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Andy McCarthy Corner post on AG Mukasey’s letter to Rep Conyers refusing to appoint a special prosecutor to look into CIA interrogation practices. From Mukasey’s letter;

… Your request for a criminal investigation into the actions Executive Branch policymakers and national security lawyers undertook to defend the Nation reflects a broader trend whose institutional effects may outlast the present Administration and harm our national security well into the future. I spoke in more detail about this problematic trend in a speech at Boston College Law School on May 23, 2008, which in turn drew substantially from former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith’s recent book, The Terror Presidency. In his book, Professor Goldsmith describes what he calls “cycles of timidity and aggression” among political leaders and commentators in their attitudes towards the intelligence community. As I pointed out in my speech, the message sent to our national security policymakers and lawyers in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was clear, it was bipartisan, and it was all but unanimous. As Professor Goldsmith explains, “The consistent refrain from the [9/11] Commission, Congress, and pundits of all stripes was that the government must be more forward-leaning against the terrorist threat: more imaginative, more aggressive, less risk-averse.”

We have gone six and one-half years without another terrorist attack within the United States, and now our intelligence professionals and national security lawyers are hearing a rather different message. Your letter, which urges me to subject those involved in developing or implementing our counterterrorism policies to criminal investigation, reflects that message. Taking such a step would not only be, in my judgment, unjust, but would also have potentially grave national security consequences. …

Yesterday, the NY Times printed an Obama op-ed on Iraq. Many of our favorites had comments. Peter Wehner is first.

… Among the most striking things about Obama’s op-ed is how intellectually dishonest it is, particularly for a man who once proudly proclaimed that he would let facts rather than preconceived views dictate his positions on Iraq.Obama’s op-ed is the effort of an arrogant and intellectually rigid man, one who disdains empirical evidence and is attempting to justify the fact that he has been consistently wrong on Iraq since the war began (for more, see my April 2008 article in Commentary, “Obama’s War“).

Senator Obama is once again practicing the “old politics” he claims to stand against, which is bad enough. But that Obama would have allowed America to lose, al Qaeda and Iran to win, and the Iraqi people to suffer mass death and possibly genocide because of his ideological opposition to the war is far worse. On those grounds alone, he ought to be disqualified from being America’s next commander-in-chief.

Max Boot is next.

Peter has already offered a trenchant response to Barack Obama’s New York Times op-ed, “My Plan For Iraq.” But the article is filled with so many misstatements and distortions that I feel compelled to weigh in as well. Herewith some thoughts on specific passages, from someone who is admittedly part of the McCain team of foreign policy advisers. Obama’s statements are in italics; my responses follow:

The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated.

The lead paragraph of Obama’s article makes it sound as if the Iraqi leader has endorsed the Democratic candidate’s call for withdrawing all U.S. brigades from Iraq within 16 months of assuming office. He has done no such thing. Iraqi leaders have kept talk of timetables vague on purpose because they know how much they still depend on American assistance.

I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The question of how much of a threat Saddam Hussein posed is certainly debatable. If their public statements are anything to judge by, Bill Clinton and senior members of his administration had a much graver view of the threat than did Obama. So did many Democratic members of the Senate, including Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, who voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. None of them connected Saddam Hussein with 9/11 (neither did George W. Bush) but they believed, as Bill Clinton put it in 1998, “The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow.” …

Power Line gets in on the act.

… Finally, Afghanistan: Obama would have us believe that he urged defeat in Iraq because he was so firmly committed to victory in Afghanistan. Once again, he misrepresents the record.

In fact, Obama has never supported our troops in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said on August 14, 2007–less than a year ago–that our forces there are mostly committing war crimes:

We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.

Obama has been so uninterested in Afghanistan that when he went to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with a Congressional delegation in January 2006, he skipped the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan, which was taken by others who made the trip with him, including Kit Bond and Harold Ford. And, in an embarrassing gaffe, Obama claimed on May 13, 2008, that we don’t have enough “Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers” in Afghanistan because they are all being used in Iraq. Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world.

Worst of all, far from being committed to victory in Afghanistan, Obama voted to cut off all funding for all of our military efforts in Afghanistan on May 24, 2007 (H.R. 2206, CQ Vote #181), thereby seeking to bring about defeat there as well as in Iraq. His current effort to portray himself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing on Afghanistan is a complete fraud.

It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can’t offhand think of such a miscreant.

Peter Hegseth of Vets for Freedom in National Review.

As someone who monitors the Iraq-war-policy debate closely, I was puzzled to open the New York Times and see an oped authored by Sen. Barack Obama entitled “My Plan for Iraq.” Besides the seemingly moderate tone — and calling for an Afghanistan “surge” (an idea I agree, and one proposed by Sen Joe Lieberman in March)  — not much in the piece is new or newsworthy. In the final analysis, the oped is another dogmatic addendum to Obama’s “withdrawal at any cost” position.

In fact, just one question entered my head when I finished reading: Why now? Why would Sen. Obama — or any legislator, for that matter — write such a piece before visiting the country for himself, seeing the situation with his own eyes, and speaking with commanders and troops who actually know what’s going on?

It strikes me that only someone who is signaling no interest in consulting with commanders on the ground would spell out his “plan” for Iraq just one week before he visits the country for the first time in 918 days. Only someone who is arrogant enough to believe he always knows best would outline his Iraq policy before once meeting one-on-one with General David Petraeus. …

Weekly Standard.

It’s reassuring to hear Sen. Barack Obama, a man who based his presidential bid on the supposed inevitability of defeat in Iraq, recognize the success of the surge, which he also predicted was bound to fail. But his New York Times op-ed today betrays a strategic understanding that is more deeply disturbing; it’s not just his “Plan for Iraq” that’s worrisome, but his plan for America in the world.

In Obama’s view of international politics and power, Iraq is not simply “the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy,” but a diversion, a strategic sideshow. He claims “Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and never has been,” and offers “broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Obama needs to look at a map and a history book. Iraq long has been and today remains one of the two naturally dominant powers in the Persian Gulf region, home to the second-largest proven oil reserves on the planet and a front-line bulwark against revolutionary Iran. ..

Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist defends Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart hammered by judge,” shouted a front-page Star Tribune headline earlier this month. The Dakota County judge — responding to a class-action assault on the giant retailer — labeled Wal-Mart “dehumanizing” and set it up for a possible $2 billion penalty.

Many Minnesotans probably shrugged. What else is new? The story seemed consistent with charges we’ve heard for years: Wal-Mart exploits its workers by paying skinflint wages and skimping on health insurance. Not to mention driving legions of mom-and-pop stores out of business.

With such a reputation for ruthlessness, Wal-Mart must be struggling to find workers, right?

Yet when the company opened a new store in St. Paul’s Midway area in May 2004, about 6,000 applicants vied for 325 job openings, according to Joyce Niska, the store’s acting manager in 2005. That, too, was nothing new. For years, people have beaten down the doors to work at Wal-Mart. …

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Michael Barone with a history lesson on the Berlin airlift.

Sixty years ago this month, the top story in campaign year 1948 was not the big poll lead of Republican nominee Thomas Dewey or the plight of President Harry Truman. It was the Berlin airlift. On June 23, the Soviets cut off land access to West Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor in Germany, called for sending convoys up the autobahns, but Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by the Red Army, and everyone feared it would overrun Western Europe unless the United States retaliated with the atomic bomb. Air Force generals said that there was no way planes could ferry the 8 million pounds of food and coal Berlin would need every day. Secretary of State George Marshall and Joint Chiefs Chairman Omar Bradley, two of America’s most respected generals, felt Berlin was indefensible and we should withdraw. One man disagreed. President Harry Truman, in one crucial meeting after another, said, We’re not leaving Berlin. …

David Warren thinks a free Canada will disappear, not with a bang, but with a whimper

George Will says civilization depends on beer.

… “The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.” …

Jeff Jacoby points to the Dem hypocrisy of worshipping Kerry’s military service and then the systematic denigration of McCain’s.

