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Ralph Peters chronicles the 2007 the terrorists’ failures in Iraq.
AS 2007 drew to a close, embarrassed journalists sought to play down American military successes and avoided questioning Democratic presidential contenders about their predictions of inevitable failure in Iraq.
Magically, Iraq disappeared from the headlines – except on those rare occasions when a problem could be reported. At the close of a year of stunning progress, media stories on New Year’s Eve leapt to report that 2007 had been the deadliest year for US troops.
You had to read deep into the columns to learn that those casualties occurred in the first half of 2007, as we battled and defeated the terrorists and militias – or that, in recent months, American and Iraqi casualties have plummeted as a relative peace broke out.
Still, all that was just hushing up dirty family secrets in the media clan and an effort by left-leaning journalists and editors to protect the politicians they favor.
The greatest media story of 2007 was the one you never read (unless you read The Post): The year was a strategic catastrophe for Islamist terrorists – and possibly a historic turning point in the struggle against al Qaeda and its affiliates. …
The Editors of Investor’s Business Daily collect eight possibilities for 2008. Not predictions, mind you, but possibilities. Pickerhead loves # 2.
… 2. Global Warming ‘Consensus’ Fades
If 2007 was the Year of Al Gore, with his movie, Academy Award and Nobel Prize, 2008 just might be the year the so-called scientific consensus that man is causing the Earth to warm begins to crack. …
Rich Lowry shares him impressions of four candidates.
Good Spine posts.
Power Line with a couple of posts on Clinton’s Pakistan misstep.
… In an email message alerting us to his report, Smith writes that he “can’t believe we all missed this at the time.” It remains to be seen whether anyone but Smith will take note. In the meantime, at Hot Air Bryan expands on the revelations vouchsafed in Ms. Hillary’s interviews and concludes:
So Hillary Clinton, smartest woman in the world and veteran of flying into the world’s dangerous hot spots alongside comedian Sinbad, got the Pakistani elections entirely, completely and utterly wrong in all respects. …
One of CNN’s blogs notes Biden picked up on Clinton’s gaffe.
… The Delaware senator was responding to news that Clinton suggested in two recent interviews that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is up for reelection this month.
Musharraf was actually reelected in October, and the upcoming Pakistani elections are parliamentary, not presidential.
“We have a number of candidates who are well-intentioned but don’t understand Pakistan,” Biden said at a campaign event Tuesday. “One of the leading candidates — God love her.”
“There are good people running,” continued the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has made his foreign policy credentials a centerpiece of his long shot presidential bid. “But to say Musharraf is up for election! Musharraf was elected — fairly or unfairly — president six months ago. It’s about a parliamentary election!” …
Walter Williams on greed and need.
Demagoguery about greedy rich people or greedy corporate executives being paid 100 or 200 times their workers’ salaries is a key weapon in the politics of envy. Let’s talk about greed, starting off with Merriam-Webster’s definition: “a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.”
That definition is a bit worrisome because how does one know what a person really needs? It’s something my economics students and I spend a bit of time on in the first lecture. For example, does a family really need one, two, three or four telephones? What about a dishwasher or a microwave oven? Are these excessive desires? If you say these goods are really needed, then I ask, how in the world did your great-grandmother and possibly your grandmother, not to mention most of today’s world population, make it without telephones, dishwashers and microwave ovens? “Need” is a nice emotional term, but analytically, it is vacuous. …