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Karl Rove says the Dems have major national security problems.

One out of five is not a majority. Democrats should keep that simple fact of political life in mind as they pursue the White House.

For a party whose presidential candidates pledge they’ll remove U.S. troops from Iraq immediately upon taking office — without regard to conditions on the ground or the consequences to America’s security — a late February Gallup Poll was bad news. The Obama/Clinton vow to pull out of Iraq immediately appears to be the position of less than one-fifth of the voters.

Only 18% of those surveyed by Gallup agreed U.S. troops should be withdrawn “on a timetable as soon as possible.” And only 20% felt the surge was making things worse in Iraq. Twice as many respondents felt the surge was making conditions better.

It gets worse for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Nearly two out of every three Americans surveyed (65%) believe “the United States has an obligation to establish a reasonable level of stability and security in Iraq before withdrawing all of its troops.” The reason is self-interest. Almost the same number of Americans (63%) believe al Qaeda “would be more likely to use Iraq as a base for its terrorist operations” if the U.S. withdraws.

Just a year ago it was almost universally accepted that Iraq would wreck the GOP chances in November. Now the issue may pose a threat to the Democratic efforts to gain power. For while the American people are acknowledging the positive impact of the surge, Democratic leaders are not. ..

Mark Steyn on Obama’s speech.

“I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree, flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Sen. Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Rev. Wright believes that AIDS was created by the government of the United States – and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Rev. Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDS is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Before the speech, Slate’s Mickey Kaus advised Sen. Obama to give us a Sister Souljah moment: “There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births,” he wrote. “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of the Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.” Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. …

… Free societies live in truth, not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank – for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth? It is Barack Obama’s choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment – to claim that, given America’s history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright’s generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn’t that – what’s the word? – racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.

Charles Krauthammer too.

… But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign.

Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright’s rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Now, Obama wraps himself in a flag! James Taranto comments.

A New Republic writer, Dayo Olopade, says Obama’s preacher problem is not going away.

… Having lived for so long at the center of a world he built, Wright may simply not be used to restraining himself. (Indeed, during the past year, even as he had to know that Obama’s high profile could bring the press to his pews, he continued to evangelize against the government.) But it isn’t just that Wright is self-centered, although that seems to be the case; it is also that his worldview doesn’t recognize firm boundaries between religion and politics, or really between religion and anything. When Wright finally carried out his long-planned retirement at the end of February (no doubt much to Obama’s relief), his church held a two-week-long celebration honoring him as a “Theologian/ Teacher,” “Ethnomusicologist,” and “African World Visionary.” Don’t laugh; for Wright, such distinctions are necessarily fluid. The sermon I attended freely mixed faith and politics–at one point, Wright intoned, “I got to tell somebody what the Lord has done for my people. I’m gonna use my mouth! Listen to me and listen carefully: Neither Hillary, Hannity, nor Hobbes ever had a grandparent in slavery or on a slave ship beneath the decks, never had a grandparent in a slave dungeon on the coast of West Africa as a prisoner. That’s my people’s story, and if you think I’m gonna stop telling it, you got another damn thing coming!” No wonder he can’t resist sparring with Sean Hannity and The New York Times. …

Maureen Dowd recaps the Dem mess.

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

“It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes,” said one leading Democrat.

Hillary got a boost from the wackadoodle Jeremiah Wright. As a top pol noted, the Reverend turned Obama — in the minds of some working-class and crossover white voters — from “a Harvard law graduate into a South Side Black Panther.”

Obama blunted the ugliness of Wright’s YouTube “greatest hits” with his elegant and bold speech on race. But how will he get the genie back into the bottle?

Pressed about race on a Philly radio sports show, where he wanted to talk basketball, he called his grandmother “a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, well there’s a reaction that’s in our experiences that won’t go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way.”

Obama might be right, but he should stay away from the phrase “typical white person” because typically white people don’t like to be reminded of their prejudices. It also undermines Obama’s feel-good appeal in which whites are allowed to transcend race because the candidate himself has transcended race. …

Jennifer Rubin liked MoDo’s column.

… So even if Dowd cannot quite admit the intellectual and moral shortcomings of a man who equates the woman who raised him with a hate-mongering preacher, she nevertheless allows that it was politically clumsy of him to bring it up. Well, that’s something.

Then she tip-toes up to an equally troubling issue for Obama:

Even swaddled in flags, Obama is vulnerable on the issue of patriotism. He’s right that you don’t have to wear a flag pin to be patriotic, and that Republicans have coarsely exploited patriotism for ideological ends while failing to do truly patriotic things, like giving our troops the right armor and the proper care at Walter Reed. But Republicans are salivating over Reverend Wright’s “God damn America” imprecation and his post-9/11 “America’s chickens coming home to roost” crack, combined with Michelle Obama’s aggrieved line about belatedly feeling really proud of her country.

While Dowd cannot resist a cheap dig at Republicans (or, apparently, distinguish between administrative ineptitude and lack of patriotism), she gets it, somehow: Obama has a patriotism problem, which will only become worse in the general election. (There is a reason why John McCain continues to remind voters of his biography.) …

Jonah Goldberg columns on Mamet.

… Mamet invokes John Maynard Keynes’s response to criticism that he changed his mind: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”

Michael Billington might have a different response. “I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right,” wrote the Guardian’s theater critic of more than three decades. “What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.”

This response is quite simply perfect, a Picasso of asininity, a Mona Lisa of moronic imbecility.

Mamet, a dashboard saint of angst-ridden cosmopolitan liberalism, has set out to read widely and carefully, exploring how his outdated political pose no longer tracks with reality or with his own understandings of the world, and Billington worries that Mamet is locking himself into a rigid ideological position.

Mamet has, Houdini-like, gone through the painful process of regurgitating a key to the chained-up straitjacket in which he’d been trapped, and after the required internal dislocations has emerged to think freely about the world, and this guy somehow thinks Mamet’s trapped himself. …

LA Times Op-Ed welcomes Mr. Mamet.

… So now Mamet has grasped the nettle. He will come to find out just how small-minded, exclusionary and intellectually corrupt many on the left can be. Colleagues may abandon him; theater critics will contrive to ignore and attack him; his dependable audience may turn away.

But he will also discover a right wing he never knew. He will discover thinkers who seek historical and moral truth as if it really mattered, and writers who defend liberty as if it were what in fact it is: the prerequisite of full humanity. Rather than the low and tiresome obsession of the left with the color of people’s skins, he will find people who embrace a philosophical colorblindness. He will meet women of intelligence and competence who — mirabile dictu — don’t despise men and manliness but openly admire them. …

We go to Zimbabwe, of all places, for a lesson in the importance of private property. This time it’s to protect elephants.

… Ponder the stories of two African states. Kenya banned the killing of elephants in 1979, effectively nationalising its herd. At around the same time, Rhodesia (as it still was) made elephants the property of those whose land they were on. The result? Thirty years on, Kenyan elephants have been all but wiped out, while Zimbabwe’s are as numerous as ever. …

… The foundation of capitalism is Aristotle’s observation that, that which no one owns, no one will care for. Here is proof.