… Given that effusive show of respect for military experience in 2004, you would think no Democrat this year could even contemplate disparaging John McCain’s far more extensive military career. The presumptive Republican nominee, after all, spent 22 years as a naval aviator; flew 23 combat missions over North Vietnam; earned numerous combat decorations, including the Silver Star and Legion of Merit; and demonstrated courage and self-sacrifice during five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

Yet in recent months, one Democrat after another has gone out of his way to diminish or criticize McCain’s war record. A partial list:

In April, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia denounced McCain as insensitive – pointing, as evidence, to his military service. “McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet,” Rockefeller told the Charleston Gazette. “He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Rockefeller later apologized, but a few days later, it was George McGovern’s turn. The former Democratic presidential nominee told an audience that he would like to say to McCain: “Neither of us is an expert on national defense. It’s true that you went to one of the service academies, but you were in the bottom of the class.” He added, tauntingly: “You were shot down early in the war and spent most of the time in prison. I flew 35 combat missions with a 10-man crew and brought them home safely every time.” …

Jim Geraghty at NRO’s Campaign Spot wonders why we’re not hearing about Obama’s June fundraising totals.

John Kass of ChiTrib says the left is squealing over Obama’s flips.

… Obama used them to crush the Clintons, but now the left is finally realizing it’s been betrayed, on issue after issue, with Obama changing his positions in order to defeat a tired and disillusioned Republican Party in November.

They’re at the dance now and he’s the one with the keys and he’s the only ride they’ve got. And they don’t like it.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he’ll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn’t say he’d listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

And his cheerleaders are beginning to realize that Obama may not be the Arthurian knight in shining armor, that he may not be Mr. Tumnus, the gentle forest faun of our presidential politics. Months after his inauguration, after he makes Billy Daley the secretary of the treasury and Michael Daley the secretary of zoning and promotes Patrick Fitzgerald to become the attorney general of Mars, the political left may figure out that Obama is a Chicago politician.

“Only an idiot would think or hope that a politician going through the crucible of a presidential campaign could hold fast to every position, steer clear of the stumbling blocks of nuance and never make a mistake,” wrote Bob Herbert in The New York Times. “But Barack Obama went out of his way to create the impression that he was a new kind of political leader—more honest, less cynical and less relentlessly calculating than most. . . . Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.”

This panic of the left—particularly among many political media types—is profoundly instructive to foreigners seeking to understand American character. The American media elite chose to portray Obama as some kind of knight in armor. They’re analysts. Yet they were desperate to believe in a political fairy tale from Chicago. …

Debra Saunders writes on Obama, McCain and the wiretapping bill.

Hey, it’s politics. In the primary, when Barack Obama wanted to connect with his party’s disaffected left, he said that he would support a filibuster to stop a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the federal government after the 9/11 attacks.

Now Obama has those voters in the bag. So he is reaching out to the majority of Americans who want aggressive international surveillance to prevent another terrorist attack.

And the average voter certainly isn’t going to lose sleep if the price of that security is that the ACLU does not have carte blanche to sue AT&T for cooperating with the government.

Wednesday, Obama was one of 69 senators who voted for the FISA bill that provided retroactive immunity to the telecoms. …

Abe Greenwald with a good take on this week’s New Yorker cover.

Obama doesn’t like the New Yorker cover. American Thinker thinks he ought to “man up.”

A long, yet unsatisfyingly incomplete article in the current issue of The New Yorker about Barack Obama’s Chicago roots, lauding him for many things that might be considered non-laudable, was a passing curiosity in the blogosphere yesterday. We here at AT blogged about it, pointing out that Mr. Lizza had actually uncovered some things that weren’t too flattering about the candidate.

But the piece went from a passing curiosity to a full blown campaign typhoon when the cover of the issue was released. It showed Obama in a turban doing the fist bump with his wife who is dressed up as some kind of revolutionary. An American flag burns in the fireplace of the Oval Ofice:

One look at this and the Obama campaign hit the roof. …

Now for a couple of less than flattering views of Jesse Helms. Juan Williams is first.

… To be sure, for Helms the essence of North Carolina values was keeping taxes low, and fighting against big government. That is a great message. It won him a base of support.

But that base was rural working-class voters and white suburban male voters. He rallied this base by letting everyone know he disliked Chapel Hill intellectuals — the kind of people who protested for equal rights for blacks and challenged U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He showed no compassion for gays coming out of the closet and women who wanted abortion rights; instead choosing to make them demons threatening family values. And he made blunt use of racial politics.

The most infamous example was in his 1990 Senate campaign against Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte and a black man. Helms ran an ad that showed white hands crumpling a rejection letter while a voice announced: “You needed that job. And you were best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority.” …

Hitchens is next with, “Farewell to a Provincial Redneck.”

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Some of our favorites have Tony Snow thoughts. From The Corner; Mark Steyn, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Yuval Levin, Byron York, and Shannen Coffin. From Contentions John Podhoretz.

Since the world is reaching a point of no return regarding the nukes in Iran, the story of the raid 27 years ago that destroyed Saddam’s nuclear program is germane. Jerusalem Post has the story.

It was late afternoon, Sunday, June 7, 1981, and Zeev Raz was leading his squadron of F-16s across Iraq toward the Osirak nuclear reactor. Anxiously, he scanned the terrain ahead for the last checkpoint of their hair-raising mission, a little island in the middle of the Bahr al-Mihl Lake, about 100 kilometers west of the target, from which the pilots would calculate their final assault on Saddam Hussein’s impending bomb factory.

At 5.34 p.m., bang on schedule, Raz spotted the lake. Or at least he thought he did. Except that it looked rather larger than it had in the satellite photos they’d pored over. And that little island – the crucial last reference point – was nowhere to be seen.

Flashing through Iraqi air space at 10 kilometers a minute, Raz was second-guessing himself. Had he miscalculated? Had he strayed from the meticulously planned route? Was he leading his colleagues to disaster? What had gone wrong?

Too late, Raz realized what had happened. The previous winter’s heavy rains had swollen the lake and submerged the island. The satellite image was out of date. He had been in the right place, and should have trusted himself. Quickly, he reset his computer, inputting his new position, obtaining the adjusted parameters for the bombing run.

But minutes later, when Raz closed in on his target, it became appallingly clear that the miscalculation at the sunken island had profoundly distracted him. This expert airman, leading the pride of the Israel Air Force across vast swathes of hostile terrain on a mission deemed by prime minister Begin to be critical to Israel’s very existence – a mission that the chief of the General Staff, Raful Eitan, had told them that day “must be successful, or we as a people are doomed” – found to his horror that he had, almost amateurishly, overflown the target. He had begun his bombing dive too late.

Israel’s legendary destruction of Osirak – a near-impossible operation, pushing the F-16s further than they had been built to fly, evading enemy radar for hundreds of miles, to precision bomb a heavily protected nuclear target – has entered the pantheon of acts of extraordinary Zionist daring as a clinical example of pre-emptive devastation, executed with breathtaking, ruthless accuracy.

But as detailed in American journalist Rodger Claire’s overlooked study of the mission, 2004′s Raid on the Sun – in which he spoke, uniquely, to all the pilots, their commanders, and key players on the Iraqi side of the raid as well – the bombing of Osirak was far from error-free. It was an astonishing, envelope-pushing assault all right. It succeeded, utterly, in destroying Saddam’s nuclear program – a blow from which he would never recover. It safeguarded Israel from the Iraqi dictator’s genocidal ambitions. But Raz’s mistake on the final approach was only one of several foul-ups that could so easily have doomed it.

Recognizing that Raz, the lead bomber, was not going to be able to hit the target, the No. 2 pilot in the squadron, Amos Yadlin, streaking along behind him, made the incredibly risky split-second decision to depart from the bombing sequence, cut in beneath Raz’s plane, and try to drop his two 2,000-pound bombs first. As he would later tell author Claire, Yadlin thought to himself: “I’m not going to end up being hanged in some square in Baghdad because of a screwup.”

Yadlin did indeed get his bombs away, and saw them pierce the Osirak dome and disappear inside as he peeled off.

Simultaneously, Raz was executing an astoundingly ambitious “loop-de-loop” in the skies above the reactor, and was able to come back over Osirak, at the correct angle this time, and hit the target.

The potential consequences of these radical departures from the intended bombing process – the potential for misunderstanding, for collision, for disaster – can hardly be overstated. …

John Fund enumerates the left’s electoral efforts. They think it’s their techniques that need work. When they lose this time will the face up to the fact their ideas suck?

… In 2005, billionaire investor George Soros convened a group of 70 super-rich liberal donors in Phoenix to evaluate why their efforts to defeat President Bush had failed. One conclusion was that they needed to step up their long-term efforts to dominate key battleground states. The donors formed a group called Democracy Alliance to make grants in four areas: media, ideas, leadership and civic engagement. Since then, Democracy Alliance partners have donated over $100 million to key progressive organizations.

