piece, and Paul Begala talked about it in this PBS Interview:

Dick Armey was the Republican leader in the Congress, and he stood on the House floor in the first year of Clinton's term and said, "He's not our president." He pointed to the Democrats, and he said, "He's your president." ... That was a level of contempt for democracy that I found startling.

If disowning the president demonstrates contempt for democracy, is it less of an offense to disown the ongoing war in which our nation is engaged?

Harry Reid may not like it, but this nation and our troops are in a war. He might think it's lost already, or he might think we can win it by surrendering--it's not really all that clear. But it is the nation's war. And until it ends he--in his roles both as Senate Majority Leader and as the senior Democrat in national leadership--has a responsibility to try to ensure that we win it.

Like it or not, this is Harry Reid's war, too. It became his when he voted to authorize it, and he renewed his responsibility each time he voted to fund it, or to confirm its leaders, and when he took his oath of office. If he doesn't accept his responsibility, he ought to step aside.

Here's the video from MoveOn.org--according to the press release, the anti-war group will air the ad in "early primary states"--which this year could mean just about any state in the country.

As the Hotline points out, "The more liberals bash McCain, the more comfortable conservatives tend to get." Truer words were never written. The idea that this ad could do any damage to McCain in a primary is absurd. Republicans don't take their cues from the defeatist advertising of MoveOn.org--images of burning American tanks? Do they seriously think that will help them get their message across in Red America?

64 percent of Republicans approve of the president's handling of the war in Iraq. How does tying McCain to Iraq hurt him in the primary? If MoveOn.org really wants to go after McCain, they should endorse him as the Republican most likely to take action on global warming. But this...this is a gift. I'm feeling more comfortable about a McCain presidency already.

I know he meant well, but Al Gore might be making global warming worse:

Dr Bala and his colleagues took such effects into account using a computer model called the Integrated Climate and Carbon Model. Unlike most climate-change models, which calculate how the Earth should absorb and radiate heat in response to a list of greenhouse-gas concentrations, this one has many subsections that represent how the carbon cycle (photosynthesis and its consequences) works, and how it influences the climate. Thus, Dr Bala's model can be told to replace all the world's forests with shrubby grasslands, and left alone to work out how such a change would alter greenhouse-gas concentrations and how that, in turn, would influence the temperature in different places.

When Dr Bala ordered global clearcutting, the model calculated that the atmosphere's carbon-dioxide levels would roughly double by 2100. This is a much greater increase than happens in a business-as-usual simulation, but it would, paradoxically, make for a colder planet. That is because brighter high latitudes would reflect more sunlight in winter, cooling the local environment by as much as 6°C. The tropics would warm up, since they would be less cloudy, but not by enough to produce a net global heat gain. Overall, Dr Bala's model suggests that complete deforestation would cause an additional 1.3°C temperature rise compared with business as usual, because of the higher carbon-dioxide levels that would result. However, the additional reflectivity of the planet would cause 1.6°C of cooling. A treeless world would thus, as he reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, be 0.3°C cooler than otherwise.

I know that the argument is 'settled' because we have a 'consensus' and all, so it's surprising that counter-intuitive findings like this one pop up. (Or this one, which almost shrilly advocates pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.) I thought scientists had already chased down all these minor effects (like solar cycles) that could be affecting our understanding of global climate change.

And before you say 'you're being silly; we can't cut down all the world's forests,' the study does say that carbon offsets might be making the problem worse:

...Carbon-offset outfits should take note of Dr Bala's paper. Planting trees in convenient places such as Europe and North America may actually be counterproductive. Instead, in an environmental two-for-one, it is the rainforests that need bolstering.

I wonder if--just maybe--we don't really understand climate change well enough to warrant radically changing our lifestyles.

We've been making a few changes here at THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD, bringing in new contributors and generally expanding our coverage. Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed the postings of the Influence Peddler, aka Brian Faughnan.

Brian worked for 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, spent several years working abroad as a consultant in Mexico City, and, until recently, was a lobbyist representing tech companies. Brian has maintained his own blog at the Influence Peddler, where he and two associates comment on politics, policy, religion, pop culture, and whatever else interests them.

Brian will be posting here a couple of times a day with an eye toward Congress. We are very happy to have him on board, and we're confident we've picked up one of the blogosphere's more astute observers of inside the beltway politics. So keep an eye out for his stuff, and keep an eye on his blog as well, The Influence Peddler.

More Housekeeping: Bill Roggio will resume posting his daily updates on Iraq next week. Bill is currently receiving a crash course in Zionism while touring the Holy Land on an AIPAC-sponsored junket--tough job.

This week's editorial from the Nation is a real doozy. Here's how it starts:

Once upon a time, Republicans believed in diplomacy. They spoke with enemies. Recall Richard Nixon: As President, he negotiated with the Soviets, the Chinese and the North Vietnamese, who were shooting at US troops at the time. Nowadays, the Bush Administration too often dismisses diplomacy and, when it does, is cheered on by neoconservatives and conservatives who misguidedly equate communication with weakness.

Ah, yes...why can't Republicans today be more like Nixon? Well, conservatives at the time were none too thrilled about Nixon's trip to China. Barry Goldwater famously quipped ''Well, if Nixon likes China so much, let him stay there.'' And, of course, Goldwater also called Nixon "the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life." So forgive today's conservatives if they don't look to the Nixon presidency for guidance on this particular question.

The editorial goes on to say that "Pelosi, who affirmed US policy toward Syria in her conversation with Assad, was merely following the advice of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group..." The Iraq Study Group did recommend engagement with Syria and Iraq, but not by Congress. And the ISG also recommended a surge of U.S. forces into Iraq if ground commanders deemed it necessary--they have, though the editors at the Nation are unlikely to support that recommendation.

They go on:

And for the moment--much to the consternation of conservatives--it is giving diplomacy a chance on North Korea. But when it comes to the big picture, the Administration still prefers bullying and threats of military action to the hard work of talking and negotiating. Iran's defiant announcement that it has begun enriching uranium on an industrial scale shows that this approach hasn't paid off.

Conservative consternation seems entirely appropriate given that the February 13 agreement with the DPRK already appears to be falling apart--the North Koreans appear unlikely even to meet the first deadline for shutting down their main nuclear reactor. And no one on the right thinks that mere bullying and threats will prevent the Iranians from moving forward with their nuclear program, and no one on the left can seriously think that direct diplomacy with Iran will either. The Iranians are determined to build a bomb. International sanctions might offer a third way, but not without Russian and Chinese support--an unlikely development, especially if the United States pursues a policy of engagement rather than isolation.

The editors further look to the behavior of the British government in the recent hostage crisis as an example for Bush and his "cowboy allies":

In the British-Iranian face-off, Prime Minister Tony Blair achieved the release of the British hostages without resorting to threats or force. Yet the big-stick crowd in Washington derided Blair.

The British brought their soldiers home, but only after Blair issued a vague threat about a 48 hour deadline. To assume that a credible threat of the use of force didn't play a significant part in their release is naive. And yes, conservatives did a little deriding--Americans have been around that block before. There would have been no humble attempts at diplomacy if "Iranian military vessels surrounded an American ship instead of a British one"--one Carter administration was enough for us cowboys.

And finally:

Bush does not believe in the power of negotiation and compromise--as evidenced even by his dealings with Congressional Democrats.

Which Congressional Democrats are looking to compromise? Certainly not the leadership, who have passed around a memo saying that the party "must not yeid" to the White House.

So the guys at the Nation wish Bush would negotiate more? Not enough that we negotiated with Saddam for years while he flouted UN resolutions? That we negotiated with our Security Council partners to build support for action against Iraq--and that we assembled a coalition of the willing to support such action? Not enough that the Bush administration created the Proliferation Security Initiative, with dozens of partners? Not sufficient that we negotiated with European and Middle Eastern partners to imprison and try terrorist nationals? And to monitor terrorist financing? Not sufficient that we negotiated with Saddam through back channels in the days and hours leading up to the war? Not enough that the United States held together a coalition to address North Korea's nuclear program? Not sufficient that we negotiated with Libya to abandon its WMD program (under British auspices, I believe).

As for Congress, Bush negotiated with them on the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, extension of Trade Promotion Authority... just to name a few.

The problem is that the folks at the Nation don't believe that there's ever a reason to stop negotiating. They believe in the old adage, 'speak softly and carry a fluffy pillow,' unless you're dealing with George Bush. Their problem is that they don't really like the things that Bush is negotiating on; they oppose them. So they cast about wildly, looking for some Republican they can throw up as a straw man. You can tell how desperate they are that the best they could come up with was Nixon.

John McCain spoke at VMI this morning. The full text of his speech is available here.

It's pretty good stuff...like the editors at the Wall Street Journal wrote today, "On Iraq, It's McCain's Finest Hour." He hits the Democrats hard: "In Washington, where political calculation seems to trump all other considerations, Democrats in Congress and their leading candidates for President, heedless of the terrible consequences of our failure, unanimously confirmed our new commander, and then insisted he be prevented from taking the action he believes necessary to safeguard our country’s interests." But, the most moving bit of the speech is surely it's conclusion:

In closing, I’d like to bring to your attention the gallantry and patriotism of one American who served with distinction in Iraq, a Navy SEAL, who refuses to quit his mission and let the country he loves so well suffer the terrible harm our defeat would entail. A few days ago, Petty Officer First Class Mark Robbins’ unit was ambushed outside Baghdad. During the ensuing firefight, he spotted an insurgent with an RPG, and immediately stepped out from cover and exposed himself to enemy fire to take out the terrorist before he could fire. He saved the lives of his comrades, but was gravely wounded as he did so. He was shot in the eye by another insurgent with an AK-47. The bullet exited the back of his head about three inches behind his ear. He was initially knocked unconscious but came to, continued to fight and then, despite the severity of his wound, walked to the evacuation helicopter. He was eventually taken to Landstuhl military hospital in Germany. As is the custom of Navy SEALs, he was accompanied by one of his comrades, Petty Officer Second class McLean Swink.

On our way home from Iraq, our delegation stopped in Germany for refueling and crew rest, and I had the privilege of visiting some of our wounded at Landstuhl. I briefly stopped in Mark Robbins’ room, but he was sedated and unable then to communicate. I spent a few moments there, and talked to his buddy, before I went to visit other wounded soldiers. Not too long after I had left Mark’s room, Petty Officer Swink found me and told me Mark was awake and had asked to see me. So I returned. When I entered his room and approached his bedside, he struggled with great difficulty to sit up, stiffened his body as if he were trying to stand at attention, grasped my hand tightly and wouldn’t let go. And then he whispered to me not to worry, “We can win this fight. We can win this fight.” Mark, as another person observed, looks like the “toughest kid on the high school football team.” He is tough, and brave, and very young. But more than that, he’s an inspiration to those who are only called upon to subordinate a temporary political advantage to the security of our good and great nation. Petty Officer Mark Robbins, an American hero, believes we can still win this fight. I’ll take his word for it, and accept my responsibility to help the cause he sacrificed so much to defend. Thank you.”

The AP reports:

The original letter in which Theodore Roosevelt first used the phrase "Speak softly and carry a big stick" is up for sale from the Raab Collection in Philadelphia, with an asking price of $200,000.

The two-page typed letter was written by Roosevelt on Jan. 26, 1900, and mailed to Henry L. Sprague, a member of the Union League Club in New York.

In the letter, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, expresses his pleasure in convincing the state's Republican leaders to reject the reappointment of Louis F. Payn as insurance commissioner.

"I have always been fond of the West African proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.' If I had not carried the big stick . . . I would not have had ten votes. But I was entirely good humored, kept perfectly cool and steadfastly refused to listen to anything save that Payn had to go, and that I would take none but a thoroughly upright and capable man in his place."

The writers at the Washington Note lean decidedly Democratic. Today, Scott Paul of Citizens for Global Solutions warns that maybe--just maybe--in their zeal to bug out of Iraq ASAP, the Democrats are coming off as isolationist and patronizing:

My hope over these past few years has been that Democrats and eventually Republicans would embrace a more enlightened view: that people in the Middle East do want freedom - and economic opportunity, and peace, and rights, and dignity - and the United States should work with them as a partner to help them achieve these goals.

This rationale, in my view, is the right justification for redeploying troops from Iraq. Such a step, coupled with international partnerships and continued nonmilitary assistance, can help bring about a political solution in Iraq, as well as progress for Iraq's neighbors.

But I'm not entirely convinced that this is the prevailing attitude in the Democratic Party. I'm worried some Democrats, frustrated with the Iraqis and sensing their constituents' impatience, are simply ready to say, "not my problem anymore" and take up the isolationist cause.

Mr. Paul is far kinder than I would be. I have argued (over here), that in turning the Iraq conflict into a replay of Vietnam, Democrats are setting themselves up for post-Vietnam syndrome. After Vietnam, the voters were unwilling to trust Democrats on national security until the end of the Cold War. The only time they won the White House in that era was a quickly-corrected fluke.

In 2008, the Democratic nominee for president will find that voters do not trust him (or her) on national security issues. If that seems overly broad, consider any likely match-up of presidential contenders. What are the chances that any one of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards will be perceived as more credible on national security than Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, or Fred Thompson?

In their race to end the war and further discredit a president who will never again run for office, Democrats are damaging their own future electoral prospects.

Drudge links to this story from the San Francisco Chronicle about a town hall meeting in Oakland, California, where Sean Penn and Rep. Barbara Lee gathered with "hundreds of people . . . to denounce the war in Iraq and call for an immediate withdrawal of American troops." Staff writers Carolyn Jones and Cecilia M. Vega set the scene in the second paragraph:

The enthusiastic and occasionally boisterous crowd of 800 or so crammed into the Grand Lake Theatre wildly cheered as Penn excoriated President Bush.

Then, toward the bottom of the piece:

Rodney Brown, a 30-year-old Oakland substitute teacher, said he would have liked to see more people attend the protest. While organizers said between 500 and 700 attended the rally, many remarked that the crowd seemed significantly smaller. Police declined to provide a crowd count.

