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Mark Steyn has Pakistan thoughts.
… Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything: Gen. Musharraf should do this; he shouldn’t have done that; the State Department should lean on him to do the other.
“It is time for him to go,” pronounced Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach. Every foreign policy genius has his Hollywood pitch ready: “If we’re not careful, we’re going to see the same thing happen that happened in Iran,” warned Dan Burton, R-Ind. Pakistan 2007 is a remake of Persia 1979 with the general as the shah, etc.
Well, I dunno. It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate when offering advice to Islamabad.
Gen. Musharraf is – as George S. Kaufman remarked when the Germans invaded Russia – shooting without a script. But that’s because he presides over a country that defies the neatness of scripted narratives. In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush told the world that you’re either with us or against us. Musharraf said he was with us, which was jolly decent of him considering that 99.9999 percent of his people are against us. In the teeth of that glum reality, he’s rode a difficult tightrope with some skill. …
Bill Kristol makes sure we don’t overlook Lieberman’s recent speech, or Lieberman himself. Here’s the Senator;
. . . [T]here is something profoundly wrong–something that should trouble all of us–when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.
There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base–even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.
For me, this episode reinforces how far the Democratic Party of 2007 has strayed. . . . That is why I call myself an Independent Democrat today. It is because my foreign policy convictions are the convictions that have traditionally animated the Democratic Party–but they exist in me today independent of the current Democratic Party, which has largely repudiated them. …
Samizdata quote reminds us idiots reside in business too.
Karl Rove had an op-ed about the Dem congressional leadership in WSJ.
This week is the one-year anniversary of Democrats winning Congress. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid probably aren’t in a celebrating mood. The goodwill they enjoyed after their victory is gone. Their bright campaign promises are unfulfilled. Democratic leadership is in disarray. And Congress’s approval rating has fallen to its lowest point in history.
The problems the Democrats are now experiencing begin with the federal budget. Or rather, the lack of one. In 2006, Democrats criticized Congress for dragging its feet on the budget and pledged that they would do better. Instead, they did worse. The new fiscal year started Oct. 1 — five weeks ago — but Democrats have yet to send the president a single annual appropriations bill. It’s been at least 20 years since Congress has gone this late in passing any appropriation bills, an indication of the mess the Pelosi-Reid Congress is now in. …
Peter Wehner in Contentions comments on Pelosi’s latest “end the war” stunt.
… In Iraq we’re also seeing some encouraging news on the economic front and very encouraging, even dramatic, progress on the local political front; “bottom-up†reconciliation is continuing apace. The main problem in Iraq lies with the central government and its unwillingness, still, to share power. Nevertheless, almost every important trend line in Iraq is positive. And yet to the likes of Speaker Pelosi, it matters not at all. She and her colleagues are ideologues in the truest sense—zealous and doctrinaire people committed to a path regardless of the evidence. And the fact that good news in Iraq seems to agitate her and other leading Democrats is astonishing, as well as unsettling.
Nancy Pelosi’s effort to subvert a manifestly successful (if belatedly implemented) strategy in Iraq is reckless and foolish—and it may succeed in driving down Congressional approval ratings, already at record lows, to single digits. Which is about where they belong.
Joshua Muravchik, also in Contentions, examines awards by something in DC called the Churchill Centre.
… If you find the Baker-Hamilton legacy incongruent with that of Churchill, the Churchill Centre is out to reshape your memory of him, much as various academics lately have redefined Ronald Reagan as a liberal or moderate in noble contrast to the odious conservative, George W. Bush. The Centre explains: “The political precept that won Churchill respect from all sides was his belief that in difficult times the best results follow when people of differing beliefs and backgrounds come together, the greatest example of which was the ‘Grand Alliance’ of World War II.†In other words, Churchill’s great feat was not his resistance to Hitler but his embrace of Stalin.
Next, perhaps, the Centre will create a Churchill Award for Appeasement.
Speaking of Churchill, a Power Line post on new books centering on his relationship to Jews.
Cafe Hayek says Bill’s taking the fall for Hill.
Speaking of those two, Marty Peretz wonders if Bill wants her to fail. And Peretz is not reassured by her Mid-east thoughts.
American Thinker has a peek inside the academy’s fundraising.
Higher education, one of the biggest industries in America, has gotten wealthy beyond the dreams of previous generations of academics. Tuition increases at more than double the rate of inflation for a decade, taxpayer funding of research, tuition loans and scholarship, and tax exempt donations by the wealthy have all added enormous sums.
Wrapped in mantle of virtue and knowledge, the actual business of extracting the annual hundreds of billions of dollars it devours remains in the shadows. But a recent event has made public a perfectly normal, yet mildly disturbing practice related to fundraising.
To paraphrase a campaign slogan of yore, it’s not what’s illegal that’s the problem; it is what is normal. …
The Angry Economist posts on the drug war.
One of the funniest things ever in the New Yorker. Showed up four and a half years ago. Time for a redo.
People are surprised when I tell them that I, by temperament and by avocation, am a naturalist. I don’t look like a naturalist. No pair of field glasses dangles from my sunburned neck (which isn’t sunburned), and I don’t wear hiking boots or an old bandanna, and my arms are not laden with specimen bags and notebooks and tweezers—the tools of the naturalist’s trade, you are thinking, but not of mine. I don’t live in a tent, not even for part of the year. I don’t own a canoe or a kayak or any kind of net. The shelves in my study? I can tell you truthfully that they are not lined with large jars containing the well-preserved bodies of dead squirrels and such, or with old birds’ nests, or with a dozen or so different types of ferns that are indistinguishable to you but not to me. No. …
Paul Greenberg provides more entertainment.