Take Colorado, which has voted Republican for president in nine of the last 10 presidential elections. But in 2006, Colorado elected a Democratic governor and legislature for the first time in over 30 years. Denver will be the site for the party’s 2008 presidential convention. Polls show Barack Obama would carry the state today. This hasn’t happened by chance. The Democracy Alliance poured money into Colorado to make it a proving ground for how progressives can take over a state.

Offshoots of leading liberal national groups were set up including Colorado Media Matters in 2006, to correct “conservative misinformation” in the media. Ethics Watch, a group modeled after Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was started and proceeded to file a flurry of complaints over alleged campaign finance violations — while refusing to name its own donors.

Western Progress, a think tank to advance “progressive solutions,” opened its doors as did the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, one of 29 such groups around the country. Then there’s Colorado Confidential, a project of The Center for Independent Media, which subsidized liberal bloggers. CIM has set up similar ventures in Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan, with funding from groups such as the Service Employees International Union, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. …

John Fund has a couple of good shorts. The first has a Scalia look.

… Mr. Scalia has some idea for avoiding public anger at the courts in future: Use them less. He thinks the United States is “over-lawed” and has too many lawyers. “I don’t think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex,” he says. “If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.” …

Jack Kelly on the campaign so far.

WHEN your approval rating is only 14 percent, there’s nowhere to go but up. Unless you’re the Democrat-led Congress. A Rasmussen poll released Tuesday indicated the approval rating for Congress has declined by 36 percentage points from last year’s “high.” Just 9 percent of respondents said Congress was doing a “good” or “excellent” job, while 52 percent of us think it’s doing a “poor” one. That’s the lowest rating ever.

Much of the dissatisfaction with Congress is due to its unwillingness to do anything about the soaring price of gasoline. “Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’•” a Democratic congressional aide told The Hill newspaper.

“So why are the Republicans running scared, and why aren’t they going after the ‘new Democratic Congress’ hammer and tongs?” wondered Web logger Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. “Beats me. Because they’re idiots, I guess.”

I disagree. Some Republicans in Congress are crooks, and many are cowards. But few are idiots. For idiocy, you have to look to the campaign of Sen. John McCain. …

Slate’s Undercover Economist defends speculators.

When the economy is in turmoil, no one is demonized more than the speculator. First, we are told, speculators have driven up the price of oil, condemning us to expensive heating and driving. Then, they have driven down the price of bank shares, dealing vicious blows to the nation’s noblest banks. All of this, we are supposed to believe, is immensely profitable and highly destabilizing. …

Silly Telegraph, UK cow flatulence story is here just for the picture of the cow.

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Manchester Guardian says Tehran is leaving no doubt about their intentions.

… The Iranian response has been to underline its deterrent with events like today’s missile test and heightened rhetoric. Ali Shirazi, an aide to Iran’s Supreme Leader, said Tel Aviv would “burn” if Iran was attacked.

It would not be a limited war. Iranian officials have said that they would automatically presume an Israeli strike was western-backed and retaliate accordingly. Shirazi said the US fleet in the Persian Gulf would also be hit. In the past the Iranians have threatened asymmetric warfare using small boats and suicide bombers against much larger ships. It is a fair bet that shipping in the Straits of Hormuz – through which 40% of the world’s oil passes – would either be blocked or seriously squeezed. Attacks on US and British troops could also be stepped up through proxies and allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. US military intervention would be unavoidable.

The sabres being rattled across the Persian Gulf right now are very real and very dangerous.

For those who miss Mark Steyn, here he is from the 2004 campaign.

And by the way, Mark will be guest host on Limbaugh’s show tomorrow.

… If I were a mad scientist hired by Bush svengali Karl Rove to construct the most unelectable Democratic presidential candidate possible, I’d start with a load of big-government one-size-fits-all dependency-culture domestic policies. Next I’d throw in a consistent two-decade voting-record aversion to American military power. Then make him the kind of fellow whose stump speeches are always butt-numbingly ponderous and go on way too long because someone told him that if you intone a platitude slowly and sonorously enough it sounds like the Kennedy inaugural address.

He’d probably be a senator because, in a business that attracts pompous blowhards, senators are the crème de la crème. A senator from Massachusetts, because that’s as near as you can get to running Jacques Chirac while still meeting the citizenship eligibility requirements. He’d have to be an aristocratic Massachusetts senator, because there don’t seem to be any other kinds, but he wouldn’t be glamorously high-class, like Jack and Camelot, just aloof and condescending and affected. And every time he tries to talk a little guy talk, a little hunting or baseball, it doesn’t come out quite right. And he’s so nuanced he’s running not only as America’s most famous war hero but also as America’s most famous anti-war protester.

No, scrub that last bit. No one would believe it.

But what do I know? My ne plus ultra of unelectability was chosen by Democratic primary voters this spring mainly because he was perceived to be “electable”. I don’t know where they got that idea from. Probably from the American media, who seem barely to recognise Kerry’s principal defect – his boring self-righteousness – perhaps because it’s also theirs. Nevertheless, if this week the senator gives the kind of speech he’s given for the last year, Americans will flee in horror from the prospect of spending four years listening to this guy. …

Daily Telegraph, UK has a weekly feature “Holy Cow” (which in our language translates to “Sacred Cow”). They pose this question, “Are there any Holy Cows left? “Every week iconoclast and ex-investment banker Sameh El-Shahat goes out on a limb to challenge conventional wisdom around stories in the news.” This week Mr. El-Shahat offers his off-beat opinion of George Bush.

So, the hot news now is Barack Obama.

Obama this, Obama that… Naturally, it is very laudable that the United States may have chosen to look beyond the issue of race and opted for a person purely on the merit of his character. But what will they find?

The usual hot air that Washington politicians seem to have made their own. Mr Obama is no different. We’re just too politically correct to say that the only thing refreshing about him is his colour. So we say he’s “bipartisan”, or he’s a “uniter”.

Whatever happened to leadership and honesty as presidential traits? I happen to believe that the only leader in the West to have these two admirable qualities in droves is the leader of the free world: George W Bush. …

Karl Rove says there’s much to admire in the Obama campaign.

For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.

For starters, Barack Obama’s manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an “army of persuasion” modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor “Victory Committee” of ’00 and ’04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.

Sen. Obama’s organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille’s plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros’s 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran “virtual precincts,” using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today. …

Rove did suggest Obama’s moves to the center might endanger him and Victor Davis Hanson is now calling him “Barack W. Bush.”

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama’s flip-flops, as the Senate’s most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger.

But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts.

Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court’s overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns.

The senator, also like Bush, supports the death penalty. He recently objected to the court’s rejection of a state law that allowed for the execution of child rapists.

And although Obama is still pro-choice, he now, like the president, thinks “mental distress” should not justify late-term abortion. …

Tony Blankley comments on Obama’s shifts.

… His Iraq position is currently in the process of glissading from anti to pro, so we will have to wait for a while before saying he actually has changed it. To be precise, to stay in my dance metaphor, Obama’s move may not be a glissade so much as a fouette . Centralhome.com’s “Dance Dictionary” defines a fouette as “a turning step, usually done in a series, in which the working leg whips out to the side in and then into the knee as the dancer turns on the supporting leg, rising onto the point at each revolution.” I like to be precise in describing Sen. Obama because, while informal, he is a stickler when it comes to such matters.

As a conservative, of course, I like all his changed views except for the fact that he doesn’t believe his current iteration of principle any more than he believed his previous iteration. Which brings us, as it always does in such circumstances, to America’s greatest fraud sniffer, H.L. Mencken. He defined a demagogue as “one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” It is not surprising that the youth is particularly enchanted by the senator from Illinois. Being young, they are inexperienced in the ways of the world.

I offer to our youth the cautionary tale of Ludwig van Beethoven when he was in his early 30s. He originally called his “Eroica” symphony the “Bonaparte” symphony as a tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte, then the heroic French consul who had begun to reform Europe radically after gaining military victories over various monarchically ruled countries. But Beethoven became disillusioned when, in 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Beethoven then renamed the symphony the “Eroica” because he refused to dedicate one of his great compositions to the man he now considered a “tyrant.” …

In Contentions, Peter Wehner thinks Obama’s move to the right demonstrates the essentially conservative nature of the American electorate.