How the heck do they get 800 and then, three hundred words later, report that even the organizers wouldn't claim such a turnout? Maybe the Chronicle just has a soft spot for one of their own. After all, the paper credentialed Penn and sent him to Iraq in 2003. The writing was terrible--"The fatigue of the trip hits me in the back of the head like a rocket-propelled grenade"--but the paper sent him to Iran to cover the election there two years later. And now the paper not only inflates the crowd numbers, but does him the favor of ignoring what he actually said:

My 15-year-old daughter was working on a comparative essay this week (you can ask Condi what a comparative essay is, as academic exercises fit the limits of her political expertise.) My daughter's essay, which understood substance over theory, discusses the strengths of the Nuremberg trial justice beside the alternate strategy of truth and reconciliation in South Africa, and I quote: "When we observe distinctions between one power and another, one justice and another, we consider the divide between retribution and reconciliation, of closure and disclosure." I can't do her essay justice in this forum, but at its core, it asks how, when, and why we compromise toward peace, punish for war, or balance both for something more.

If that doesn't make a crowd of any size "enthusiastic and occasionally boisterous," I don't know what would.

From today's Washington Post, Retreat and Butter:

As it is, House Democrats are pressing a bill that has the endorsement of MoveOn.org but excludes the judgment of the U.S. commanders who would have to execute the retreat the bill mandates. It would heap money on unneedy dairy farmers while provoking a constitutional fight with the White House that could block the funding to equip troops in the field. Democrats who want to force a withdrawal should vote against war appropriations. They should not seek to use pork to buy a majority for an unconditional retreat that the majority does not support.

It's not all carrots and pork though. According to the Hill, Nancy is using the stick too:

Democratic aides have speculated that Pelosi might penalize wayward lawmakers by yanking them off of committees. She apparently did not invite Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who voted against the bill in the Appropriations Committee, to return last weekend to California with her.

(HT Influence Peddler)

If you didn't catch John Bolton's performance on the Daily Show last night, it's worth watching.

Stewart likes to have it both ways--he's a comedian, but you're also supposed to take him seriously when he squares off against the political and intellectual giants of our time. The only problem is: Stewart is a comedian with a limited grasp of "democratic theory," as Bolton pointed out time and again.

When Stewart asks Bolton why Bush would appoint to the United Nations an ambassador that "wasn't a huge fan of the United Nations," Bolton responds, "I think that's exactly wrong, and I think that's part of what's wrong with Washington. It is not the case that the government should be staffed by people who like the bureaucracies they're serving in. I also served as undersecretary for arms control and I was very skeptical of arms control. The point is, the president ought to have people philosophically attuned to his way of thinking. And if you've got a problem with that, I'd suggest you've got a problem with democratic theory."

Then Stewart claims that Lincoln brought people into his cabinet that disagreed with him. Bolton: "You're historically wrong on Lincoln." Oh gee, you think the United States ambassador to the United Nations might know a bit more about American history than the host of Comedy Central's Daily Show.

By the end of this, Stewart's defense of bureaucracy becomes completely absurd, and anti-democratic, at which point even Stewart concedes, "you may be right."

It's worth watching the whole thing. Bolton is dominating.

David Brooks in today's New York Times($):

The Democratic leaders don't want to be for immediate withdrawal because it might alienate the centrists, and they don't want to see out the surge because that would alienate the base. What they want to do is be against Bush without accepting responsibility for any real policy, so they have concocted a vaporous policy of distant withdrawal that is divorced from realities on the ground.

Say what you will about President Bush, when he thinks a policy is right, like the surge, he supports it, even if it's going to be unpopular. The Democratic leaders, accustomed to the irresponsibility of opposition, show no such guts.

As a result, nobody loves them. Liberals recognize the cynicism of it all. Republicans know the difference between principled opposition and unprincipled posturing. Independents see just another group of politicians behaving like politicians.

What we get is foreign policy narcissism. The Democrats call it an Iraq policy, but it's really all about us.

This clip is a bit long, but very powerful, and it may offer the most persuasive, liberal argument for keeping American troops in Iraq--"this isn't about national security, this is about saving humans." Really excellent stuff, at least watch the second half if you're pressed for time.

I knew it couldn't be true. The Corner's John Podhoretz links to this story from the Sunday Times absolving the great man of any connection to an anti-Semitic article released last week by Cambridge University.

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, said this weekend that the article, which was never published, had been ghost-written by a member of Oswald Mosley’s fascist party. He added that Churchill had refused to have it published because it was not his work and did not reflect his views.

Gilbert said Richard Toye, the lecturer who “found” the article and includes it in a new book, Lloyd George and Churchill, must have failed to consult Gilbert’s compilation of Churchill’s writings published in the 1980s, which describes it. “I’m amazed. My book would have been on the shelf in the same library. I immediately recognised the name of the article,” said Gilbert, whose own new book, Churchill and the Jews, will be published this summer.

I couldn't help but notice that conservative blogs have suddenly embraced country singer Chely Wright and her patriotic ditty "Bumper of My SUV."

Today Michelle Malkin is giving Wright "kudos" for heading to Iraq to entertain the troops. And last week, Blackfive praised Wright for "singing her heart out for our troops."

The song's been out for a while, and I interviewed Wright a few years ago in relation to a mini-scandal that developed when the Tennessean accused Wright of mounting a "campaign of deception" to push the song up the charts. According to the newspaper,

Seventeen members of a handpicked team of fans contacted radio stations around the country asking for more airplay for Wright's pro-military ballad, The Bumper of My SUV. It was all part of an organized campaign by leaders of the fan club who encouraged the team to do such things as ''tell 'em your husband is a marine--whatever it takes.''

Here are some quotes from my interview with Chely:

On where she gets her news: "I get my news from BBC, MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, NPR, I don't, uh, certainly Fox is slanted right. I'm not a Republican. CNN is slanted a bit left, although not far left, NPR is slanted way left. I get all the information that I can from every source that I can . . . so no, I'm not a big fan of Fox News. I'm not opposed to it. I think it's information, it's an opinion."

When I pushed her on who she'd be supporting in the 2004 presidential election, she accused the president of "a hate crime" for pushing a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriage:

Um, you know what, I suggest to anyone who is still undecided, which by the way, honestly, swear to God, I'm still undecided. I have a big problem with the president's desire to amend the constitution, as far as the marriage between a man and a woman. As far as I'm concerned that's a hate crime.

And finally, on the Dixie Chicks:

I sent Natalie Maines a registered letter in support of her freedom to speak her mind. You can go back to a video that was shot on Toby Keith's record that was so big, the Angry American, the song that they were fighting about, that Natalie and Toby were fighting about. You can go back to that video and if you were to go to the CMA [Country Music Awards] footage where he performed and the entire crowd was given a flag, all of us on the floor were given flags to wave during his performance because we were told it was to be shot and they were going to use it for a clip for his video. You can go back and you can slo-mo it, and you can freeze-frame it and super-zoom in to the third row, I was the only person on the floor level, out of all the artists and people in our industry, that would not wave her flag.

Not that being a liberal prevents her from supporting the troops, and not that performing for the troops isn't noble regardless of her political beliefs, but I would recommend that our friends in the blogosphere be a little wary of Ms. Wright. The report from the Tennessean suggests Wright is quite capable of manipulating patriotism in a craven effort to boost record sales. And while she denied any connection to that creepy PR campaign when I spoke with her, I did not get the sense that this was a person who supported the mission, even if she does support the troops.

Where do the Democrats stand on Iraq? They've only had 17 different plans, literally, since they took back Congress. But if you really want to know, don't bother asking General Pelosi, it seems not even she can keep it all straight.

From the AP:

A few dozen peace activists marched across the Golden Gate Bridge and gathered outside the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday, demanding that Congress stop funding the war in Iraq.

"San Francisco has been against this war from the very beginning," said Toby Blome, a physical therapist who organized the event. "This is our fifth year of the war, and Nancy needs to wake up and represent San Franciscans."

Blome, holding a plate of cheese and bread and a glass of wine, was stopped on her way to Pelosi's front door and told the speaker would not see them. Blom and about 10 other activists said they plan to camp outside the residence overnight.

The vice president spoke at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's 2007 Policy Conference this morning. Here are some notable excerpts from Cheney's speech. You can read the full text here (pdf).

On Iraq:

The most common myth is that Iraq has nothing to do with the global war on terror. Opponents of our military action there have called Iraq a diversion from the real conflict, a distraction from the business of fighting and defeating bin Laden and the al Qaeda network. We hear this over and over again, not as an argument but as an assertion meant to close off argument.

Yet the critics conveniently disregard the words of bin Laden himself. The most serious issue today for the whole world, he has said, is this third world war that is raging in Iraq. He calls it a destiny between infidelity and Islam. He said the whole world is watching this war and that it will end in victory and glory or misery and humiliation. And in words directed at the American people, bin Laden declares, "The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever."

This leader of al Qaeda has referred to Baghdad as the capital of the Caliphate. He has also said, and I quote, "Success in Baghdad will be success for the United States. Failure in Iraq is the failure of the United States. Their defeat in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars."

Obviously, the terrorists have no illusion about the importance of the struggle in Iraq. They have not called it a distraction or a diversion from their war against the United States. They know it is a central front in that war and it's where they've chosen to make a stand. Our Marines are fighting al Qaeda terrorists today in Anbar province. U.S. and Iraqi forces recently killed al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad who were responsible for numerous car bomb attacks. Iraq's relevance to the war on terror simply could not be more plain.

Ryan Sager has launched a new website for the New York Sun with a focus on the 2008 presidential election. The site will pull relevant material from the newspaper, but it will have a good deal of original content as well.

Here are some links from NYSunPolitics.com you might find interesting:

Why Democrats should give more consideration to Bill Richardson.

On the center of the Democratic Party shifting Left.

On McCain dealing with the legacy of campaign-finance reform.

Uncle Jimbo, who blogs at Blackfive, the ne plus ultra of milblogs (excepting Bill Roggio's Fourth Rail, of course), has contributed an excellent piece to the Politico's user-generated editorial page. I gather that readers are encouraged to vote for their favorite article, which will subsequently appear in the newspaper's print edition. Uncle Jimbo proposes implementing the Sy Hersh fantasy of aggressive cross-border raids into Iran in order to counter Iranian meddling in Iraq. Still, Uncle Jimbo does not entirely discount the important role diplomacy can play in confronting Iran:

Now understand that I'm not a sudden convert to the value of tea-sipping and petit-four nibbling, but let's check the box and say OK we talked to them and they said they still need the nukes, Israel doesn't have to go immediately but eventually, and they will cut the number of IEDs they are shipping to Iraq by one fourth. How do you like them apples? They won't agree to any deal worth making so let's show the world exactly that. Oh and did I mention that my Special Envoy selection would be none other than the Walrus himself, John Bolton. I would almost pay money to sit at that table, not almost, would.

Go vote for Uncle Jimbo (the fourth article down).

The Huffington Post has closed down the comments section on an AP story about the blood clot in Cheney's leg.

Little Green Footballs: "Looks like the Huffington Post is going to have block comments on all posts about Dick Cheney from now on, so that the 'minuscule portion' of Arianna’s readers who exult at the idea of Cheney’s death don’t embarrass her again."

Meanwhile, one of Arianna's celebrity bloggers, HBO's Bill Maher, has come out against Arianna's attack on free speech, and walks right up to the line of endorsing an assassination on the VP. Said Maher, "I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact."

Eli Lake has an excellent piece in the New York Sun today on "What Gore Doesn't Say" when asked about the Iraq war--mainly that U.S. forces should retreat and redeploy. According to Lake, the Oscar winning, celebrity politician "is a tag 'em and bag 'em tough guy, a former vice president who endorsed the rendition of terrorists for interrogation, not to mention the bombing of Serbia and Iraq."

Lake says, "one of the reasons he opposed the [Iraq war], was because he did not trust President Bush to stay in Iraq once the Baathist state was dismantled." He quotes the former VP's September 23, 2002, address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco:

"If we go in there and dismantle them [the Baathists]--and they deserve to be dismantled--but then we wash our hands of it and walk away and leave it in a situation of chaos, and say, ‘That's for y'all to decide how to put things back together now,' that hurts us."

Lake's conclusion:

Mr. Gore's record in public life aside, he is also a far shrewder politician than many are willing to admit. This Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Oscar winner must know that Americans--when faced in a presidential election with a choice between a dove and a hawk--have chosen the hawk every time since Johnson beat Goldwater. . . . And at the end of the day, this may be the most inconvenient truth of all for those frantically trying to draft Mr. Gore to run for the White House.

Yesterday, while the Senate worked toward finalizing an important bill "implementing unfinished recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to fight the war on terror more effectively, to improve homeland security, and for other purposes," Senator Maria Cantwell saw an opportunity to offer an amendment of her own. The purpose of that amendment:

To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of vastly reducing global poverty and eliminating extreme global poverty, and to require periodic reports on the progress toward implementation of the strategy.

Eliminating global poverty is surely an admirable goal . . . but how exactly is the president supposed to achieve the elimination of global poverty? Well, that's all left rather vague--the important thing in Senator Cantwell’s proposal, it seems, is that we’ll have a big plan to figure all this out.

Alas, the long, sad history of foreign aid is littered with well-meaning calls for precisely this kind of top-down, centralized plan to end poverty--despite their recurring failure to actually work. Writing in the Washington Post a while back, the distinguished economist William Easterly of New York University explained why. Reviewing a book by Jeffrey Sachs, the leading acolyte of the “big plan,” Easterly wrote:

The broader development successes of recent decades, most of them in Asia, happened without the Big Plan--and without significant foreign aid as a proportion of the recipient country's income. Gradual free market reforms in China and India in the 1980s and '90s (which Sachs implausibly argues were shock therapy in disguise) have brought rapid growth. Moreover, the West itself achieved gradual success through piecemeal democratic and market reforms over many centuries, not through top-down Big Plans offered by outsiders. . . .

"Success in ending the poverty trap," Sachs writes, "will be much easier than it appears." Really? If it's so easy, why haven't five decades of effort gotten the job done? Sachs should redirect some of his outrage at the question of why the previous $2.3 trillion didn't reach the poor so that the next $2.3 trillion does. In fact, ending poverty is not easy at all. In those five decades, poverty researchers have learned a great deal about the complexity of toxic politics, bad history (including exploitative or inept colonialism), ethnic and regional conflicts, elites' manipulation of politics and institutions, official corruption, dysfunctional public services, malevolent police forces and armies, the difficulty of honoring contracts and property rights, unaccountable and excessively bureaucratic donors and many other issues. Sachs, however, sees these factors as relatively unimportant. Indeed, he seems deaf to the babble and bungling of the U.N. agencies he calls upon to run the Big Plan, not to mention other unaccountable and ineffectual aid agencies.