On Sunday Fred Barnes posted an analysis on the Weekly Standard website arguing that Barack Obama’s tack to the center is “quite clever.” One of the three reasons Fred put forward to substantiate his case is that Obama is “better off being attacked by John McCain as a flip-flopper than as an unrepentant liberal.”

I agree with Barnes, and simply want to underscore an important point we ought to take from it: Obama’s dizzying shifts on a range of issues — including Iraq, meeting with Iran’s Ahamdinejad, terrorist surveillance programs, free trade, abortion, guns, public financing, and the America flag lapel pin, among others — reminds us that America remains a center-right, basically conservative leaning nation. …

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line thinks Wehner it too optimistic and that Obama will remain a leftist.

Peter Wehner argues that Barack Obama’s tack to the center is probably a wise move and, as such, underscores that “America remains a center-right, basically conservative leaning nation.” According to Peter, “the fact that Obama understands this and is doing everything he can do inoculate himself against the charge of liberalism ought to be welcomed news to conservatives.”

This view strikes me as too sanguine. …

Wehner answers.

Paul Mirengoff, one of the troika who writes for the outstanding blog Powerline, posted a piece taking issue, in a respectful way, with what I wrote here.

According to Paul, my claim that Barack Obama’s tack to the center is probably a wise move and, as such, underscores that “America remains a center-right, basically conservative leaning nation” is not quite right. In addition, my statement that “the fact that Obama understands this and is doing everything he can do inoculate himself against the charge of liberalism ought to be welcomed news to conservatives” is “too sanguine.” Paul points out that Obama isn’t even tacking significantly away from the left on most key domestic issues, e.g., health care, energy policy, and taxes. “Overall,” Paul writes, “Obama’s moves show only that America remains a centrist nation.”

I’m not sure Paul and I differ on all that much. But whether we do or not, I’ll take this as an opportunity to elaborate my views. My point, as I stated in my original post, is that conservatism, despite the challenges it faces today, is still the most appealing and popular political philosophy in America. Moreover, liberalism remains a lethal charge in a presidential campaign (if the charge sticks). It tells us something important that Obama will fight hard against the claim that he is a liberal, arguing that such labels are part of the “old politics” that he has magically transcended. McCain, on the other hand, is happy to be labeled a conservative. …

Want a preview of how wacky Dems would run our country? WSJ has their plans for the convention.

As the Mile High City gears up to host a Democratic bash for 50,000, organizers are discovering the perils of trying to stage a political spectacle that’s also politically correct.

Consider the fanny packs.

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: “That just doesn’t exist.”

Ditto for the baseball caps. “We have a union cap or an organic cap,” Mr. DeMasse says. “But we don’t have a union-organic offering.”

Much of the hand-wringing can be blamed on Denver’s Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper, who challenged his party and his city to “make this the greenest convention in the history of the planet.”

Convention organizers hired the first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist Andrea Robinson. Her response to the mayor’s challenge: “That terrifies me!”

After all, the last time Democrats met in Denver — to nominate William Jennings Bryan in 1908 — they dispatched horse-drawn wagons to bring snow from the Rocky Mountains to cool the meeting hall. Ms. Robinson suspected modern-day delegates would prefer air conditioning. So she quickly modified the mayor’s goal: She’d supervise “the most sustainable political convention in modern American history.” …

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David Warren on the G8 summit.

… There is little, even in the wonderland of international power politics, quite as fatuous as the G8, when the world’s leaders meet, as they have been doing since 1973, to solve everyone’s domestic problems in an informal, results-oriented atmosphere. Thirty-five years later, they’re still dealing with the oil crisis.

They can create problems, they can compound problems, they can expand problems, and they can, through the extraordinary “outreach” of their bureaucracies, systematically undermine the people’s efforts to cope with these problems — but they cannot solve anything. The fault lies in an “imperfect” nature, which does not respond to the fairy-weave of the politician’s wand, or to the incantations of the tribal shaman for that matter. By toil alone is the harvest realized; by toil, the bread is baked; by toil is it bought and sold.

Governments can appropriate wealth, but the notion that they can somehow create it, or even reapportion it with any degree of foresight, is one of the great stupid ideas.

Journalists — attracted to power as the moth to the flame — are especially susceptible to the illusion that politicians have the ability to fix things; and to the converse, equally superstitious idea, that their failure to fix connotes a bad will.

Should there be drought, the shaman commands rain. …

Gordon Chang says forget the G8, there is only the G1. And Claudia Rosett blogs on the G8.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes on the FARC hostage rescue and why some NGO’s are NFG.

As we learn more about the Colombian military’s daring hostage rescue last week, one detail stands out: In tricking FARC rebels into putting the hostages aboard a helicopter, undercover special forces simply told the comandantes that the aircraft was being loaned to them by a fictitious nongovernmental organization sympathetic to their cause called the International Humanitarian Mission.

It may have taken years for army intelligence to infiltrate the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and it may have been tough to convincingly impersonate rebels. But what seems to have been a walk in the park was getting the FARC to believe that an NGO was providing resources to help it in the dirty work of ferrying captives to a new location.

<!–
com.dowjones.video.articlePlayer.draw(“1646108104″,”320″,”290″,”left”,”452319854″, “The Colombian military tricked the FARC into releasing their most valuable hostages. Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who writes the "Americas" column, talks with Kelsey Hubbard about how the once-powerful guerrilla group was duped. (July 7)”)
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I am reminded of President Álvaro Uribe’s 2003 statement that some “human rights” organizations in his country were fronts for terrorists. Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd got his back up over Mr. Uribe’s statement, and piously lectured the Colombian president about “the importance of democratic values.”

But as the helicopter story suggests, Mr. Uribe seems to have been right. How else to explain the fact that the FARC swallowed the line without batting an eye? …

O’Grady’s piece raised a question about Nancy Pelosi’s conduct. Power Line has details.

… some Americans seem remarkably oblivious to the evil that FARC, Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leftists represent. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mary O’Grady writes about the fact that some “human rights” organizations are in fact allies of, and fronts for, terrorist groups. That’s a fair point, but I want to focus on the latter part of her column, in which she describes efforts by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to turn the hostages into “a public-relations coup that would give him and the FARC ‘continental and world renown.’”

O’Grady’s account is based on documents that were captured from a FARC laptop in a raid by the Colombian military that we wrote about here. Based on those documents, it appears that Chavez had a couple of schemes to set up prisoner exchanges involving the FARC hostages. This is the most interesting one: …

Maybe Pelosi’s shenanigans are some of the reason for the approval rating of Congress falling to 9%. Ed Morrissey has the story.

When Democrats won majorities in both chambers of Congress, they pointed to the falling approval ratings of the legislature as a mandate for change.  They have certainly provided it — albeit in the wrong direction.  Rasmussen’s latest polling shows the approval ratings for Congress have reached a new low, and a new achievement … single digits:

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category. …

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. …

Ed Morrissey also posts on the Dem energy policy.

Democrats in Congress promised to make energy policy a high priority when they returned after the Independence Day break.  Instead, they have quietly scrubbed the schedule of any votes on their energy bill, afraid Republicans will make them vote on increased domestic oil production and force them to choose between popular sentiment for drilling and their environmentalist allies.  Their strategy?  Well, the Hill chooses a good quote:

“Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’ ” said a Democratic aide. …

John Stossel likes the Supreme gun ruling.

… But there is something else that many analysts of the decision have missed.

The Bill of Rights did not create rights. It acknowledged them. Right before the July 4 holiday, it shouldn’t have been necessary to remind the four Supreme Court dissenters of what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. … “

The Framers of the Second Amendment did not say, “The people shall have the right to keep and bear arms.” They wrote, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” …

Walter Williams hearts speculators.

Despite Congress’ periodic hauling of weak-kneed oil executives before their committees to charge them with collusion and price-gouging, subsequent federal investigations turn up no evidence to support the charges. Right now oil company executives are getting a bit of a respite as Congress has turned its attention to crude oil speculators, blaming them for high oil prices and calling for tighter control over commodity futures trading.

Let’s look at the futures market and for simplicity use corn futures discussed in my May 28th column titled “Futures Market.” While corn is different from oil, both obey the laws of supply and demand, just as humans are very different from bricks but both obey the laws of gravity. …

Sacré bleu! French winemakers say, “Screw You!” Daily Telegraph has the story of the cork’s demise.