Babble and bungling? Unaccountable and ineffectual? Let’s hope that someone in the Senate squashes this crummy idea.

The new Democratic Congress seems to have fallen in love with the nonbinding resolution. First it was the resolution condemning the president's new Iraq strategy, which, as a nonbinding resolution, had no effect but to convey to the troops in Iraq and our allies abroad the defeatist sentiments of the new Democratic Congress.

Then there was the nonbinding resolution demanding that Japan apologize for the use of foreign women as sex slaves during the Second World War. Never mind that Japan has already apologized for the abuse, that Japan is this country's closest ally in the region, and that there is little to be gained from such a resolution--ask the man on the street if he worries about North Korea's nuclear program or Japanese human rights abuses during the war years. But this is still a powerful issue in China and Korea.

Now the newest nonbinding resolution that Congress has taken up concerns the genocide of Armenians by Turkey during the First World War. It too threatens to upset relations with a key American ally. And like the others, it will have no effect but to satisfy the demands of an interest group, in this case Armenians who are well represented among Nancy Pelosi's constituents.

It takes little effort for Congress to pass such resolutions, and it does much for their standing with interest groups, antiwar, ethnic, or othewise, but it is the administration that has to deal with the consequences. And it is the American public that will pay the price for the irresponsible actions of elected officials who remain largely unaccountable for the mess they will make of this country's foreign policy.

The Washington Post reports today on the hiring of Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to fill the position left vacant by Philip D. Zelikow's departure from the State Department earlier this year. Cohen has been a harsh critic of the administration's handling of post-war Iraq, but his hiring is likely to cause little joy among those advocating a diplomatic solution to the war in Iraq. In December, Cohen authored a scathing piece on the Iraq Study Group for The Wall Street Journal. Said Cohen,

What we need in Iraq is not a New Diplomatic Offensive (capitals in the original) so much as energy and competence in fighting the fight. From the outset of the Iraq war much of our difficulty has stemmed not so much from failures to find the right strategy, as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made.

Commentary, to which Cohen has been a frequent contributor, has reposted a number of Cohen's articles on their website.

From Vice President Cheney at CPAC:

In these circumstances it's worth reminding ourselves that, like it or not, the enemy we face in the war on terror has made Iraq the primary front in that war. To use a popular phrase, this is an inconvenient truth. (Laughter and applause.) In bin Laden's words, and I quote, "Success in Baghdad will be success for the United States. Failure in Iraq is the failure of the United States. Their defeat in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars." End quote. That makes one thing, above all, very clear: If you support the war on terror, then it only makes sense to support it where the terrorists are fighting us.

Time just posted the latest from WEEKLY STANDARD editor, and now bona fide blogger, William Kristol. He points to five reasons why Republicans are suddenly bullish about the party's prospects.

I have lots of conservative friends and often speak to Republican-leaning groups. I have something surprising to report: they're pretty cheerful. They're well aware that President Bush's numbers are terrible--and that Al Gore got an Academy Award. Yet my fellow conservatives and Republicans are pretty upbeat. After a rough 2006, conservative magazines are seeing an uptick in subscription renewals, right-wing websites are getting more hits, and Republican and conservative groups here at Harvard (yes, Harvard!) seem invigorated. What's going on? Here are five reasons conservatives and Republicans might have some cause for their cheer.

Read the whole thing here.

Arianna disapproves of those of us who called attention to the comments posted on her site Tuesday morning lamenting the failure of a suicide bombing in Afghanistan Tuesday to kill Vice President Cheney. These commenters "make up a very, very small unrepresentative portion of our readers," she now assures us.

How does she know? If the HuffPost commenters are unrepresentative of HuffPost readers, how does she divine the views of her readers?

Enlighten us, Arianna. Poll your readers. Ask them: Are they pleased that the attempt against Vice President Cheney failed? Are they grateful that he is alive and well? Do you hope the U.S. prevails in Afghanistan? In Iraq?

And if the poll turns out the way you hope, perhaps you should arrange to moderate the commenters so they don't convey the impression that your readers are--as you put it--"unhinged" and "fringe."

We posted this morning on the hundreds of Huffington Post comments railing against the failure of the Taliban to kill the American vice president. It seems that HuffPo caught on, closing down and cleaning out the comments, but not before they became a major embarrassment to the site.

Dean Barnett has preserved a few choice comments over Townhall, and Mark Steyn has some interesting thoughts on the matter over at the Corner.

The Democratic party's embrace of the Huffington Post, which routinely invites Democratic Congressmen, Pelosi and Murtha included, to blog on the site, makes this whole thing stink even more. Now that they've been forced to shut down the comments section on a story about at an attempted assassination on the vice president of the United States, Arianna ought to ask herself how she attracted a readership capable of spewing such vile, and violent anti-Americanism. And if the Democrats are smart, they'll stay away from the site altogether.

After seeing the headline on Drudge, "Attacker Was Trying to Reach Cheney," for some reason my fist thought was to see how the Huffington Post would handle the story. He may be the vice president of the United States, but to the lefties at HuffPo, Cheney is every bit as evil as Mullah Omar, and twice as dangerous.

Well, the comments don't disappoint, here's the very first one:

"Cheney's spokeswoman said he was fine"

Fu@#.

If you head over to HuffPo you can read at least 100 more just like it, each lamenting the fact that the Taliban couldn't assassinate the vice president of the United States.

And remember, this is where Nancy Pelosi blogs when she wants to get her message out, and John Murtha, too. This is their base--people who would celebrate a successful attack on the life of the vice president.

From the AP:

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) -- A tour bus of U.S. senior citizens defended themselves against a group of alleged muggers, sending two of them fleeing and killing a third in the Atlantic coast city of Limon, police said on Thursday.

One of the tourists--a retired member of the U.S. military aged about 70--put assailant Warner Segura in a head lock and broke his clavicle after the 20-year-old and two other men armed with a knife and gun held up their tour bus Wednesday, said Luis Hernandez, the police chief of Limon, 80 miles east of San Jose.

The two other men fled when the 12 senior citizens started defending themselves. The tourists then drove Segura to the Red Cross where the man was declared dead. The Red Cross also treated one of the tourists for an anxiety attack, Hernandez said.

The tourists left on their Carnival cruise after the incident and Hernandez said authorities do not plan to press any charges against them, saying they acted in self defense.

I'm sure the guy feels terrible that he killed the would be mugger. Still, the story is easily as inspiring as Dikembe Mutombo's--maybe Bush can recognize him at the next State of the Union.

On Tuesday night, David Gergen moderated a forum at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government that featured five Harvard veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The event was billed as a special tribute to the roughly 100 veterans of those wars who are currently enrolled at the Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and the audience was overwhelmingly supportive of the troops, if not their mission--at least there was no visible evidence of antiwar sentiment.

The evening began with a moment of silence for those who had given their lives in the service of their country and featured a uniformed ROTC color guard, rifles and all, which, despite the nature of the event, seemed somewhat out of place given that Harvard hasn't allowed ROTC on its campus since the late 1960s. Once the discussion got underway, the soldiers and Marines on stage pulled no punches in addressing the situation on the ground, even though Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was sitting right in the front row. One Marine, who had been severly wounded in Ramadi, spoke about his unit's role in the Iraqi elections of October 2005--the polling station was attacked 9 times and only 12 votes were cast. In the next election in December, his unit stayed away from the polls and more than 50,000 votes were cast.

Another Marine, Captain Maura Sullivan, had served in Falluja. She spoke eloquently about the challenges of being a female officer in a combat zone, but her tone belied her claim that gender wasn't an issue. She was simply more passionate, emotional, and empathetic than the other speakers. I don't think women should serve in combat, but I walked away from the event thinking that such traits would be an asset more than a liablity.

Gergen himself was downbeat on our chances for success in Iraq, and kept asking the troops questions that were framed by references to "crumbling support at home." But the soldiers and Marines insisted that they "didn't pay attnetion to what was going on outside" Iraq. And there was some support among them for the surge.

Of course, in the People's Republic of Cambridge, an event conceived with the sole purpose of honoring the service of Harvard's students and alums could not pass without the expression of some antimilitary (though not antiwar) sentiment. What was surprising, however, was that that sentiment came not from students, or faculty, but a member of the press. It was left to Don MacGillis, who identified himself as a reporter for the Boston Globe, to ask these junior officers why it was that the military had not yet integrated homosexuals into its ranks.

As the Harvard Crimson reported, "after some in the audience gasped and murmured, panelists responded that they were uninvolved with decisions to implement such policies."

The troops handled it well, though Gergen, who was at the White House when "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was implemented, defended the policy as something that had represented real progress at the time. He also said that he thought homosexuals would likely be integrated into the military by the next administration.

It was a pleasure to see just how bright and capable these junior officers were, and one couldn't help but be impressed by their uniform desire to get back to their comrades in Iraq. Funny enough, they all seemed to consider Harvard to be a tougher duty than combat--they spoke of the intense guilt they felt at leaving their buddies behind.

But if Harvard has embraced these veterans returned from combat, it still shuns those who would follow in their footsteps. Harvard undergrads have to make the trek to MIT to serve in ROTC, their service honored only when they make a useful prop for Kennedy School forums.

From the Australian: Blair is right on troops, by Mark Steyn

From Real Clear Politics: The Thinking Behind Blair's Iraq Decision, by Gerard Baker.

From the Washington Post: A Lack of Courage In Their Convictions, by George F. Will.

From Politico: Military Tells Congress of Equipment Shortfalls, by Christian Lowe.

From the Wall Street Journal: Plus Ça (Climate) Change, by Pete du Pont.

Rich Lowry writing at NRO:

Murtha repeatedly says in the webcast that his proposals are meant to “protect” the troops. But he is frank about the not-so-ulterior motive of keeping more troops from heading to Iraq, explaining that “they won’t be able to do the work.” Because his provisions can be sold as guaranteeing the readiness and quality-of-life of the troops, Murtha believes that they “will be very hard to find fault with.”

Only if one ignores our constitutional scheme. The president, not Congress, is the commander in chief. Congress was never meant to, nor is it suited to, direct tactical military decisions, as Murtha seeks to do with his restrictions.

Arguably, his maneuver will be the most blatant congressional intrusion on the president’s war-making powers in the nation’s history. . . .

The subconscious logic of their position on the war has thus taken a subtle turn. It used to be that the war had to end because it was a failure; now it must fail so that it can end.

Democrats don’t see this distinction, since they simply believe the war is irretrievably lost. But they still pay laughably unserious lip service to the notion of success. Murtha says there’s no military solution in Iraq, that we can win in Iraq only through the political process — as if it has no effect on the political process whether Shia militias are murdering Sunnis unchecked or laying low to avoid the surge. In a howler, he maintains that if we leave, “al Qaeda’s going to disappear.” Maybe if we spread pixie dust and close our eyes?

From the Wall Street Journal: The Antiwar Surge, by Brendan Miniter.

From Politico: The Hired Gun's Hired Gun, by Christian Lowe.

From the Washington Post: Terrorist Networks Lure Young Moroccans to War in Far-Off Iraq, by Craig Whitlock.

From the Washington Times: Venezuela bolsters military against U.S., by Carmen Gentile.

From the Chicago Sun-Times: 'Success' in N. Korea will fail in long run, by John O'Sullivan.

Michael Rubin, an occasional contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD (most recently he authored this piece on privatizing the CIA) and the editor of Middle East Quarterly, has written an excellent essay on some of the many books that have come out of the war in Iraq. Rubin reviews a wide range of books that touch on nearly every aspect of the war, including the pre-war planning, the embed system, and the troop numbers debate.

In any case, Rubin's review is as impressive as it is comprehensive. Certainly worth checking out.

From the Telegraph:

Controversial plans to build a "supermosque" on the doorstep of the London Olympics will be blocked by the Government.

Ruth Kelly's Whitehall department is expected to refuse planning permission for the London Markaz, which would be the biggest religious building in Britain with room for 70,000 worshippers.

Backers want the £300 million mosque, in east London, to serve as a reception centre for athletes and fans from Islamic countries during the 2012 games.

The group behind the plans is Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary sect whose charitable trust, Anjuman-e-Islahul Muslimeen, has owned the 18-acre site since 1996. Tablighi Jamaat was called "an ante-chamber for fundamentalism" by French security services. Two of the July 7 London suicide bombers are believed to have attended one of its mosques.

Here's Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday:

I think the seven Republican senators and the 17 Republican House members who deserted the cause of victory in the war have their own political vulnerability.

There's something called primaries we have in America, and there will be primary challenges in the Republican Party against some of those congressmen and, I hope, against some of those senators, and they deserve to be primaried, because they are acting, I think, in a shameful way.

There are a handful of them in the House who have always been against the war. I guess they get to keep that up.

But those who are flipping now for expedient reasons when the president of the United States sends additional reinforcements over, when David Petraeus says we have a chance to win, and they flip to vote for non- binding resolution that is the first step to crippling the ability to win this war -- and it's Jack Murtha's cynical plan to do this through his control -- his ability to shape the appropriations process -- those Republicans, I think, have political vulnerability to Republican primary challenges.

You can see a list of the "white flag Republicans" over at the Victory Caucus.

From Vanity Fair: Washington's $8 Billion Shadow, by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

From First Things: The Leadership of George W. Bush: Con & Pro, Joseph Bottum and Michael Novak.

From the Baltimore Sun: Run silent, run very fast, by Allison Connolly.

From Arab News: Iran: US Has Many Options, by Amir Taheri.

From Policy Review: Missile Defense From Space, by Steven Lambakis.

Excerpt from Lieberman's speech on the floor of the Senate today:

The non-binding resolution before us is not about stopping a hypothetical plan. It is about disapproving a plan that is being carried out now by our fellow Americans in uniform, in the field. In that sense, as I have said, it is unprecedented in Congressional history, in American history. This resolution is about shouting into the wind. It is about ignoring realities of what’s happening on the ground in Baghdad.

It proposes nothing. It contains no plan for victory or retreat. It proposes nothing. It is a strategy of “no,” while our soldiers are saying, “yes, sir” to their commanding officers as they go forward into battle.

And that is why I will vote against the resolution by voting against cloture.

I understand the frustration, anger, and exhaustion that so many Americans, so many members of Congress, feel about Iraq, the desire to throw up one’s hands and simply say, “Enough.” And I am painfully aware of the enormous toll of this war in human life—and of the mistakes that have been made in the war’s conduct.

But let us now not make another mistake. In the midst of a fluid and uncertain situation in Iraq, we should not be so bound up in our own arguments and disagreements, so committed to the positions we have staked out, that the political battle over here takes precedence over the real battle over there. Whatever the passions of the moment, the point of reference for our decision-making should be military movements on the battlefields of Iraq, not political maneuverings in the halls of Congress.

Even as our troops have begun to take Baghdad back step-by-step, there are many in this Congress who have nevertheless already reached a conclusion about the futility of America’s cause there, and declared their intention to put an end to this mission not with one direct attempt to cutoff funds, but step by political step. No matter what the rhetoric of this resolution, that is the reality of the moment. This non-binding measure before us is a first step toward a constitutional crisis that we can and must avoid.

Let me explain what I mean by a constitutional crisis.

Let us be clear about the likely consequences if we go down this path beyond this non-binding resolution. Congress has been given constitutional responsibilities. But the micro-management of war is not one of them. The appropriation of funds for war is.

I appreciate that each of us here has our own ideas about the best way forward in Iraq, I respect those that take a different position than I, and I understand that many feel strongly that the President’s strategy is the wrong one. But the Constitution, which has served us now for more than two great centuries of our history, creates not 535 commanders-in-chief, but one—the President of the United States, who is authorized to lead the day to day conduct of war.

Whatever our opinion of this war or its conduct, it is in no one’s interest to stumble into a debilitating confrontation between our two great branches of government over war powers. The potential for a constitutional crisis here and now is real, with congressional interventions, presidential vetoes, and Supreme Court decisions. If there was ever a moment for nonpartisan cooperation to agree on a process that will respect both our personal opinions about this war and our nation’s interests over the long term, this is it.

Matthew Continetti, writing in today's DAILY STANDARD, points to a disturbing trend in Congress, and more generally in the public debate over the war in Iraq. Continetti calls it warrior chic, "the idea that biography trumps policy, that a person's identity proves the validity of their ideas." In particular, the identity of the soldier or veteran is used to prove the validity of arguments both for and against the president's new Iraq strategy. Says Continetti, "taken to the extreme, of course, such an idea erodes the principle, embodied in the Constitution, of civilian control of the military." Should civilians defer to soldiers and veterans in any debate over the war in Iraq? Apparently General William Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), seems to think so.

Dean Barnett has a post up about General Odom's appearance on the Hugh Hewitt show last night. Barnett hesitates to criticize a man with such a distinguished service record, but ultimately calls the general's commentary "an embarrassment." Here's the key exchange:

Odom: And following…let me ask you. Are you enthusiastic enough to put on a uniform and go?

Hewitt: No. I’m a civilian.

Odom: Okay, but we can recruit you.

Hewitt: I’m 51, General.

Odom: And I don’t see all these war hawks that want to…none of them have been in a war, and they don’t want to go.

Hewitt: Well, General, are you advocating that only uniformed military should have opinions on this?

Odom: No, you can have an opinion, but if you…you can’t start telling me that you’re going to just pay no attention to what people like myself say.

Hewitt: No, I am paying…that’s why you’re on this program.

Odom: Okay.

Odom isn't advocating that only uniformed military can have an opinion, just that the opinion of the uniformed military be given greater weight than that of civilians. It isn't a complete disregard for the principle of civilian control of the military, but it's pretty close. Barnett says that while "[he is] sure certain people loved the General’s ad hominem attack and relished the use of the chickenhawk trope by an actual man of the uniform, such an 'argument' doesn’t bear evidence to a confident or nimble intellect. Rather than defend his ideas, Odom tried to bully his way into winning an argument." I'd say Barnett is letting him off pretty easy.

Clifford May has a great piece up at National Review on last weekend's Munich Conference on Security Policy. The conference's slogan, "peace through dialogue," sounds an awful lot like appeasement to May, but this is clearly the approach favored by Democrats in Congress. Here's freshman Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak in an question and answer with readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer today:

That [Afghanistan] is the real danger to U.S. security . . . not the civil war in Iraq which can have relative peace if we lead with confidence in a diplomatic effort with Syria and Iran and other regional nations to bring stability to a country once we are out -- but remaining strong in the region on our bases in Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, and Kuwait, carrier battle groups, and amphibious ready groups in the Persian Gulf. We change the incentive for Syria and Iran once we are not present in Iraq from being destructively involved in Iraq, to wanting stability in Iraq so that millions more refugees do not overflow their borders, nor do they become involved in a proxy battle by supporting the Sunnis and Sh'ia in Iraq that represent the majority of their own respective populations of these two "allied" countries.

We just retreat, redeploy, and then negotiate the details with Syria and Iran--peace through dialogue, peace in our time!

From Time: Give Force a Chance, by William Kristol.

From the New York Times: Dispute Over Iraqi Cleric, Said to Have Gone to Iran, by Damien Cave.

From the Washington Post: Bush Regains His Footing, by David S. Broder.

From the Times: The shaky prospects of Mitt Romney, by Gerard Baker.

From the Washington Post: The Putin Doctrine, by Charles Krauthammer.

FP Passport has the quote from Senator Biden's talk at the Brookings Institution today:

Biden said a lot of interesting things in his talk, but perhaps the most colorful wasn't in the prepared remarks (pdf). During the questions period, he said that U.S. combat forces must leave Iraq by 2008 in order to make it clear to the Iraqis that we won't stick around as "apartheid cops."

I'm not really sure what that means. I understand what Carter meant when he used the word in relation to Israel, not that it was an appropriate comparison, but saying it in this context would imply exactly what? That U.S. troops are protecting the privileges of an elite from an oppressed majority? That is exactly what U.S. troops put an end to when they eliminated the Baath party--the tool by which a small band of Sunnis from Tikrit were able to keep Iraq's Shiia as second-class citizens. Iraq was an apartheid state, and Saddam's Republican Guard was its "apartheid police." All U.S. troops are doing is trying to keep alive as many Iraqis as possible--Shiia and Sunni alike.

Over at the Corner, Andy McCarthy links to this story from Haaretz:

A commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Wednesday that a commando unit has engraved the military organization's emblem into the side panel of an American warship stationed in the Persian Gulf.

Nur Ali Shushkari, the head of the Revolutionary Guards ground forces, told Iranian pro-government news agencies that the symbol was etched onto the ship by the crew of a submarine that had managed to reach the U.S. vessel without detection by radar.

Sometimes it seems like there is no limit to what Iranian military technology can do. Not long ago, Defense Tech ran an item on Iranian missile technology titled "Iran's Super Missile Will Defeat Great Satan, Steal Your Girlfriend." The post runs down some of the more "laughable" claims Iranian officials have made about what their missiles can do. Now they are claiming that their submarines can avoid detection by radar--what a breakthrough!

The Bertelsmann Foundation has released a survey "on the view of Germany held by Jews in Israel and the USA, and the view of Israel from Germany." The full survey is available here, but the most interesting results, I think, are those relating to the threat posed by a nuclear Iran.

At 62 percent, a significant majority of Germans understand the Iranian nuclear program to be an existential threat to the state of Israel. That number is slightly higher among Israelis, at 75 percent, and American Jews, at 73 percent.

The next question asks respondents if a military strike against Iran would be justified if negotiations fail. Interestingly, 80 percent of Israelis believe such action would be justified, which means that 5 percent believe an attack would be justified despite the fact that Iran doesn't pose an existential threat to the country. The same number of American Jews that believe Iran to be a threat to Israel likewise responded that an attack would be justified. But among Germans, only 32 percent believed an attack would be justified. Which is half the number that believe Iran to be a threat to the Jewish state's very existence. Can it be that one-third of Germans expect Israel to sit by idly while facing such a threat?

The third question explains the gap between the number of Germans who understand Iran to be a serious threat and the number who would consider military action justified if all other efforts at a peaceful solution fail. When asked if they believe that "there are situations that arise in the world in which military force must be used?" Only 39 percent of Germans answered yes. Not surprisingly, American and Israeli Jews answered yes by an overwhelming margin.

It seems reasonable to assume that German public is a good indicator of public opinion across Western Europe on the issue of Iran. If a vast majority of Germans can't conceive of using military force no matter what the circumstance, and wouldn't support Israeli action despite the fact that they understand a nuclear Iran to pose an existential threat to Israel, most Europeans likely agree--a sentiment reflected in the comments of French President Jacques Chirac earlier this month. If push comes to shove, Europe will oppose military action, no matter how strong the evidence against Iran, so why bother trying to make the case at all.

From the New York Times: Bush Declares Iran’s Arms Role in Iraq Is Certain, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Marc Santora.

From Powerline: The Under Secretary Responds, by John Hinderaker.

From Newsweek: Cheney Ally Blasts Pentagon Report, by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball.

From the Times: Bizarre Love Triangle: India, China and Russia.

From the Wall Street Journal: Awaiting the Dishonor Roll.

Via Michael Fumento, a video from the front lines in Iraq. Fumento explains:

Spc. Andy Johnson from A. Co., 1/506th, 101st Airborne sent me this video montage he put together from his vacation at Camp Corregidor this past year. It includes a couple of video clips of mine and some other good action shots - though I don't understand why he left out a great clip of an F-18 ground attack. (Betcha he inserts it when he reads this.) Among the most interesting is footage of a Humvee he and two others from his platoon were in when the back end was hit by an RPG-7. It knocked the whole back off and nobody inside suffered more than a bad case of nerves. Best of all, it's not set to heavy metal music - which I cannot stand - but rather a nice tune from The Man in Black.

The Houston Chronicle reports on the arrest of Daniel Joseph Maldonado, aka Daniel Aljughaifi. Maldonado is charged with "receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction outside the U.S.," and was escorted back to Houston from Kenya by two FBI agents on Monday. Maldonado was arrested in Kenya after fleeing from Somalia, where he allegedly trained with al Qaeda members under the direction of the Islamic Courts Union.

Lone Star Times has the scoop on Maldonado's brief stint as a blogger:

Let me preface what follows with the BIG disclaimer that everything I’m about to write is entirely circumstantial.

That said, there only appears to be one Daniel Aljughaifi bouncing around the Internet… and he has a blog.

He also appears to be an administrator and heavily involved with an online forum called The Islamic Network, although his last activity on the site appears to have been on 9/16/06.

Maybe we’re talking about two completely separate Daniel Aljughaifis here, in which case I apologize.

But not too much, since the Daniel Aljughaifi I’ve identified in the Islamic Network forum seems content to bitch about how unfair it was to convict Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria.

Other tidbits I noticed–Aljughaifi claims to be “half Puerto Rican and half white” and is “married to a black woman.” Good for him.

Also, a different forum user in April complained that Aljughaifi had suddenly dropped out of sight, and someone else named “Talib” (i.e, “student,” the root of the word “Taliban”) says they are looking to contact “Daniel” themselves.

Lone Star also points out this ridiculous sentence in the Chronicle story:

Al-Qaida is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Va.

Yes, al Qaeda is blamed for the attacks, because they did it!

From the Washington Post: Tough Questions We Were Right to Ask, by Douglas J. Feith.

From the Washington Times: Bolton hits agreement as 'bad signal' to Iran, by Bill Gertz.

From the New York Sun: Iran's Top Strategist, In His Own Words, by Steven Stalinsky.

From the Taipei Times: The best defense is a good offense, by John Tkacik.

From Defense Tech: Navy Phone Bill: $4 Billion.

David Axe has an excellent post up on the Aviation Week blog about the size of the U.S. fleet. I'll quibble with a few points Axe makes, but by and large, he is correct to assert that the size of the U.S. fleet is not the sole criterion for determining U.S. Naval power.

The thurst of Axe's argument:

By at least one very important metric, our fleet is bigger than it has been in decades. That metric is the number of combat aircraft sorties that our aircraft carriers can generate in a single day. We have a 1,000-sortie fleet, according to Bob Work from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. That’s the biggest fleet in the world, by far, and a bigger one than we’ve had since probably World War II.

Axe illustrates the point with a link to this neat, though slightly out of date graphic from globalsecurity.org (the British only have two active carriers, and the U.S. has 11 rather than 12 large carriers in service at the moment).

I spoke to Robert Work at length a few weeks ago, and he painted a similar picture of U.S. Naval dominance at the time (you can read what he had to say here). According to Axe, not only can American carriers "launch several times more sorties hitting ten times more targets per day than carriers from just a few years ago," but the U.S. Navy can also deploy carriers more quickly and in greater numbers than they once could.

All this adds up to the ability to put an overwhelming amount of firepower on target and on time. Axe says that "assuming you’ve got eight carriers on station plus half the amphibs--pretty much the maximum--that’s a thousand sorties hauling at least two precision-guided bombs apiece, for a grand total of around 2,000 aimpoints." When I spoke with Work, I came away with a significantly higher figure, though my post wasn't confined solely to the Navy's air power. If the Navy can hit 2,000 aimpoints a day from the air, it can hit more than twice as many with missiles. Work told me the Navy could probably hit something like 10,000 aimpoints in a given day if cruisers, destroyers, and subs were to employ their massive arsenal of cruise missiles.

In any case, Axe makes a legitimate point, which is that there is no nation on the planet that can challenge America's naval supremacy--not now, and not for a very long time. And though Axe minimizes the importance of overall ship numbers in comparison to the number of aimpoints those ships can hit, the fact is, by the more traditional metric of fleet size, the United States Navy has more ships than the next 17 navies combined. Work told me that during Pax Britannia, the Royal Navy understood supremacy to be a fleet larger than the next two largest navies combined.

Still, the U.S. Navy has set a target of a 313-ship fleet. That number now stands at 276. If the Navy can reign in costs on the LCS, which will comprise a substantial portion of that target number, then it makes sense to keep building. If, on the other hand, the Navy is unable to control costs on the LCS and its other major shipbuilding program, the DDG 1000, then it might make sense to reevaluate in light of the Navy's already dominant position relative to its potential competitors.

In this picture you can see four carriers, at the top is the USS John C. Stennis and at the bottom is the soon-to-be decommissioned USS John F. Kennedy. Sandwiched between the two massive carriers are the smaller French carrier Charles De Gaulle, and behind it the HMS Ocean, which is based on the British Invincible-class carrier design, but is slightly smaller and can't launch fixed-wing aircraft.