While New World wines have adopted the screw top for years – with up to 90 per cent of New Zealand wines and 60 per cent of Australian bottles using them – giving up the time-honoured cork has met with much stiffer resistance in France beyond the cheaper end of the market.

But according to one wine expert, two of the world’s top names – Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy, whose bottles can sell for tens of thousands of pounds, and Bordeaux’s legendary Chateau Margaux – are now looking into screw tops.

Romanée-Conti would not comment on the sensitive issue, with tops still viewed as heresy by many purists. But the director general of Chateau Margaux, Paul Pontallier, confirmed that the Bordeaux domaine was trying them out. …

The Onion reports Bill Clinton has put his inaugural gown away.

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Dilbert’s Blog leads us off since he declined to pick a candidate, but did post on the subject of hard work.

There were two types of interesting reactions to my last post. A number of readers think that I’m a closet Obama supporter who would never support a Republican candidate. For the record, I think neither Obama nor McCain come anywhere near the minimum requirement I would like to see in a president. For example, I’d like a president who preferred science over superstition, just to name one thing. So if you think my writing suggests that one of the candidates is slightly less unsuitable than the other, that’s unintentional.

I’ve only once donated money to a politician, and it was McCain. But that’s because I made the mistake of telling one of his fundraisers, a friend of mine, that I’d donate money if the surge “worked.” Admittedly that was more like paying off a bet than supporting a candidate. But time does seem to be vindicating the surge strategy, no matter what you think of how we got into the mess in the first place. …

The UN high commissioner for human rights is retiring. Marty Peretz has thoughts.

Onions again. This time from WSJ Editors.

Congress is back in session and oil prices are still through the roof, so pointless or destructive energy legislation is all but guaranteed. Most likely is stiffer regulation of the futures market, since Democrats and even many Republicans have so much invested in blaming “speculators” for $4 gas.

Congress always needs a political villain, but few are more undeserving. Futures trading merely allows market participants to determine the best estimate – based on available information like supply and demand and the rate of inflation – of what the real price of oil will be on the delivery date of the contracts. Such a basic price discovery mechanism lets major energy consumers hedge against volatility. Still, “speculators” always end up tied to the whipping post when people get upset about price swings.

As it happens, though, there’s a useful case-study in the relationship between futures markets and commodity prices: onions. Congress might want to brush up on the results of its prior antispeculation mania before it causes more trouble.

In 1958, Congress officially banned all futures trading in the fresh onion market. Growers blamed “moneyed interests” …

Bill Kristol has ideas for McCain’s staff.

From the gun clubs of Northern Virginia to the sports bars of Capitol Hill — wherever D.C.-area Republicans gather — you hear the question:

“Where’s Murphy?”

“Murphy” is Mike Murphy, the 46-year-old G.O.P. strategist who masterminded John McCain’s 2000 primary race against George Bush, helping McCain come close to pulling off an amazing upset. Murphy was then chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s successful Massachusetts governor run in 2002.

Murphy remained close to both men, and as a result sat out the G.O.P. nominating contest this past year, not wishing to work against either of them. It was widely assumed, though, that if either McCain or Romney won the nomination, the winner would bring Murphy on board for the general election. So far it hasn’t happened. I believe it soon will.

I hasten to disclose that Murphy is a friend. I should also disclose that when I called to say I had heard he might well be signing on with McCain, he went Sergeant Schultz on me, saying nothing.

But here’s what I gather from acquaintances and sources in and around the McCain campaign.

McCain is frustrated. He thinks he can beat Obama (politicians are pretty confident in their own abilities). But he isn’t convinced his campaign can beat Obama’s campaign. He knows that his three-month general election head start was largely frittered away. He understands that his campaign has failed to develop an overarching message. Above all, McCain is painfully aware that he is being diminished by his own campaign. …

David Harsanyi says as for as the GOP goes, “It’s the leadership stupid”.

… So a conservative might ask: Do the vagaries of the market and history, or an incompetent Republican president who abandoned fiscal conservatism, reveal a fundamental problem with ideology?

After all, a couple of election losses didn’t push the Democratic Party dramatically toward the right. It didn’t ignite mass doubt among the grass roots. It did the opposite. With each loss, the left found a stronger commitment to progressive ideas. All of which manifested when a decidedly left-wing Obama knocked off the allegedly moderate Hillary Clinton.

Republicans have won five of the last seven presidential terms with a conservative economic message. Come to think of it, Democrats won two presidential terms in the ’90s with a conservative economic message.

Should one of the most successful coalitions in the history of American politics be abandoned after a single midterm election loss — and a probable loss this November?

Maybe Republican leadership, rather than conservative principles, is in need of an overhaul. You wouldn’t believe what a charismatic, articulate politician can do with a set of old ideas.

Just ask the Democrats.

Caucus Blog says Hillary’s Howard Wolfson has signed with FOX News.

Howard Wolfson, who was a top strategist for the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is going where some Democrats were unwilling to go during the early days of the election season: the Fox News Channel.

The network is expected to announce as early as Tuesday that it has signed Mr. Wolfson as a contributor who will appear regularly on its programs.

Mr. Wolfson is joining a network that Democrats shunned for a time, complaining that its coverage was unfair. But aides to Mrs. Clinton came to view Fox News as distinctly fair to her in a news media climate that they believed favored Senator Barack Obama.

“I thought that Fox’s coverage during the primary was comprehensive and fair and evenhanded,” Mr. Wolfson said Monday in a telephone interview from Liverpool, England, where he was vacationing. “It’s a huge audience, and it is important to have a strong, progressive voice on the network.” …

A NY Times Profile of Rush Limbaugh continues.

… If McCain wins, Limbaugh will spend the next four years tugging him to the right. If he loses, it will not be, in Limbaugh’s estimation, Limbaugh’s fault, and it won’t be the end of his world either. A secret of Limbaugh’s success is that his uncompromising, often harsh ideas are offset by a basically friendly temperament. He is less like his angry father than his mature role models, Buckley and Reagan, for whom sociability and fun were integral to their conservative world view.

And increasingly, he has other interests. He’s been spending more time with his extended family in Cape Girardeau, where he’s so popular that the municipality runs a Rush Limbaugh tour for visitors. He toys with the idea of buying an N.F.L. franchise. His friend Joel Surnow says that if there were a Rush Limbaugh movie, it would be something along the lines of “Citizen Kane” meets Howard Stern.

As for politics, Rush has already picked his candidate for the Conservative Restoration: Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 37-year-old prodigy whom Limbaugh considers to be a genuine movement conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold — “fresh, energetic and optimistic in his view of America.” In the meantime, though, there’s the Democratic convention in Denver to muck around in, and then the main event in November. Operation Chaos is over, but Rush will come up with something new to delight his fans and infuriate his foes. Presidents rise and presidents fall, but “The Rush Limbaugh Show” will go on, weekdays at 12:06, Eastern Time.

Talk about “bringing coals to Newcastle,” Der Spiegel says Arab states are investigating coal-fired generating plants.

For Alfred Tacke, CEO of the Essen energy giant Evonik Steag, it’s the yellowish-brown pall below that tells him the plane he’s on is approaching the Persian Gulf. Beneath the haze, he knows, is Kuwait, which has five large-scale gas- and oil-fired power plants in operation. The power they generate provide around-the-clock electricity for Kuwait’s gigantic seawater desalination plants and the country’s enormous air-conditioning needs.

“Here, you only need to stick your finger in the sand and you’re likely to strike oil or gas,” says Tacke, whose energy group ranks fifth among Germany’s electricity producers. But Tacke has his own ideas about how to make money in the region. And they center on a different kind of black gold: coal-fired power plants. “We’re currently in the process of discussing the conditions for projects of this kind,” he says.

As odd as the idea may seem, coal power in the gulf is just one more outcome of skyrocketing oil prices. In a world with dramatically disparate ideas on how or even whether to address the risks of global warming, demand for coal plants across the globe is growing rapidly to the detriment of efforts to increase the production of renewable energies such as solar, hydro and wind. …

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Contentions’ Abe Greenwald did some research to show how silly the NY Times can be.

Since Pickings is for grown-ups, the dénouement no matter how distant, is important. WSJ editors have one for the Spitzer/Grasso/Langone moment in New York.

This week’s dismissal of the case against Dick Grasso is sweet vindication for the former New York Stock Exchange CEO. But beyond the debate over his $190 million pay package, there are lessons here about prosecutorial discretion, pack journalism and business courage under political pressure.

These columns defended Mr. Grasso from the beginning, not because we cared a whit about his pay but because it looked like one more case of overreach by Lord High Executioner Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Grasso wasn’t accused of corruption; his sin was making a bundle in a political season when that was déclassé. Moreover, Mr. Grasso hadn’t set his own pay. The NYSE board had signed off on it, and it seemed bizarre to punish a CEO for accepting what his own bosses had legally agreed to pay him. …

Speaking of dénouements, perhaps the end is near for Mugabe. Roger Bate in WSJ has the inflation story in Zimbabwe.

Amid Zimbabwe’s political violence is an economic lesson for anyone who doesn’t keep an eye on inflation. The country’s dictator, Robert Mugabe, who was sworn in on June 29 to his sixth term as president, has killed a few hundred of his opponents in the past few months, but his country’s inflation is killing far more than that. With food aid only trickling back into the country and hundreds of thousands without enough cash to buy food, it was clear during a trip there last month that the crisis is deepening.

Consumer prices have more than doubled every month this year, in some cases doubling every week. A conservative estimate provided by Robertson Economic Information Services, a Southern African consultancy, says that prices are now three billion fold greater than seven years ago. That’s right, billion. The exchange rate is currently an astronomical 90 billion Zimbabwe dollars to one U.S. dollar. …

And Ed Morrissey has good news from Iraq.

Did you know that the US and Iraq will shortly conclude “one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror”?  You wouldn’t if you read American newspapers or watched American television.  The Times of London reports on the approaching end of al-Qaeda in Iraq as the forces of Nouri al-Maliki and the US close the trap on 1,200 AQ terrorists in Mosul: …

The candidates’ calls for universal service got David Harsanyi going with some libertarian thoughts.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson writes that individuals are endowed with unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

There is nothing in there about state-sponsored “public” service and nothing about having to listen to politicians lecture us about what we “must” do to satisfy patriotic obligation. I checked.

Yet, a hobbyhorse of presidential hopefuls is government service. The duo is under the impression that public service trumps your own selfish existence. After all, you only make a living, give to charities of your choice, take care of your own children, buy your own junk and, hopefully, mind your own business.

“Loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July,” Barack Obama explained to a crowd in Colorado Springs this week. “Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it.”

Yes. He said must.

Ironically, in most places, Americans are prohibited from lighting fireworks on Independence Day — naturally, we “must” not hurt ourselves. And there are increasingly more “musts” being handed down. (Reason Magazine recently named Chicago, Obama’s hometown, the city with the least amount of individual freedom in the nation.) …

Corner post by VD Hanson introduces the NY Times look at Rush Limbaugh.

While reading the mostly balanced Zev Chafets Rush Limbaugh story in the New York Times Magazine, I was struck by how long so many people have vastly underestimated Limbaugh’s talents. For two decades his critics kept sneering, “His gets millions for mouthing off three hours day.”  …

A profile of Rush Limbaugh appeared in Sunday’s Times Magazine. It was an interesting and long account, and will appear in parts, today and tomorrow.

… Limbaugh has been a factor in every national election of the past 20 years, but not since the mid-1990s has he been so prominent. Democrats have blamed him for everything from invading their primaries to starting scurrilous rumors about Michelle Obama. Limbaugh denies the latter accusation, but he happily embraces the former. His vehicle was so-called Operation Chaos, a radio campaign designed to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton and prolong internecine fighting among liberals.

Nobody quite knows how effective Operation Chaos was. Karl Rove said he thinks it helped tilt Texas for Clinton. She herself gave this some credence on the day after the vote by jauntily saying, “Be careful what you wish for, Rush.” Howard Dean implored primary voters in Indiana and North Carolina to ignore Limbaugh. The Obama supporter Arianna Huffington called Limbaugh and other conservative hosts “toxic curiosities.” After Clinton won in Indiana, where 10 percent of Democratic primary voters admitted to exit pollsters that they were really Republicans, Senator John Kerry accused Limbaugh of “tampering with the primary” and causing Obama’s defeat.

Limbaugh was delighted. He deemed Operation Chaos to have “exceeded all expectations” (his customary self-evaluation) and explained once again that he wasn’t supporting Clinton but merely trying to bloody Obama because John McCain was too chicken to do it and because he believed that Obama would then be easier to beat in November.

Probably both the Democrats and Limbaugh overstated his actual impact. But Operation Chaos was a triumph of interactive political performance art. Limbaugh appointed himself Supreme Commander, deputized his listeners and turned them into merry pranksters. “Rush is a master at framing an issue and creating a community around it,” says Susan Estrich, who ran Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign and has since become a talk-show host herself. Operation Chaos drew a crowd, which is what Limbaugh does for a living. It got people laughing at the Democrats, which is what he lives for. And, ever the devout capitalist, he turned an extra buck by peddling Operation Chaos gear. The stuff flew off the cybershelves of the E.I.B. store, the biggest seller since his Club Gitmo collection (“my mullah went to Club Gitmo and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”).

None of these high jinks would have mattered if Limbaugh were a regular radio personality. But he isn’t. Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade publication, puts Limbaugh’s weekly audience at 14 million. Limbaugh himself says it is closer to 20 million. Either way, nobody else is close. He has been the top-rated radio talk-show host in America since the magazine started the ranking 17 years ago.

Such massive and consistent popularity makes Limbaugh a singular political force. “Rush has completely remade American politics by offering an alternative to the networks and CNN,” Rove told me. “For 20 years he has been the leader of his own parade.” …

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Douglas Feith, who was at the Pentagon in the run-up to the Iraq War, puts some things in context.

A lot of poor commentary has framed the Iraq war as a conflict of “choice” rather than of “necessity.” In fact, President George W. Bush chose to remove Saddam Hussein from power because he concluded that doing so was necessary.

President Bush inherited a worrisome Iraq problem from Bill Clinton and from his own father. Saddam had systematically undermined the measures the U.N. Security Council put in place after the Gulf War to contain his regime. In the first months of the Bush presidency, officials debated what to do next.

As a participant in the confidential, top-level administration meetings about Iraq, it was clear to me at the time that, had there been a realistic alternative to war to counter the threat from Saddam, Mr. Bush would have chosen it.

In the months before the 9/11 attack, Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated diluting the multinational economic sanctions, in the hope that a weaker set of sanctions could win stronger and more sustained international support. Central Intelligence Agency officials floated the possibility of a coup, though the 1990s showed that Saddam was far better at undoing coup plots than the CIA was at engineering them. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz asked if the U.S. might create an autonomous area in southern Iraq similar to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, with the goal of making Saddam little more than the “mayor of Baghdad.” U.S. officials also discussed whether a popular uprising in Iraq should be encouraged, and how we could best work with free Iraqi groups that opposed the Saddam regime.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worried particularly about the U.S. and British pilots enforcing the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Iraqi forces were shooting at the U.S. and British aircraft virtually every day; if a plane went down, the pilot would likely be killed or captured. What then? Mr. Rumsfeld asked. Were the missions worth the risk? How might U.S. and British responses be intensified to deter Saddam from shooting at our planes? Would the intensification trigger a war? What would be the consequences of cutting back on the missions, or ending them?

On July 27, 2001, Mr. Rumsfeld sent a memo to Mr. Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney that reviewed U.S. options: …

Michael Moynihan, an editor of Reason has a good analysis of the Colombian success, and compares it to the brutal suppression of Tupac Amaru in Peru.

In December 1996, the Peruvian Marxist guerrilla group Tupac Amaru (MRTA) occupied the Japanese embassy in Lima, taking hostage a group assembled to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Akihito. Four months later, Peru’s strongman president, the now-imprisoned Alberto Fujimori, ordered a team of elite Peruvian soldiers to retake the building. The handful of rebels who managed to survive the initial assault, witnesses later reported, were bound, dragged into a courtyard, and executed by members of the Peruvian army. Not a single member of the MRTA made it out alive.

A rather different tactic was employed by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose special forces freed 15 hostages held by the Marxist terror group FARC on Wednesday. The hostages included three American contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Dressed like a group of slightly menacing Berkeley baristas, the army infiltrators disguised themselves in Che Guevara t-shirts (seriously) and camouflaged uniforms, easily convincing the FARC that they too were fist-clenching, Lenin-reading members of the jungle politburo. It was an elaborate, cleverly plotted ruse—one that was guaranteed to fool a platoon of knuckle-dragging, forest-dwelling communist revolutionaries. …

Michael Barone wonders why the Dems are treating Colombia so poorly.