Mitt Romney made it official this morning. The former Massachusetts governor announced his candidacy for president at an automotive musuem in Dearborn, Michigan. Powerline has more on the address, but here is what Romney had to say on the war in Iraq:

Across the nation, there is debate about our future course in Iraq. Our desire to bring our troops home, safely and soon, is met with our recognition that if Iraq descends into all-out civil war, millions could die; that Iraq's Sunni region could become a base for Al Qaeda; that its Shia region could be seized by Iran; that Kurd tension could destabilize Turkey; and even that the broader Middle East could be drawn into conflict. The possible implications for America and for American interests from such developments could be devastating. It could mean a future with far more military involvement and far more loss of American life. For these reasons, I believe that so long as there is a reasonable prospect of success, our wisest course is to seek stability in Iraq, with additional troops endeavoring to secure the civilian population.

Barack Obama has already stepped back from remarks he made the other day claiming that we "have seen over three thousand lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."

Here's the video clip, which was widely circulated by conservative blogs yesterday.

The New York Times reports that Obama has "restructure[d]" his remarks--he only meant "that their service hasn’t been honored because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.” Hard to take that seriously when none of the Democratic candidates has proposed any type of strategy that would give the troops a better chance at success. Allahpundit does an excellent job of explaining the conundrum facing the Democrats:

Of course he thinks their lives were wasted. Everyone on the anti-war side does; that’s one of the reasons they want to end the war. But they can’t say that because it dishonors the dead so they’re forced into rhetorical pretzels like the one Pelosi tied herself into a few weeks ago with Diane Sawyer. Army Lawyer summed up her position at the time thusly: “They didn’t die for nothing, they died for something stupid.”

From the New York Post: A Putrid Payoff, by John Podhoretz.

From the Washington Post: A Blogger for Edwards Resigns After Complaints, by Howard Kurtz.

From Bloomberg: New York Magazine's Head Doctors Analyze Bush, by Andrew Ferguson.

From the New York Times: Iran and the Nameless Briefers, by the editors.

From the Telegraph: Iraqi insurgents using Austrian rifles from Iran, by Thomas Harding.

The Corner's Andy McCarthy links to this New York Sun report from Eli Lake on Iranian weapons in Iraq. According to Lake:

Indeed, while the specific intelligence on the explosive formed projectiles is no longer disputed in the intelligence community, the CIA is questioning whether their export from Iran represents a strategy of the regime or the rogue actions of one of its security services, known as the Quds Force. According to reports from the briefing in Baghdad yesterday, American commanders said Iran's export of the bombs to Iraqi Shiite militias was a deliberate strategy of the regime, noting that the Quds Force reports directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Says McCarthy:

Sure. Khamenei has reaffirmed that "Death to America" is Iran's motto, Ahmadinejad says a world without America is achievable, we have 30 years of evidence of the Iranian regime acting on those assumptions, and we know the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Quds (Jerusalem) Force have long been the mullahs' arms for exporting their revolution. But when we catch the Iranians red-handed killing American troops in Iraq, the CIA figures it may not really be the regime but rogue elements. One can easily see why Doug Feith is getting grief for not taking everything the CIA says to the bank.

Senator Lieberman addressed the Munich Conference on Security Policy on Sunday. The senator took a not so subtle jibe at John Kerry, saying America is "a principled nation, not a pariah nation. He also responded to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who two days ago asked the same audience, "What is a uni-polar world? No matter how we beautify this term, it means one single center of power, one single center of force and one single master."

Here is an excerpt from Lieberman's speech:

Much as the founding of NATO in 1949 put to rest doubts about America’s long-term commitment to the security of Europe, so too would a global NATO end any uncertainty that exists today about the West’s long-term commitment to democracy in nations around the world, including, particularly, in the Muslim world. It would make clear that our presence in places like Afghanistan is not just a temporary arrangement, subject to the whims of public opinion and the leaders of the moment, but part of a deeper, formal alliance bound by common principles from which we cannot and will not withdraw.

These are the same principles enshrined in the original NATO charter, which declares the alliance is founded on “democracy, individual liberty, and rule of law.”

These principles know no borders-and they are under attack today across many borders. Our enemies are clear about who they are. Radical Islamists have stated openly, in the words of one jihadist group: “We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it.”

I cannot speak about the global war of ideas without also acknowledging our struggle in Iraq.

I understand the frustration and anger that the Iraq war has created in America and toward America throughout the world, but I ask that those feelings not blind us to the larger truths about the enemy we are fighting, and about our shared interest in its defeat.

We are fighting in Iraq against the same violent ideology of radical Islam that NATO is fighting in Afghanistan and against which so many of our societies are struggling worldwide. The asymmetrical war of ideas I have discussed is irretrievably bound up in the outcome of the war in Iraq, as our common enemy keenly appreciates-at times it seems, better than we do.

As we have seen in Iraq, America is capable of mistakes large and small, but we are a principled nation, not a pariah nation.

Surely principled in the sense that America remains the indispensable nation in the fight for freedom throughout the world, precisely because we are willing to put our powers-economic, diplomatic, and, yes, military-in pursuit of our principles. But we have not and cannot act alone.

President Putin said yesterday that there is -one single center of power-in the world today. He is correct.

But that power is not the United States. It is the power of freedom.

Freedom speaks all languages and knows no borders. Walls and prisons cannot contain it, and totalitarianism cannot defeat it.

But the cause of freedom does not belong to one nation alone. On the contrary, the greatest triumphs of democracy in the twentieth century were achieved by the strength of our alliances, including particularly NATO.

Today once again our community of democratic nations faces profound challenges, and we have encountered disappointing setbacks.

But these challenges must call us now to remember who we are and what we stand for and to summon the will to defend both.

Rather than falling victim to doubt or exhaustion or division, let us sustain and strengthen our faith in all that binds and animates us-the values of freedom and tolerance and justice and democracy. Let us move forward, united and confident in our ultimate victory-the victory of freedom.

From the Washington Times: Beijing's dark designs, by James Holmes.

From the New York Sun: Vindicating Douglas Feith, by the editors.

From the New York Times: Why Are the Pacifists So Passive? by Lynn Chu & John Yoo.

From the Christian Science Monitor: Russia intensifies efforts to rebuild its military machine, by Fred Weir.

From the Washington Post: Military Ties Iran To Arms In Iraq, by Joshua Partlow.

Fantastic and profane parody of the correspondence between John Edwards and Amanda Marcotte, editor of Pandagon and a member of the Edwards '08 campaign team.

Here's a sample:

To: Senator John Edwards
From: Amanda Marcotte
Re: Focus Group

Dear Senator Edwards:

To help you hone your campaign message for the online community, I organized an impromptu focus group of top progressive bloggers for tomorrow night at the Raleigh Airport Hilton. This group will include political analyst Jeremy Lacewell of Die Mother****ing ZioNazi NeoCon Mother****ers Die, feminist Kiersten Lomax of Hands Off My C**t, and recent immigrant blogger Mohammed al-Aziz of I Intend To Detonate a Nuclear Weapon in St. Louis.

This event will help you get acquainted with online mainstream progressives, discuss the issues important to them, and come up with a strategy for countering the insane Xtian Jesusist lynchmobs. We will be serving lacto-vegetarian snacks and Ecstasy to help facilitate a free-wheeling discussion.

Hope you can make it!!!

Amanda

HT The Corner

Senator John McCain was one of only 14 senators to vote against the confirmation of General George Casey to be the Army's next chief of staff. In his comments on the floor of the Senate, McCain explained his vote:

So, I want to tell my friends that people in the military, particularly our young officers, are watching what we do here. We teach them, we teach them in our service schools and we teach our noncommissioned officers and our junior officers, you're responsible. You're responsible for success or failure. That's why we appoint you as leaders. And in this case, this leader, despite his honorable character and his dedication to this country, has not led and his responsibility has not been carried out.

A friend of THE WEEKLY STANDARD sent along an email the other day which echoed McCain's concerns:

Apropos of Casey's hearing, I was struck by this quote from Field Marshal Slim's memoir, Defeat Into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942-1945. Slim wrote the following of his feelings after the Allies had been chased out of Burma in 1942, when he was a corps commander:

"For myself I had little to be proud of; I could not rate my generalship high. The only test of generalship is success, and I had succeeded in nothing I had attempted. . . . In preparation, in execution, in strategy, and in tactics we had been worsted, and we had paid the penalty--defeat. Defeat is bitter. Bitter to the common soldier, but terribly bitter to his general. The soldier may comfort himself with the thought that, whatever the result, he has done his duty faithfully and steadfastly, but the commander has failed in his duty if he has not won victory--for that is is his duty. He has no other comparable to it."

We haven't been defeated in Iraq, but by any standard Casey "has failed in his duty."

You can read McCain's remarks in their entirety here.

From the New York Times: Edwards Learns Blogs Can Cut 2 Ways, by John M. Broder.

From the Wall Street Journal: Rudy vs. Hillary in 2008? by Peggy Noonan.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Maintaining America's high-tech edge, by Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

From the Washington Times: War resolution seen hurting morale, by S.A. Miller.

When British soldier Lance Corporal Matty Hull of the Household Cavalry Regiment was killed in Iraq in March of 2003, it was no more than a few minutes before it became clear that his death had been caused by friendly fire--a "blue on blue incident." Two A-10s from the Idaho National Guard had mistakenly strafed a convoy of British sodiers, killing Hull and wounding one of his comrades. The official investigation into Hull's death had been held up ever since by demands that a tape of the incident be made available the British coroner’s court charged with heading the inquest. Yesterday, a British tabloid made a transcript of the tape available and posted a portion of it on the web, available here.

As the New York Times reported yesterday, the pilots "fall apart in a duet of shock, panicked swearing and audible weeping, after learning the what they've done." One says he's "going to be sick," the other let's out a scream and a torrent of expletives. There's no mistaking their anguish for indifference. Yet the Sun quotes an unnamed U.S. military source as saying "The pilots need to be brought to account.” The tabloid is certainly doing its part to drum up public support for some kind of legal action against the two men.

Italy, too, is attempting to hold U.S. soldiers to account for mistakes made in Iraq. Reuters reported yesterday that an Italian judge has ordered Mario Lozano of the U.S. Army's 69th Infantry Regiment to stand trial in the death of Italian agent Nicola Calipari, whose vehicle was shot-up by U.S. soldiers while transporting an Italian journalist--held hostage by insurgents only hours earlier--to the Baghdad airport. Lorenzo will be tried in absentia for the voluntary homicide of Calipari in addition to two counts of attempted murder.

And last month, a Spanish court issued an international search and capture warrant for three U.S. servicemen whose tank fired on the Palestine Hotel in April 2003, killing Spanish TV cameraman José Couso. The three servicemen were cleared of any improper conduct by a Pentagon investigation which found their actions justified, despite the tragic consequence.

I spoke with Jeremy Rabkin, frequent WEEKLY STANDARD contributor and professor of international law at Cornell University, about these cases and what they mean for relations between the United States and our "allies."

Rabkin says that in the case of Italy, that country "has a historic claim that they will protect Italians out in the world." Because the United States takes a similar position, he says we shouldn't be "too sanctimonious." Still, he says that the Italian charges essentially amount to an accusation that the United States did not investigate in good faith. "It's shocking that they are so distrustful," and the charges basically imply that the Italians "believe we meant to kill, or that we believe you are so reckless," that the actions of this soldier can be called murder.

In the case of Spain, Rabkin says the issuing of a warrant is "a reminder that Spain is a left-wing government and not to be trusted." In contrast to Italy, which at least "maintains the pretense of being a serious country," the Spanish simply aren't an ally and aren't serious.

Finally, Rabkin says it's unlikely the British case will be pursued, but that the investigation is alarming nonetheless. In each of these incidents, the lesson, and "it is well for us to learn this," is that these countries are "putting us on notice that they are completely unreliable partners." How can we go to war with our allies if American soldiers can be held liable in a foreign courts for mistakes made in good faith?

And in the realm of pure speculation: Many presumed that the Italian government had paid a ransom to free the captive journalist that Calipari was escorting to the airport. That the car was speeding towards a check point, with no indication that the driver would stop, might be explained by the Italian government's reluctance to answer questions about who had been paid what and where. Rabkin said they "probably didn't want to explain themselves," which means that the Italians may well have "perpetrated this provocation."

The bottom line is that our supposed allies believe "there are no innocent mistakes because we are waging an illegal war." They are "playing a game to embarrass us and show people at home that they are standing up to the United States." With friends like these...

From the Financial Times:

Israeli and Lebanese soldiers exchanged fire on Wednesday after Lebanese troops shot in the air as an Israeli patrol crossed a security fence near the border to search for explosives planted by Hizbollah guerrillas. No one was hurt.

And from the Jerusalem Post:

National Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Thursday that it was "not impossible" that summer 2007 would see another conflict in the North, one in which Syria was also involved.

According to Ben-Eliezer, the IDF was not prepared for such a war.

From the Wall Street Journal: Hillary on Iraq.

From the Chicago Sun-Times: Who Won in the Senate?, by Robert Novak.

From Real Clear Politics: John Edwards Gets a Makeover, by Gerard Baker.

From the Los Angeles Times: Dissent grows in Iran, by Kim Murphy.

From CNN: U.S. military: Iraqi lawmaker is U.S. Embassy bomber, by Michael Ware.

From the Washington Post:

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) said yesterday that Congress should consider a "war-on-terrorism tax," reducing the need for lawmakers to cut domestic programs to pay for security spending.

Lieberman said the proposed increase in the Pentagon's budget for next fiscal year will squeeze funding for critical domestic programs.

"When you put together the [Pentagon] budget and the Homeland Security budgets, we need to ask people to help us in a way that they know when they pay more it will go for their security," he said at a Budget Committee hearing.

In other tax news, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), in an effort to "strengthen the link between the taxes we pay and the politicians we elect," has sponsored a bill to change the deadline for filing federal income taxes from April 15 to the first Monday in November--the day before Election Day.

I imagine most Americans would find considerable consolation in knowing their tax dollars were going directly to fund national security programs, and pushing back the filing deadline to the day before election day...well that just makes good sense.

When Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi requested access to military aircraft, she had to know she was inviting trouble. And the White House is dragging out the negotiations, making sure the media has enough time to chew over the details of Pelosi's request. Here are some of the latest comments:

From CNN's Lou Dobbs:

CORRESPONDENT: "It's clear skies for Nancy Pelosi. The Pentagon is providing the House speaker with an Air Force plane large enough to accommodate her staff, family, supporters and members of the Californian delegation when she travels around the country. . . .

"Pelosi wants routine access to a larger plane. It includes 42 business class seats, a fully-enclosed state room, an entertainment center, a private bed, state-of-the-art communications system and a crew of 16. . . . It would be 42 people, and clearly she won't be the only one on this plane. She wants to have members of the congressional delegation. And her critics will say, look, this is a very nice perk that she can share with her colleagues and use as leverage, should she need to."

LOU DOBBS: "Well, it's really a fascinating thing: 42. She could take a circus with her, for crying out loud."

And from the Examiner:

Well, that didn't take long. After campaigning against the 'waste, fraud, and abuse' of the Bush administration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now wants to be cut in on the take.

The woman who five months ago said, "Democrats are committed to a new direction in the way our government does business so taxpayers' money is handled responsibly," is dunning the White House to put an Air Force jet at her disposal - reportedly, not only for her use, but for her family's as well. . . .

But all of this luxury doesn't come cheap. Hourly operating costs for an Air Force C-32--the planes that typically carry the vice president, the first lady, and Cabinet officials--are about $15,000 an hour.

So for one of those planes to fly the speaker home to San Francisco, drop her off, and fly back and get her, would cost taxpayers around $300,000 - while round-trip commercial fares start at $233. That doesn't qualify as "waste and abuse"?

According to FAS.org, the C-32 is "configured for 45 passengers and 16 crew, [and] is designed for a 4,150 nautical mile mission, roughly the distance from Andrews to Frankfurt, Germany." It also has an open bar.

The C-32

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was the featured guest at a reporter's breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor this morning. USA Today's On Deadline has the scoop on the svelte governor's comments on the war in Iraq and fellow Republican John McCain.

Asked if fellow Republican McCain's embrace of the increasingly unpopular war would create problems for him as a presidential nominee, Huckabee said:

"That and a Washington address probably are not strong attributes." Would American voters elect a nominee who had supported the war so strongly? "If the wheels are coming off even more, then everything about the war is a huge problem," he responded. If things "improve or stabilize" in Iraq, that could change.

What about Bush's leadership of the war? The administration seemed ill-prepared to deal with the situation that followed after Saddam Hussein was ousted, he said. "There does seem to be an 18-minute gap ... between the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a stable democracy" there.

Huckabee defended his own ability to handle foreign policy as president, despite his lack of Washington experience. He praised President Ronald Reagan's management of the end of the Cold War. What about Bush, another former governor? "I don't think it is necessarily helpful," he said, "but I also don't think it's overwhelmingly harmful. . . . I don't think there's an automatic transference to the next guy."

Huckabee doesn't have any foreign policy record, but he will surely have his own "huge problem" to deal with come the primary, mainly an "insistence on raising taxes at almost every turn throughout his final term.”

From the Los Angeles Times: Keys to a successful surge, by Max Boot.

From the Washington Times: Enemy doubles IED use in Iraq, by Rowan Scarborough.

From the New York Post: A Cowardly Congress . . .

From CNSNews.com: Who's Blocking Debate on Iraq War?, by Susan Jones.

From the Washington Times: Pelosi's push for jet remains up in air, by Rowan Scarborough and Charles Hurt.

From the New York Sun: Spitting on Veterans, by Seth Gitell.

From National Journal: Military cutting orders for costly high-tech weapons, by Art Pine.

From the Times: As Iraq suffers, all eyes are turning to Iran, by Gerard Baker.

From the Wall Street Journal: Can There Be a Liberal Iraq?, by Bret Stephens.

I just saw the text of a speech delivered today by Senator Joe Lieberman on the floor of the Senate. Lieberman states his intention to vote against cloture on the Warner-Levin resolution, and he scolds his fellow senators for supporting a resolution that would, "by codifying our disunity, by disavowing the mission our troops are about to undertake--confirm our enemies’ belief in American weakness."

Here is a choice excerpt. You can read the full text here.

Now, a new course has been chosen. A new commander is in place in Iraq, confirmed by this Senate. A new Secretary of Defense is in place at the Pentagon, confirmed by this Senate. And a new strategy has begun to be put into action on the ground in Iraq by our troops.

It is altogether proper that we debate our policy in Iraq. It should be a debate that is as serious as the situation in Iraq and that reflects the powers the Constitution gives to Congress in matters of war.

But that, sadly, is not the debate that the Warner-Levin resolution invites us to have. I am going to speak strongly against this resolution because I feel strongly about it. I do so with respect for my colleagues who have offered it, but I believe its passage would so compromise America’s security, present and future, that I will say so in the clearest terms I can.

The resolution before us, its sponsors concede, will not stop the new strategy from going forward. As we speak, thousands of troops are already in Baghdad, with thousands more moving into position to carry out their Commander’s orders. This resolution does nothing to alter these facts.

Instead, its sponsors say it will send a message of rebuke from the Senate to the president, from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other. But there is a world beyond Pennsylvania Avenue that is watching and listening.

What we say here is being heard in Baghdad by Iraqi moderates, trying to decide whether the Americans will stand with them. We are being heard by our men and women in uniform, who will be interested to know whether we support the plan they have begun to carry out. We are being heard by the leaders of the thuggish regimes in Iran and Syria, and by Al Qaeda terrorists, eager for evidence that America’s will is breaking. And we are being heard across America by our constituents, who are wondering if their Congress is capable of serious action, not just hollow posturing.

This resolution is not about Congress taking responsibility. It is the opposite. It is a resolution of irresolution.

For the Senate to take up a symbolic vote of no confidence on the eve of a decisive battle is unprecedented, but it is not inconsequential. It is an act which, I fear, will discourage our troops, hearten our enemies, and showcase our disunity. And that is why I will vote against cloture.

If you believe that General Petraeus and his new strategy have a reasonable chance of success in Iraq, then you should resolve to support him and his troops through the difficult days ahead. On the other hand, if you believe that this new strategy is flawed or that our cause is hopeless in Iraq, then you should vote to stop it. Vote to cut off funds. Vote for a binding timeline for American withdrawal. If that is where your convictions lie, then have the courage of your convictions to accept the consequences of your convictions. That would be a resolution.

The non-binding measure before us, by contrast, is an accumulation of ambiguities and inconsistencies. It is at once for the war but also against the war. It pledges its support to the troops in the field but also washes its hands of what they are doing. It approves more troops for Anbar but not for Baghdad.

We cannot have it both ways. We cannot vote full confidence in General Petraeus, but no confidence in his strategy. We cannot say that the troops have our full support, but disavow their mission on the eve of battle. This is what happens when you try to wage war by committee. That is why the Constitution gave that authority to the President as Commander in Chief.

Cynics may say this kind of thing happens all of the time in Congress. In this case, however, they are wrong. If it passed, this resolution would be unique in American legislative history. I contacted the Library of Congress on this question last week and was told that, never before, when American soldiers have been in harm’s way, fighting and dying in a conflict that Congress had voted to authorize, has Congress turned around and passed a resolution like this, disapproving of a particular battlefield strategy.

From the New York Post: A Ban On Victory.

From the Sunday Times: We’re far too nice to Muslim extremists, by Minette Marrin.

From Real Clear Politics: North Korean Rumors, by Richard Halloran.

From the Washington Times: U.S. threatens crushing offensive to calm Baghdad.

From National Review Online: What’s Our Iran Policy?, by Andrew C. McCarthy.

Governor Mitt Romney addressed a group of conservative House members at a Heritage Foundation retreat in Baltimore today. The presidential hopeful had some strong words for Hillary Clinton, whose position on Iran was met with groans from a pro-Israel audience last night at an AIPAC-sponsored dinner in New York .

Here are the relevant bits from Romney:

Someone else considering a run for the White House recently addressed the Iran issue, and you won't be surprised to find out that I don't agree with her approach.

In a speech last night in New York City, Senator Hillary Clinton said that she needs to quote 'understand' unquote Iran better--and to help her with her education process, that we should quote 'engage Iran' unquote.

Friends, someone who doesn't understand Iran hasn't been paying attention--at this point, we don't need a listening tour with Iran. While I support gathering intelligence about our adversaries in any way possible, engaging is not the right policy. To the contrary, economic and diplomatic isolation must be our priority.

Indeed, she argued that our strategy of engagement with the Soviet Union during the Cold War was a model for how we could deal with Iran. Now, for all the former Soviet Union's flaws, at least they maintained a commitment to national survival. They were not suicidal. The same cannot be said about the Iranian regime. And we must stop making analogies that are disconnected from the world in which we operate.

And someone who wants to engage Iran displays a troubling timidity towards a terrible threat.

You can read more about Romney's appearance over at Red State.

He's put up another apology. As John Hinderaker points out at Poweline, "this one shows unmistakable signs that the Post's editors have now caught up with Arkin." Arkin offers this in the way of an explanation:

Mercenary, of course, is an insult and pejorative, and it does not accurately describe the condition of the American soldier today. I sincerely apologize to anyone in the military who took my words literally.

Not very convincing. What other way is there to take that word? He also adds that "In our instant and globally wired world, these very men and women are additionally burdened by their access to our debates and words." I would say that we are all burdened by Arkin's words, at least the Post's editors are now shouldering some of that burden along with us.

Now available at Time.com is Bill's latest. It's the story of how the Democrats went from mild to wild in just a few short months--from being "the very soul of moderation" immediately following the election, to one-upping each other in "a tide of antiwar agitation" as the presidential race heats up. Here's a sample:

But in politics, as in life, exercises in competitive indignation can get out of hand. Biden got rolling his resolution disapproving of the surge--but without thinking through the counterattack that would be opened up. Now, as the troops begin to enter the theater, Republicans can ask whether the main effect of these merely symbolic resolutions isn't to undermine the chances of Americans succeeding and to encourage our enemies.

You can read the whole thing here.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who frequently contributes to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, released his first book today, a memoir of his conversion to Islam and his subsequent radicalization and involvement with a group of American-based jihadists. I've not had the chance to read the book yet, though I've spoken to Daveed at length about his fascinating journey to jihad and back. He's one of the good guys now, and frequently posts news and analysis from the war on terror at the Counterterrorism Blog.

I strongly urge our readers to check out the book, My Year Inside Radical Islam. And if you'd like to hear more about it, Daveed appeared on Hannity & Colmes last night, you can watch the video here.

Two days ago, William M. Arkin, the Washington Post's national and homeland security blogger, wrote a column that accused American troops of being ingrates, mercenaries, rapists, murders, and just about every other nasty thing he could think of, all because a few soldiers told NBC News that the American people weren't supporting them if they weren't supporting their mission. The original post set off an absolute firestorm in the blogosphere, which was surely the intent of the author--he couldn't have written a more provocative column.

Now Arkin has dug his heels in with a follow-on post. You really have to read Arkin's stuff to believe it. Pathetically, he plays the victim card.

Well, one thing's abundantly clear about who will actually defend our rights to say what we believe: It isn't the hundreds who have written me saying they are soldiers or veterans or war supporters or real Americans--who also advise me to move to another country, to get f@##d, or to die a painful, violent death.

Contrary to the typically inaccurate and overstated assertion in dozens of blogs, hundreds of comments, and thousands of e-mails I've received, I've never written that soldiers should "shut up," quit whining, be spit upon, or that they have no right to an opinion.

No he's never written that. He's written something far more insulting: that the troops should be grateful they're not being called baby killers. So add Arkin to the list of thin-skinned provocateurs who think that the "right to say what we believe" means that the targets in your rhetorical gunsights don't have an equal right to fire back. Here is what stirred Arkin's ill-tempered critics:

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order.

Sure, it is the junior enlisted men who go to jail. But even at anti-war protests, the focus is firmly on the White House and the policy. We don't see very many "baby killer" epithets being thrown around these days, no one in uniform is being spit upon.

The left has tried desperately to portray itself as pro-military. It was a heroic effort, but it was finally too much for William Arkin, who has let us know how at least some on the anti-war left really feel, and it's not a pretty sight.

Democrats often point to Afghanistan as "the real war on terror". They say that Iraq is a mere distraction, and that the strain of that conflict on the American military has led to a situation where, in the words of Howard Dean, "We don't have enough troops in Afghanistan."

Only it seems that the situation in Afghanistan isn't as dire as the Democrats would have us believe. From the AP:

NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Richard Nugee said Wednesday, however, that it will be NATO troops who will be launching the real offensive, referring to upcoming military operations but giving no details.

"We do not believe that there will be a spring offensive by the Taliban," Nugee said. "There will be an upward surge in violence as the weather gets better ... I don't think it will amount to an offensive. An offensive is a very symbolic phrase, it means a huge upsurge in a very short amount of time. We just don't think that will happen."

Last year, the Taliban launched a record number of attacks, and some 4,000 people, most of them militants, died in insurgency-related violence, according to a tally by The Associated Press based on reports from Afghan, NATO and U.S.-led coalition officials. Militants also launched a record 139 suicide attacks in 2006, according to the U.S. military.

That isn't to say that the situation in Afghanistan, just like that in Iraq, wouldn't be much improved by the addition of several thousand American troops. But it sounds like NATO may be doing an adequate job of things.

From the Washington Times: No third way in Iraq, by Tony Blankley.

From the Wall Street Journal: If the Shoe Fits, by Mark Laswell.

From the New York Times: Chirac Unfazed by Nuclear Iran, Then Backtracks, by Elaine Sciolino and Katrin Bennhold.

From the Washington Times: Chavez to usher in 'maximum revolution'.

From BBC: US warns Iran on Iraq insurgents.

From AFP: China Looks to New Fighters, Sparking Regional Arms Race: Report.

From ABC News: Iranian-Made IEDs Are on the Rise, by Richard Esposito and Maddy Sauer.

From Fox News: Officials: White House Holding Back Report Detailing Iran's Meddling in Iraq, by Molly Henneberg and Nick Simeone.

From CNN: Iran involvement suspected in Karbala compound attack.

From the Tampa Tribune: Marines In Iraq Decry Lack Of Laser System, by Richard Lardner.