… House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rejection of the Colombia free-trade agreement, by changing House rules in a way that may have destroyed the fast track procedure by which the United States has secured free-trade agreements for more than four decades, seems to me to be the one truly shameful act of this Congress. This rejection of an ally, the third largest country in Latin America, a nation that is threatened by authoritarian and terrorist opponents, and has nonetheless succeeded in strengthening human rights and stimulating economic growth, is as disgusting as anything I’ve seen Congress do. John McCain hailed Colombia’s action; Barack Obama, an opponent of the Colombia trade agreement, unblushingly chimed in a bit later. I wonder how he reconciles this with his message on the Colombia trade pact, summed up aptly in the title of a Washington Post editorial, “Drop Dead, Colombia.”

Investor’s Business Daily editors have a Colombia opinion.

… The best way to express our appreciation would be to correct another U.S. blunder by ending Congress’ shutout of Colombia’s free trade treaty. It was put on hold in April, after a rules change engineered by Reps. Jim McGovern and Louise Slaughter and executed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

On Monday, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, will try to get them to make amends. “Colombia is our strongest ally in the region, and it is critical that we support Plan Colombia and a free-trade agreement with Colombia,” he said.

In the wake of the rescue, Pelosi’s continued refusal to even permit a vote on the pact now stands out as the pinnacle of ingratitude. …

Charles Krauthammer has predicted Obama would climb down from his Iraq withdrawal pledge should he be elected. Now, Charles says he underestimated his slickness.

… Obama’s seasonally adjusted principles are beginning to pile up: NAFTA, campaign finance reform, warrantless wiretaps, flag pins, gun control. What’s left?

Iraq. The reversal is coming, and soon.

Two weeks ago, I predicted that by Election Day Obama will have erased all meaningful differences with McCain on withdrawal from Iraq. I underestimated Obama’s cynicism. He will make the move much sooner. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to finally acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to formally abandon his primary season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.

The shift has already begun. Yesterday, he said that his “original position” on withdrawal has always been that “we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.” And that “when I go to Iraq . . . I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.”

He hasn’t even gone to Iraq and the flip is almost complete. All that’s left to say is that the 16-month time frame remains his goal but that he will, of course, take into account the situation on the ground and the recommendation of his generals in deciding whether the withdrawal is to occur later or even sooner.

Done. …

Jennifer Rubin reports the NY Times is peeved at Obama’s flips.

Andy McCarthy in the Corner wonders just what gives with the Times and Obama.

Peter Wehner performed a service giving us a concise review of C. Hitchens’ Vanity Fair piece on waterboarding.

Christopher Hitchens has written a quintessentially Hitchens article in Vanity Fair. He decided he wanted to learn about the issue of waterboarding – so Hitchens, now 59 years old, traveled to North Carolina in order to be waterboarded. There are not many of us who take our research that seriously.

The result is a fascinating piece that describes waterboarding in a vivid and unforgettable manner.

It isn’t a pretty or happy experience.

Hitchens ultimately comes out against waterboarding and judges it to be torture, and he offers, as is his wont, some very persuasive reasons for his conclusion. There are certainly strong moral and utilitarian reasons to oppose waterboarding. But in the course of his piece, Hitchens does us the service of stating the strongest case for each side. …

John Fund tells us why we should remember Jesse Helms.

… Two events early in his Senate career showcased Helms’s unflinching nature and his political skills. In 1975, he engineered a visit to the U.S. by Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn over the objections of the State Department, which forbade its own employees from attending a major Solzhenitsyn speech in Washington. State also blocked a proposed visit to the White House, leading Helms to accuse President Gerald Ford of “cowering timidly for fear of offending Communists.”

That incident helped spur Reagan to challenge Ford for the GOP nomination the next year. Reagan lost the first five primaries, and he entered the North Carolina contest broke and under pressure to pull out. But Helms and his chief strategist Tom Ellis refused to give up. They employed Helms’s huge, direct-mail list to build a grass-roots army of volunteers and raise money to air 30-minute speeches by Reagan across the state.

Emphasizing the Panama Canal “giveaway” and smaller government, Reagan won an upset victory and was able to battle Ford all the way to the GOP convention. He showed such strength at the convention that Ford invited him to deliver off-the-cuff remarks to the delegates. Reagan was so inspiring that some of Ford’s own delegates exclaimed, “We just nominated the wrong candidate.” Reagan later acknowledged how Helms’s intervention rescued his political career. …

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Pickings has devoted much space to the al-Dura affair which is the modern day version of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion. Those Protocols were created for the Czar’s secret police in 1903 and have become a staple of anti-Semitism since. (Hitler referred to them in Mein Kampf) Later today we devote a lot of space to a Weekly Standard article debunking the al-Dura myth.

Before we get to news items, Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College reminds us of the document and the birthday we celebrate tomorrow.

… We might remember then, this Fourth of July, that our nation may not be perfect, but it can make a claim available to no other: in the name of the rights of all, it was built from the first to belong to its people and not to their rulers. …

A week ago Victor Davis Hanson wrote on our “can’t do” mentality. Daniel Henninger has the theme today with the World Trade Center site as back drop.

James Taranto has interesting background to the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt from FARC rebels in Colombia.

We’ll spend some time today on Wesley Clark. Jennifer Rubin starts us off with three posts from Contentions.

Barack Obama can’t figure out why it should be a top priority to cough up an apology to John McCain for the Wesley Clark slur. Let’s see: 1) it is burying his patriotism defense and making a mockery of Monday’s speech; 2) it is convincing the political establishment that he is tone deaf or arrogant or both; 3) no one will believe his squishy words distancing him from this and future attacks; and 4) New Politics is now fodder for parody. Oh–and he turned a one day story into a week-long blunder. …

… So we have Obama’s entirely self-created blunder where even the MSM is virtually slack-jawed at the sight of the Obama campaign’s determination to inflict more and more damage upon itself. His atrocious judgment in perpetuating a horrible storyline for himself defies the pre-existing media narrative — that Obama is smart, savvy, world-wise, and adept. Not the Obama we have seen lately: he is either paralyzed by indecision or in such a cocoon of liberal elitism that he sees nothing wrong with attacking a war hero’s military service. …

While Rubin concentrated on Obama, Victor Davis Hanson turns towards the perpetrator – Wesley Clark.

… But how can a former four-star general suggest that piloting a jet fighter-bomber under fire  can be reduced to “riding in a fighter plane” (as in a Sunday spin above the base?).  And isn’t the ability to repeatedly pilot a vulnerable aircraft over enemy territory, and then survive years of unimaginable savagery precisely “a qualification to be president” (note the indefinite article “a” that Clark employed, as in one of many that might make a successful President). …

Power Line has spotted the root of the problem – Wesley’s ego.

Wesley Clark has made the rounds of just about every talk show on television over the last 24 hours, repeating his attack on John McCain as lacking the executive experience needed to be President. It’s pretty funny, actually, if you listen to Clark, because whenever he describes the precise military experience needed to equip a candidate for the Presidency, it turns out to be exactly what Clark himself did. Right up until the time he got fired. …

There’s manifest evidence of that ego in Slate’s 2001 review of his book. (2001, mind you. A couple of light years in internet time)

… But at the book’s core is an agenda of score-settling and ass-covering–and there’s plenty of both to do. I don’t really see the difference between “modern war,” as Clark describes it, and a cynical kind of media savvy. (“For large democracies, the home front is the critical theater of war, and words and images are the key weapons.”) Like his fellow airwave-hog Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special negotiator in the run-up to the Kosovo bombing, Clark sought to wage the war by chatting up Tom Brokaw and Christiane Amanpour. He made end-runs around the U.S. Army chain of command and leaked information to other branches of government (State, in particular) and other governments (Britain’s, in particular). This won Clark a reputation for flexibility with Holbrooke and Albright and the esteem of both NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and British Prime Minister Tony Blair–so much esteem, in the latter case, that Clark was recently knighted.

But at the same time, his methods led him into a propagandistic press strategy that was transparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the war. And they hurt him in U.S. military circles, where he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator. Defense Secretary William Cohen told Clark, through Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, “Get your f–king face off the TV.” Shelton didn’t trust him. Nor did Gen. Eric Shinseki, subsequently Army chief. And once the Kosovo operation was finished, Cohen–with no objection from President Clinton–ended Clark’s tour of duty early. In essence, sacked him. …

Back to the real campaign, Karl Rove has a recap of the money war.