Earlier today, James Baker endorsed President Bush's plan to surge troops into Baghdad, as did Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the bipartisan Iraq Study Group with Baker. Baker told the Senate Foreign Relation Committee that "the president's plan ought to be given a chance . . . Just give it a chance." Said Hamilton, "If we can put this together there is a chance we can reasonably succeed. But we realize that is a very, very daunting challenge."

The Iraq Study Group's final report did recommend "a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective." And the U.S. commander, General David Petraeus, has determined just that. Democrats have been vociferous in their opposition to any proposed surge of troops, but in the days following the report's release, they overwhelmingly endorsed its recommendations.

Now that Baker and Hamilton have reiterated their support for an increase in troop numbers, Democrats will find themselves in the awkward position of having to go along with the plan or disavow the group's recommendations, which have otherwise been warmly embraced by the Democratic party. Either way, Baker and Hamilton have just made life a lot more difficult for Congressional Democrats, denying them the opportunity to hide behind a bipartisan commission as they push for withdrawal and defeat in Iraq.

Bob Herbert wrote a really touching column yesterday about how the antiwar protesters that demonstrated on the Mall this weekend really do love America (Subscription).

Said Herbert, "You can say what you want about the people opposed to this wretched war in Iraq, try to stereotype them any way you can. But you couldn't walk among them for more than a few minutes on Saturday without realizing that they love their country as much as anyone ever has."

Unfortunately, that just isn't true. Approximately 300 anarchists showed how much they "love their country" by spray-painting anarchist symbols on the steps of the Capitol building. I know dissent is patriotic and all, but vandalizing a monument to American democracy means you don't love America.

Two anarchists loving their country. From the Lone Star Times.

From the Jerusalem Post (HT the Corner): What a nuclear Iran would do, by Barry Rubin.

From BBC: Gaffes tarnish Royal's campaign, by Clive Myrie.

From the Washington Times: How the 'axis' seeks the killer missile, by Bill Gertz.

From the Fourth Rail: Iraqi Army battles Shia cult, Sunni insurgents in Najaf, by Bill Roggio.

From Defense News: After China Test, U.S. Lawmaker Urges More Space Spending, by William Matthews.

Defense Update has more news on the Pentagon's plans to deploy 4,100 additional mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles to Iraq within the year. Over the next two months, the Navy, which is managing the project, will test commercially available vehicles from nine different companies before selecting a winner. Among those competing is Force Protection Industries Inc., which manufactures the Cougar Joint Explosive Ordnance Disposal Rapid Response Vehicle, which you can read about here.

These vehicles can play an important role in reducing IED-related casualties, so we will keep an eye on this program as it moves along.

I'll take the one on the left.

Jane Fonda spoke to antiwar protesters on the National Mall yesterday. She also wore a button that read "Vietnam Veterans Against the War." I'm sure there are many Vietnam veterans who are opposed to the war in Iraq, but wouldn't it be more appropriate if Fonda wore a button that read "NVA Veterans Against the War."

Courtesy of Associated Press

That's the question Johns Hopkins history professor David A. Bell asked in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. Because so few were killed that day, at least relative to the number of Russians killed in the Second World War, Bell thinks we might have overreacted.

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Occasional WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Michael Tanji had this to say in response to Bell's question:

When I ran a warning shop I used to love hearing this from all the blind-wearing nay-sayers. Someone doesn't have ICBMs so they're not a threat. Someone can't project force via an aircraft carrier, so they're not a threat. I watched two kids in western Europe trump the best technical defenses of the government--better than rival nation-states--but for some reason they weren't a threat. It is as if the entire body of unconventional warfare doesn't exist for these people. Save for the suitcase nuke, the first four hours of '24' this season could be playing out today. Capacity is not the issue. Fact is they don't need to cause excessive death/destruction because they are threatening our existence without it. Every "loyal dissenter" says they would not have voted 'yes' then if they knew what they knew now; yet with the threat of Iran dancing in their faces they refuse act accordingly because THIS TIME they're not going to be DUPED.

Over at the Corner, John Podhoretz linked to another interesting response, this one from Tim Sumner of 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America. In case you don't have the time to read it, his answer is yes...9/11 was really that bad.

From the New York Times: 250 Are Killed in Major Iraq Battle, by Damien Cave.

From the Washington Post: Baghdad is Key, by Stephen J. Hadley.

From the New York Times: Iranian Reveals Plan to Expand Role in Iraq, by James Glanz.

From Time: Kim Jong Il's Nuclear Ambitions, by Nicholas Eberstadt.

From the Washington Post: Clinton's Presidential Posturing, by David S. Broder.

From CNN: Missile defense shield test aced as dummy target hit.

From the AP: Senior Chinese officer predicts weapons will be deployed in space, by Edith M. Lederer.

From WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Gerard Baker in today's Times:

All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.

Read the whole thing here.

From Middle East Quarterly: My Problem with Jimmy Carter's Book, by Kenneth W. Stein.

From the New York Sun: Turnaround in Baghdad, by Nibras Kazimi.

From City Journal:Yes, Rudy Giuliani Is a Conservative, by Steven Malanga.

From Newsweek: Interview with Lin Chong-Pin, former Taiwan vice defense minister, by Jonathan Adams.

From the L.A. Times: Cooperative tone of Sadr surprises U.S., by Borzou Daragahi.

From the Washington Times: Untie Military Hands, by James A. Lyons Jr.

The junior senator from New York will have a busy schedule over the next 2 years, what with all the campaign stops, TV appearances, and her work in the Senate. Which is why her decision to pursue as many committee assignments as possible seems a bit strange. Elizabeth Benjamin, blogging at Albany's Times Union, points out that Clinton will serve on no less than 3 subcommittees of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And this is in addition to her work on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, of which she chairs the subcommittee on Superfund and Environmental Health.

Benjamin also notes that John Kerry's absence from the Senate during his 2004 run prompted considerable criticism. What kind of criticism will Clinton come in for if she is only occasionally able to attend meetings of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over:

policies and programs to counter emerging threats (such as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, illegal drugs, and other asymmetric threats); information warfare programs; technology base programs; special operations programs; emerging operational concepts; Foreign Military Sales (FMS); technology export policies; Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction program issues; DOE non-proliferation programs; doctrine and R & D supporting non-traditional military operations, including peacekeeping and low-intensity conflict; and DOD commands and agencies including Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA); Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA); and SOCOM.

From MSNBC, U.S. stages 2nd airstrike in Somalia.

From the AP, Army Increase Will Cost $70B.

From the New York Times, Clash Pits Hezbollah Against Rule in Lebanon.

From Commentary, Backroom Dealing on the Golan.

From Defense Tech, Navy's Deadly New Darts.

From the Los Angeles Times, Daily body count in Baghdad falls.

The Republican senator will soon make it official. ABC News reports that Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback will declare his presidential candidacy on January 20. The Weekly Standard’s Terry Eastland profiled Brownback a few months back and recently reported on the senator's ground game Iowa.

Former DNC Chair, Clinton ally, and Global Crossing sweepstakes winner Terry McAuliffe dumps on Kerry in his new book, "What a Party! My Life Among Democrats: Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators and Other Wild Animals." According to the AP, he calls Kerry’s ’04 campaign “one of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics." Ouch. It’s a good bet these two won’t be dining together at the Nantucket yacht club this summer.

The folks over at Foreign Policy have posted an interesting debate between Matt Continetti of Weekly Standard and the American Prospect’s Matthew Yglesias on the merits of this piece, "Why Hawks Win” in FP’s latest issue. Here’s the link.

Sony has filed a "patent for a motorized skateboard that riders steer by shifting their weight,” Techweb.com reports.

Weekly Standard contributor Max Boot goes at it with British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the topic of U.S. foreign policy on the New York Times web site. You may find the lengthy discussion here. One thing Max Boot addresses is the rampant historical amnesia on who supported the invasion of Iraq. The support was broad and bipartisan.

Although you've [the moderator] asked me to reply to Geoffrey's claim that "the whole 'democratization project' is a fantasy," I'd like to begin by responding to the sentence in Geoffrey's posting that immediately follows: "Nor does it seem to have occurred to the zealots who dreamt up the war that, even were forcible democratization feasible, it might not actually be desirable in terms of the American national interest, and that genuinely democratic elections in Iraq -- or Iran or the Palestinian territories -- would be likely to have outcomes highly unpalatable to Washington."

Since you want a clash, I'll oblige by taking exception to Geoffrey's casual slur: to wit, that this war was "dreamt up" by "zealots." I know this has become part of the accepted mythology, but is this really a helpful way to characterize such disparate and distinguished supporters of the invasion as Fouad Ajami, Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, David Brooks, Eliot Cohen, Ivo Daalder, Les Gelb, Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Martin Indyk, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Bernard Lewis, Michael O'Hanlon, Ken Pollack, Dennis Ross, Natan Sharansky, Tom Friedman, George Will, Fareed Zakaria, and the editors of the Washington Post, Daily Telegraph, and Wall Street Journal? To say nothing of politicians like Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jose Maria Aznar, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Michael Howard, William Hague, and John Howard. Are they all "zealots"? What about the overwhelming majority of Americans who supported the war when it began? More zealots? Or were the zealots only those people within the U.S. government who supported the war: the likes of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, George Tenet, Steve Hadley, and Tommy Franks?

I can't speak for my fellow "zealots" but as someone who supported the invasion—and who, unlike some others, is still willing to admit it—I have always assumed that "genuine democratic elections" in Iraq or anywhere else might well produce outcomes that were "highly unpalatable to Washington." After all, I'm far from happy with many of the actions taken by freely elected governments in Paris, Berlin, Ankara—and, for that matter, Washington D.C. Why should Baghdad be any different? The point that Geoffrey elides is: Was the pre-2003 status quo in the Middle East a palatable one? Obviously not, since it was this status quo that produced the 9/11 hijackers and numerous other terrorists and tyrants. And despite the terrible time we've had in Iraq in the past four years, I am still convinced that in the long run greater liberalization and democratization will change the region for the better. And I'm not the only one. Let me quote an article from the current issue of Newsweek:

"For all his intellectual shortcomings, Bush recognized that the roots of Islamic terror lie in the dysfunctions of the Arab world. Over the last 40 years, as the rest of the globe progressed economically and politically, the Arabs moved backward. Decades of tyranny and stagnation—mostly under the auspices of secular, Westernized regimes like those in Egypt and Syria—have produced an opposition that is extreme, religiously oriented and, in some cases, violent. Its ideology is now global, and it has small bands of recruits from London to Jakarta. But at its heart it is an Arab phenomenon, born in the failures of that region. And it is likely only to be cured by a more open and liberal Arab culture that has made its peace with modernity. Look for example at two non-Arab countries, Malaysia and Turkey, whose people are conservative and religious Muslims. Both places are also reasonably successful economies, open societies and functioning democracies. As a result, they don't produce swarms of suicide bombers. Iraq after Saddam presented a unique opportunity to steer history on a new course."

Boot points out that the author of the above wasn’t a “neocon.” It was the “realist” Fareed Zakaria.

The "scary" theme of today's piece by Richard Cohen is an old one for the Washington Post columnist. Cohen, who supported the invasion of Iraq, penned many columns on the “militant mood” that ushered Reagan into power and the “scary” policies the president pursued with the Soviets, on nuclear weapons and SDI, and in Central America. Here’s a taste from a March 23, 1982 column, “The Bomb”:

In the car the other day, my son started to talk about nuclear war. He thinks it's a possibility, and since he is young and does not want to die young he considers nuclear war "unfair." It is his favorite word, but there is for the moment, none better….

Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger, with their talk of limited nuclear war and firing nuclear warning shots, their tough rhetoric and their incessant military posturing, have given the whole country the willies. They seem to have doused hope, made you wonder why you thought in the first place that things were getting better -- that nuclear war could not happen….

All this has revived and exacerbated fears about Ronald Reagan that came out during the presidential campaign. Now, suddenly, little kids talk of nuclear war in their own way and lawyers in theirs. Mothers organize and the New England towns meet and the reason is that something has gone dreadfully wrong. Ronald Reagan set out to scare the Russians, but he's scared us instead.

Some things never change.

Sen. Lieberman on the passing of the Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick:

America has lost a clarion voice for freedom. Ambassador Kirkpatrick was a genuine patriot who played a critical role in liberty’s triumph over totalitarianism in the Cold War. Ambassador Kirkpatrick profoundly understood that ideas have consequences, but she was not an armchair intellectual. She employed her great intellect in freedom’s struggle against tyranny. Once again, we are engaged in a battle with the forces of evil and totalitarianism and Jeane Kirkpatrick’s stalwart commitment to freedom should remain an inspiration to us. Jeane Kirkpatrick lived a life of a tribune of democracy. We mourn her passing.

(It won't happen, but I'll say it again anyway.)

Posted on November 15, 2006:

If John Bolton decides to bow out of the UN post because of continued Democratic opposition to his confirmation, the president should seriously consider former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson for the job. Like Bolton, he’s tough, well versed in national security, extremely articulate and would be a forceful public advocate for the president’s policies. Democrats would be hard pressed to deny him an up or down vote on the Senate floor. A Thompson pick would also send a bold signal that the president isn’t about to run-out-the-clock on his term. I’m hopeful the president could persuade Thompson to accept the nomination, but he will probably have to do so over the objections of a few, particularly in the intelligence community. With his background as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and chairman of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Thompson has routinely questioned the performance of our intelligence agencies over the years.

The bottom line: Bush shouldn’t answer the Bolton critics by appointing an anti-Bolton type, as some are clamoring for; he should up the ante and put the Democrats on the defensive. Nominate Thompson.

The biannual Top500 supercomputers list is out. IBM retains the top spot with its BlueGene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. BlueGene's performance comes in at 280.6 trillion calculations per second. Of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world, seven are in the U.S. with the other three in Japan, France and Spain. Overall, 306 of the top 500 systems are in the U.S.

(Darn. The conspiracy has been exposed.)

It's no surprise that Senator Lieberman has tapped Marshall Wittmann of the Democratic Leadership Council to be his communications director and informal political advisor. During the campaign, Wittmann, a registered Independent, frequently battled the leftwing bloggers who were trying to put the anti-war Ned Lamont in office. But Connecticut voters gave Lamont and his far left backers a good thumping on November 7. Like his new boss, Wittmann’s a big fan of the late Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democratic senator from the state of Washington who fought his party’s dominant McGovern wing. The bottom line: don’t look for Lieberman singing "Kumbaya” with the liberal Senate leadership anytime soon.

Gov. Romney's interview with the Washington Examiner is interesting not for his direct attack on Sen. McCain, one of the few politicians who has actually exhibited leadership on the Iraq War, but this statement: “I’m a conservative Republican, there’s no question about that…. I’m at a different place than the other two [McCain and Giuliani].”

Well, as I’ve noted before, it’s clear from the comments of Giuliani and his staff that if the mayor does jump in, he’s not about to concede conservatives to anyone. Indeed, it wouldn’t take much effort for Rudy to question his opponents’ conservative credentials on some issues just as they question his. McCain’s record is well known, so look for the Giuliani camp, in public and on background, to target Romney’s record and past statements a bit more in the early stages of the campaign.

I still very much doubt the mayor can win the nomination, but nothing in Rudy’s background suggests he’ll be a punching bag for his opponents. He’ll throw just as many jabs as he’ll absorb. And if he doesn’t run, the former prosecutor would be an excellent surrogate for the presidential camp that lands him. Then there’s Newt…and Brownback…

Gingrich on Fox News Sunday:

WALLACE: You say Mitt Romney. McCain started an exploratory committee this week. Thirty seconds: Are you going to do the same?

GINGRICH: No. We have a program called American Solutions we're working on. And in September of next year, I'll be glad to come back and talk with you about running for president, but not until...

WALLACE: Not until that late?

GINGRICH: Not until September.

A Newt run would certainly shake things up.

In a speech yesterday, Gen. John Abizaid was quite blunt in assessing the threat posed by Islamic radicalism. He also questioned whether the West has the will necessary to confront it now before a broader war erupts. From Reuters:

The top U.S. general in the Middle East said on Friday that if the world does not find a way to stem the rise of Islamic militancy, it will face a third world war.

Army Gen. John Abizaid compared the rise of militant ideologies, such as the force driving al Qaeda, to the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s that set the stage for World War Two.

"If we don't have guts enough to confront this ideology today, we'll go through World War Three tomorrow," Abizaid said in a speech titled "The Long War," at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, outside Boston.

If not stopped, Abizaid said extremists would be allowed to "gain an advantage, to gain a safe haven, to develop weapons of mass destruction, to develop a national place from which to operate. And I think that the dangers associated with that are just too great to comprehend."

Abizaid said the world faces three major hurdles in stabilizing the Middle East region: Easing Arab-Israeli tensions, stemming the spread of militant extremism, and dealing with Iran, which Washington has accused of seeking to develop nuclear bombs.

"Where these three problems come together happens to come in a place known as Iraq," said Abizaid, who earlier in the week warned Congress against seeking a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from the country that is wracked by insurgent and sectarian violence.

"The sacrifice that is necessary to stabilize Iraq, in my view, must be sustained in order for the region itself to become more resilient," Abizaid said.

Other senior officers have echoed Abizaid’s view on the centrality of Iraq in this war, and the need to stay engaged. Also, though it got little media attention, this November 16 piece from the back pages of the New York Times is another example of what Abizaid is warning about.

The AP reports that "House Democrats have chosen Rep. Steny Hoyer as House majority leader, the No. 2 leadership post.” Democrats showed some sense on this. Murtha would have been a disaster for the Democrats, though good for the media. With Lieberman's big victory and now Murtha's trouncing, the anti-war left will need to regroup a bit.

Despite the comments of Rep. Pelosi ("The war on terror is the war in Afghanistan”) and DNC chair Howard Dean (Afghanistan “is where the fight on terror is.”), the Global War on Terror is, in fact, global. Today’s New York Times reports:

More than 700 Islamic militants from Somalia traveled to Lebanon in July to fight alongside Hezbollah in its war against Israel, a United Nations report says. The militia in Lebanon returned the favor by providing training and — through its patrons Iran and Syria — weapons to the Islamic alliance struggling for control of Somalia, it adds….

The report also says Iran sought to trade arms for uranium from Somalia to further its nuclear ambitions, though it does not say whether Iran succeeded….

While the sources of the information remain unclear, the report is dense with details about arms shipments to the groups vying for power in Somalia.

It states that in mid-July, Aden Hashi Farah, a leader of the Somali Islamist alliance, personally selected about 720 combat-hardened fighters to travel to Lebanon and fight alongside Hezbollah.

At least 100 Somalis had returned by early September — with five Hezbollah members — while others stayed on in Lebanon for advanced military training, the report says. It is not clear how many may have been killed, though the report says some were wounded and later treated after their return to Somalia.

The fighters were paid a minimum of $2,000 for their service, the report says, and as much as $30,000 was to be given to the families of those killed, with money donated by “a number of supporting countries.”

In addition to training some Somali militants, Hezbollah “arranged for additional support to be given” by Iran and Syria, including weapons, the report found. On July 27, 200 Somali fighters also traveled to Syria to be trained in guerrilla warfare, the report says.

It also indicates that Iran appears to have sought help in its quest for uranium in Dusa Mareb, the hometown of Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, the leader of the Islamist alliance in Somalia, which is known as the Council of Islamic Courts.

“At the time of the writing of this report, there were two Iranians in Dusa Mareb engaged on matters linked to the exploration of uranium in exchange for arms” for the Council of Islamic Courts, says the report, which is dated Oct. 16.

Those claims, if proved, could worsen global tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran ignored an Aug. 31 deadline to suspend its uranium enrichment, and the United States has been leading a United Nations effort to impose sanctions….

Not only has the volume of arms flowing into Somalia grown, according to the authors, but more sophisticated weapons like surface-to-air missiles are being brought in. The conflict could grow into a regional war, with Somalia’s neighbors, Ethiopia and Eritrea, backing opposing sides.

The report also accuses Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria of supplying the Somali Islamists with arms, advisers and fighters. It says three nations — Ethiopia, Uganda and Yemen — are aligned with the so-called transitional government based in Baidoa, an inland city….

The report recommends that the Security Council blockade Somalia….

I’m confident the UN Security Council will act swiftly against the apparent chief state sponsors of the above – Syria and Iran.

His comments on immigration, the party leadership races, and 2008 may be found here.

If John Bolton decides to bow out of the UN post because of continued Democratic opposition to his confirmation, the president should seriously consider former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson for the job. Like Bolton, he’s tough, well versed in national security, extremely articulate and would be a forceful public advocate for the president’s policies. Democrats would be hard pressed to deny him an up or down vote on the Senate floor. A Thompson pick would also send a bold signal that the president isn’t about to run-out-the-clock on his term. I’m hopeful the president could persuade Thompson to accept the nomination, but he will probably have to do so over the objections of a few, particularly in the intelligence community. With his background as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and chairman of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Thompson has routinely questioned the performance of our intelligence agencies over the years.

The bottom line: Bush shouldn’t answer the Bolton critics by appointing an anti-Bolton type, as some are clamoring for; he should up the ante and put the Democrats on the defensive. Nominate Thompson.

Feingold bows out for 2008. Will the anti-war left give in to Hillary or now push for a Gore candidacy to challenge the aura of inevitability surrounding the New York senator?

Lieberman wins, and he did so without compromising his position on Iraq. Indeed, he defended it. I know some Democratic strategists were privately advising him to trim his support for the war. He ignored them. Good for Joe.

George Will writes in today's Washington Post:

Yet with Allen much diminished and perhaps out of contention, and with Rudy Giuliani not yet doing serious groundwork for a national campaign, the Republican field is already down to two. That is good for only one of them: Romney.

But what about Newt Gingrich? He’s given every indication -- publicly and privately -- that he will run; yet Will doesn’t mention the former speaker at all in his column. Gingrich won’t need much of a “ground game” to make waves in New Hampshire. He’s powerful on the stomp, a first-rate debater, and isn’t likely to concede the “conservative majority of the party” to anyone. On that score, a candidate Gingrich, or McCain for that matter, would likely hit Romney from the right on several fronts on which he is vulnerable, making it more difficult for any one candidate to consolidate the right in the early races.

Folks shouldn’t underestimate the impact of a Gingrich candidacy. He won’t win the nomination, but along the way don't expect Newt to assume the fetal position against his opponents -- whether they're named McCain or Romney.

It's no secret that a Giuliani presidential run would complicate McCain's primary strategy just as a Gingrich candidacy would complicate Romney’s. Giuliani has obvious strength with independent voters, and he can be very tough on the Democrats. Because he’s not a fan of the liberal media establishment, I suspect Giuliani would pick some fights with them to score points with conservative Republicans turned off by his social views. As mayor, Giuliani frequently battled The New York Times and its editors over his policies. Getting in a fight with the Times and other liberal icons won’t lose him votes in the GOP, and it would put pressure on McCain to do much the same or risk hemorrhaging too many conservative votes to Giuliani.

If Gingrich takes the plunge, Romney’s strategy of becoming the sole conservative alternative to McCain would probably take much longer to achieve. The former speaker would presumably seek to be anti-McCain (with a populist twist) candidate, and I can envision the extremely articulate Gingrich staying on the debate stage for some time. To swing anti-McCain voters to his side, Gingrich would likely portray Romney’s record as governor as far less conservative and innovative than meets the eye and also contrast Romney’s more liberal statements as a candidate for office in Massachusetts with what he is saying today to win the GOP presidential nod.

Though I have trouble seeing candidates Giuliani or Gingrich ultimately capturing the GOP nod, they would surely make the race fun to watch. Stay tuned…

(Did some checking. It won't happen.)

The Washington Post's Kathleen Parker told NBC's Chris Matthews on Sunday that RNC Chair Ken Mehlman “is going to be leaving the National Republican Committee, possibly heading over to the Giuliani camp.” That would be big news.

The former Democratic senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, understands why the John Kerry-endorsed Ned Lamont must be defeated. He is campaigning with Joe Lieberman today in Connecticut. Kerrey is a member of “Dems for Joe,” a band of Democrats who haven’t bailed on Joe. The group includes former Sens. David Boren (OK), John Breaux (LA), Bryan (NV), DeConcini (AZ), and Johnston (LA).

Australian Prime Minister John Howard hasn't shied away from speaking out on the global intimation campaign against free speech. He’s also not about to run away from Iraq, and he understands the consequences of defeat.

Prime Minister John Howard said Wednesday the Iraq mission was not easy, "but we have to ask ourselves is Australia's security enhanced by Western defeat in Iraq."

"I ask people to contemplate the impact on the authority of the United State, the impact on the West of a defeat in Iraq," Howard told television's Nine Network.

"If people think that is going to strengthen the West, is going to strengthen America and strengthen Australia, I think they have taken leave of their senses."

… "America will only leave Iraq when she is satisfied that the Iraqis can look after the situation themselves, and that is our position," he said.

Contrast Howard’s position with that of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a supporter of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, who had this exchange with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes:

STAHL: Do you not think that the war in Iraq now, today, is the war on terror?

Rep. PELOSI: No. The war on terror is the war in Afghanistan. That is what...

STAHL: But you don't think that the terrorists have moved into Iraq now?

Rep. PELOSI: (Unintelligible). They have.

STAHL: Well...

Rep. PELOSI: The jihadists in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. That means--they'll stay there as long as we're there. They're there because we're there.

So the “war on terror is the war in Afghanistan” but not in Iraq, even though, by her own admission, terrorists have moved into Iraq. The terrorists in Iraq, Pelosi says, will “stay there as long as we’ve there.” Pelosi didn’t say where the terrorists would go once we exited. Some may stay in Iraq; others may go to Afghanistan, South Asia, Somalia, Europe, or the Pacific Rim. In this regard, Pelosi joins the other Howard who also believes the only "fight on terror" is in Afghanistan.

From AFP:

Fear of the spread of Islam in non-Muslim countries motivates attacks on Muslims in the West, the imam of Islam's holiest shrine has told worshippers celebrating Eid al-Fitr feast.

"Did you wonder why this issue is raised every now and then?" Sheikh Saleh bin Humaid, who also heads the Saudi-appointed Shura (consultative) Council, asked at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, western Saudi Arabia.

He was referring to controversial remarks by Pope Benedict XVI last month in which he cited a 14th-century Christian emperor who said Islam's Prophet Mohammed had brought the world "evil and inhuman" practices "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

The issue "was raised only because the hearts of observers among the adversaries are filled with resentment over the spread of this faith and its overcoming of all borders, barriers and blocks in all eras and under all circumstances," bin Humaid said.

Bin Humaid was delivering the feast sermon to throngs of worshippers led by King Abdullah and other Saudi dignitaries on the first day of Eid al-Fitr that marks the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan….

Here's the latest RNC campaign ad and the DNC's response.

Here's a taste of what Chris Matthews had to say the other night to a college audience at Iowa State:

MATTHEWS: How many in this room believe in the war in Iraq from beginning to now, support the war in its full reality? The senator is one of those. Who else agrees with him? Stand up.

Stand up, stay up. Everybody now stay up who intends or would consider participating in this war. Participating in the war.

MCCAIN: Thank you.

MATTHEWS: All you people standing up are planning to participate in the war in some way? Really? Everybody here.

MCCAIN: Thank you very much, my friends.

MATTHEWS: Because I asked a minute ago how many were going to join the military. I wonder what your participation would involve.

MCCAIN: Chris, your bias is starting to show.

MATTHEWS: No, I’m just trying to get an answer now. Wait a minute -- I want the people that are standing up. Somebody yell out why are you standing if you’re not joining the military.

OK, you were one of those. Keep going, anybody else? Of course, look at all the people in the back. I asked before if anybody was joining the military. And now you’re standing up in support of the war but not in terms of a plan to actually participate in a war. I don’t get the connection. Would somebody explain it?

Does Chris Matthews support the war in Afghanistan? If so, has he prodded the military to let him serve there in some capacity? How about working for an NGO in Kabul? They’re also a part of the war effort in Afghanistan.

Does Matthews support the use of force in the Darfur region? If so, will he urge the military to let him participate in some way in that operation? Will he join one of the NGOs that will likely flood into Darfur once some security is established?

How about Kosovo? Did Matthews support President Clinton’s policy? Did he push the military to let him serve in some capacity in the operation? How about after the bombing stopped? Did he offer to help out KFOR, the peacekeeping force that went in? How about lending a hand to the NGOs still working in Pristina and other parts of Kosovo?

Perhaps a student at the next stop on the Hardball College Tour can asked Matthews about all this.