On the money front, how do Sens. Obama and McCain stack up? No contest, it seems. Since the campaign began, Mr. Obama has raised a staggering $295-plus million, versus Mr. McCain’s almost $122 million. But that’s misleading.

Mr. Obama spent a lot to win the nomination. So how much cash did he and his rival have when the general election effectively began in June? As of May 31, Mr. Obama had $43.1 million on hand while Mr. McCain had $31.6 million – a significant but not overwhelming advantage.

There is also the cash raised by the Republican and Democratic National Committees. Each candidate depends on the party committees for certain expenditures – registration, voter identification and get-out-the-vote drives, materials distributed by volunteers, even some advertising. Here, the Republicans had $53.5 million in hand on May 31, versus the Democrats’ paltry $4 million. Thus Mr. McCain and the RNC have $38 million more than Mr. Obama and the DNC. …

In 2000 a new blood libel against the Jews was created in the Gaza strip. The Weekly Standard tells us how it was done.

To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can’t own up to a mistake. This is a country where the law of the Circus Maximus still applies: Vae victis, Woe to the vanquished. Slip, and it’s thumbs-down. Not for nothing was Brennus a Gaul. His modern French heirs don’t do apologies well, or at all if they can possibly help it. Why should they? That would be an admission of weakness. Blink, and you become the fall guy.

So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura-a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000-it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel’s regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.

In the ensuing eight years, the small figure of Muhammad al-Dura cowering beside his crouching father became the defining image of the second Intifada. The “child martyr’s” picture cropped up on posters, websites, postage stamps, and street names throughout the Muslim world from Mali to Indonesia, fueling lynchings and suicide bombings. The Israeli authorities at first took the French report more or less at face value and blandly deplored the child’s death in a hasty release (“To the best of our knowledge, the boy was hit by our fire”). Others, however, were not so sure.

They parsed and scoured each of the 59 seconds of the film and every corner of the location for clues, ballistic angles, improbable moves, and hidden motivations. The film showed the two figures first seeking cover from gunfire, then later slumped over, though with no sign of blood or wounds. When increasingly convincing voices came to question, at the very least, the point of origin of the shots-the location of the small Israeli garrison made it pretty much impossible for Muhammad and his father, who was allegedly wounded, to have been hit by Israeli bullets-it took six weeks for the Israeli army spokesman to state in an interview that “both versions of the incident [are] possible,” and two more months for an official investigation to be launched.

Meanwhile, Enderlin and his bosses at the state-run France 2, who had distributed their news item free worldwide, were refusing to answer questions. They flatly declined to provide the complete 27 minutes of footage taken that afternoon by the cameraman, or to concede any possible error, ping-ponging in the classical obfuscating pattern of bureaucracies everywhere. (“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” hasn’t yet made it to France.) …

The Economist reviews a book on Communist jokes.

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Daily Telegraph blogger says the left is responsible for Mugabe.

A few years ago, when the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this stance, I was assailed by an “Africa expert” who told me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.

White liberals like him are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly unchecked. …

Contemplating Zimbabwe, Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff wonders if the UN is worth anything.

… Following Mugabe’s Stalinesque triumph, the U.N. Security Council expressed “deep regrets” that the election was conducted “in these circumstances.” That language would have been a tad more critical, but South Africa, not wanting to hurt Mugabe’s feelings, objected to describing the elections as “illegitimate.”

On the very day before, hospitals in Harare, the capital, were overflowing, as there weren’t enough doctors. Some hospitals, responding to threats by the military, refused to take any more victims of torture.

Not at all surprisingly, the U.N. Human Rights Council has yet to even put on its agenda Mugabe’s extended version of the Nazis’ “Kristillnacht” that presaged the Holocaust, when the world also declined to intervene. …

Mark’s on hiatus and we need a Steyn fix. Here’s a column from the end of March when Hillary’s demise was becoming clear.

About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can’t blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply.

Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available – his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc. But Hillary liked to live a little more dangerously. The defining fiction arose back in the mid-Nineties when she visited New Zealand and met Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest, and for some reason decided to tell him he was the guy her parents had named her after.

Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and a somewhat unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. If any of the bigshot U.S. newspaper correspondents on the trip noticed this inconsistency, they kept it to themselves. I mentioned it in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph at the time, but like so many other improbabilities in the Clinton record it sailed on indestructibly for years. By 2004 it was preserved for the ages in Bill Clinton’s autobiography, on page (gulp) 870:

“Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea’s mother had been named for.”

Eventually, when it was noticed that Hillary was born six years before the ascent of Everest, Clinton aides tried assuring skeptics that her parents had seen a press interview with Sir Edmund in his beekeeping days, Mr. and Mrs. Rodham apparently being the only Illinois subscribers to The New Zealand Apiarist. Then, in the early days of her presidential campaign, Sen. Clinton quietly withdrew the story, by which time the damage was done. …

Politico’s James Kirchick asks who’s smearing whom?

… the fears of Obama supporters that their candidate lies eternally vulnerable to GOP smears exists only in their fevered imaginations. The evidence of dirty Republican tricks has been utterly absent this campaign season. And if anyone has tried to smear Barack Obama in the way that Thomas, Wolfe and other Democratic partisans allege, it was not the Republican National Committee, but rather Hillary Rodham Clinton and her surrogates. In February, the Drudge Report claimed that the Clinton campaign circulated photos of Obama in a traditional East African turban and robe, with the message that the images showed him “dressed.” Asked if there was any truth to the smear that Obama is a Muslim, she infamously replied, “As far as I know,” it wasn’t the case. After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, she said the results showed that “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”

The belief that “the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968” is a comforting salve for Democrats. After all, it’s much easier for them to demonize conservatives than consider that the reason for their electoral defeats may lie with liberal ideas. Please don’t take that as a “smear.”

Phil Gramm, McCain’s shadow cabinet Treasury secretary, interviewed by WSJ’s Stephen Moore.

John Stossel on the media’s campaign for a recession.

“It’s been described as the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. And it brings with it grave dangers for all American families … ,” said Martin Bashir on “Nightline.” “Recession looms …. “

On the “Today” show June 20, David Faber referred to “the recession … these tough economic times.” Yet that very day first-quarter GDP was revised upward again to 1 percent.

America is not in recession, and who knows — maybe we’ll be less likely to have one if my compatriots would just chill. A recession is defined as two quarters of negative economic growth. We haven’t even had one quarter of negative growth.

Yes, growth has slowed, and many people are suffering because of falling home prices and higher food and energy prices. These are real problems, but watching TV, you’d think we were in a recession so severe it must be compared to the Great Depression. …

Walter Williams says we need more people and less government.

… Contrary to the myths we hear about how overpopulation causes poverty, poor health, unemployment, malnutrition and overcrowding, human beings are the most valuable resource and the more of them the better. There is absolutely no relationship between high populations and economic despair. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, has a meager population density of 22 people per square kilometer while Hong Kong has a massive population density of 6,571 people per square kilometer. Hong Kong is 300 times more crowded than the Congo. If there were any merit to the population control crowd’s hysteria, Hong Kong would be in abject poverty while the Congo flourishes. Yet Hong Kong’s annual per capita income is $28,000 while the Congo’s is $309, making it the world’s poorest country. …

… The greatest threat to mankind’s prosperity is government. A recent example is Zimbabwe’s increasing misery. Like our country, Zimbabwe had a flourishing agriculture sector, so much so it was called the breadbasket of southern Africa. Today, its people are on the brink of starvation as a result of its government. It’s the same story in many countries — government interference with mankind’s natural tendency to engage in wealth-producing activities. Blaming poverty on overpopulation not only lets governments off the hook; it encourages the enactment of harmful policies.

The Economist on the fate of wild mustangs in the not so wild west.

IN 1964 a new car was launched at the New York World’s Fair: the Ford Mustang. Both its name and its galloping horse logo, adapted from Frederic Remington’s portraits of the Old West, epitomised a peculiarly American dream about a land of cowboys and big skies. More than 8m Mustangs have been sold. But on America’s old frontier, the free-roaming wild horses now struggle for survival.

Deanne Stillman, a journalist, began researching this history in 1998 after 34 wild horses were massacred in the Virginia Range of mountains near Reno, Nevada. The horse began evolving on the North American continent 55m years ago, before crossing the Bering land bridge and spreading through Asia and Europe. …