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Guardian columnist says Europe needs the American defense umbrella.

… For years now, NATO nations have been committed to reach a minimum defence spending target of 2% of GDP. Yet 20 of them, including Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, have fallen far short. Among the six that have reached the target, the shares of four (including Britain and France) are in decline. Inevitably, that means the US carries ever more of the load and becomes ever more sceptical about taking Europe seriously.

For years also, European nations have talked about the importance of avoiding duplication in equipment and weapons. But the talk has largely remained just that. It is barmy that Europeans have four different models of tank, compared with America’s one; 16 different types of armoured vehicles as against America’s three; or 11 types of frigate to America’s one. Once again, Europe’s failure highlights the US predominance.

The experience of Iraq, coupled with Europe’s increased role in the Balkans, has tempted some Eurocentrics to say that Nato is outmoded and that an enhanced military role for the EU should replace it. This is fantasy land. If there is one thing that would be even worse for Europe than fighting a war with the Americans as allies, it is fighting a war without them. While it is true that Europe spends too little on defence because it knows it can rely on the Americans, it does not follow that European nations would be keen to spend more if NATO broke down. …

Mark Steyn writes this week on Hillary Clinton.

… It may be that when the Democrats do settle on a candidate – which, on present form, seems likely to be about 48 hours before Election Day – the party will then do its usual thing and unite around the winner in order to slay the Republican dragon.

But it’s not unreasonable to calculate that significant elements among both the Clintonites and the Obamaniacs will be disinclined to reward the other side for what they’ll see as an act of usurpation. I have no time for Obama, and I think he’d be a disastrous president. But he’s your ticket out if you’re a Democrat who can’t face the thought of giving your party to the Clinton mob for another decade. And, evidently, quite a lot of Dems feel like that.

Why? Where did the magic go? Well, the show got miscast. I wrote a decade ago that Hillary was like Margaret Dumont to Bill’s Groucho Marx. He goes around leering at cocktail waitresses, waggling his eyebrows and his famously unlit cigar. And Hillary would stand there, seemingly oblivious to the subpoenaed dress and DNA analysis and all the rest: In double-acts, the best straight men (or women) are the ones who appear never to get the joke, and that was Hillary in the late Nineties, standing on stage alongside Bill night after night with her rictus grin and droning in the robotic cadences of that computerized voice in your car that tells you to fasten your seatbelt that “I. Am. So. Proud. Of. My. Husband. And. Our. President. Bill. Clinton.”

But you can’t recast: You can’t put Margaret Dumont in the Groucho role. In their heyday, the Clintons ran a thuggish operation fronted by an ingratiating charmer. Now the charming facade’s gone, and the backroom thuggery is ineffective. The Clinton campaign’s letter to Nancy Pelosi suggesting that she might like to “reflect” (if you know what we mean) on her call for the superdelegates to support the winner of the popular vote (i.e., Obama) was notable not for its menace but for its clumsiness: Few sights are more forlorn than an enforcer who can no longer enforce. The Clinton letter reminded me of Elena Ceausescu still trying to pull the don’t-you-know-who-I-am routine even as the firing squad was taking aim.

But on she staggers. Even if she can’t win, she can deny victory to Obama, and to her party. As they say in show business, it’s not important for me to succeed, only for my friends to fail.

Gerard Baker on Hillary.

… Confronted with the incontrovertible evidence Mrs Clinton acknowledged this week that she “misspoke”. Misspeak is an Orwellian term deployed by politicians to describe what has happened when they have been caught in a barefaced lie.

The Clintons have a well-formed habit of misspeaking. Bill Clinton, of course, was always doing it. But his wife has also over the years mastered the art of misspeaking in what Mark Twain once described as an “experienced, industrious, ambitious and often quite picturesque” way.

She has misspoken on any number of occasions when the straight truth might have been very damaging: over her involvement in the various scandals of the early Clinton years. But alongside these instrumental whoppers, there have been some befuddlingly pointless little tiddlers too.

For no obvious reason she once claimed her parents named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, even though she was born more than five years before the mountaineer’s ascent of Everest, when he was known by almost no one outside New Zealand.

When she ran for New York senator she claimed to have been a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees even though no one could recall her ever having expressed the slightest interest in or knowledge of the baseball team.

In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about landing in sniper fire. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent.

Someone once noted that the thing about the Clintons is that they will choose a big lie when a small lie will do, and choose a small lie when the truth will do. Most of the time they get away with it. But occasionally, an inconvenient truth, like a blue dress with DNA on it, or some forgotten news footage, shows up and damns them. …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions wonders if Gen. Petraeus is amused by Hillary’s Bosnian adventure.

Doubtless General David Petraeus has more pressing things on his mind this week, but one imagines he must have indulged in some gleeful reflection upon hearing about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnian adventure.

He more than most. For it was Hillary Clinton, among all her colleagues, who dared to insinuate that General Petraeus was lying in his September 11, 2007 testimony before Congress about the progress of the troop surge. After he gave an up-to-date assessment of the situation in Iraq, Hillary said that his version of the military and political dynamic required “a willing suspension of disbelief.” Who would stoop so low as to lie to the country about their experience in a war zone!

There are at least two reasons that Hillary was the only person to challenge Petraeus in such an undignified way that day, and we can see evidence for both of them in her Bosnian fantasy. The Clintons assume that every person in a position of power lies as naturally as they do. So, when the Lewinsky scandal broke it was a web of lies, when the Iraq War got tough that was because George Bush lied her into voting for it, and when Petraeus offered his inconvenient truth that too was, naturally, a lie.

The other aspect of the Clinton M.O. that links her shoddy treatment of General Petraeus to her outlandish story about Bosnia is an irresistible impulse to gild the lily. The Clintons don’t leave well enough alone. For Bill in November 2007 it wasn’t enough to tell a crowd of Iowa supporters that he opposes the Iraq War like most other Democrats these days. Here’s how far he had to take it: “Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” he said, and added that he “should not have gotten” the tax cuts that deprived our fighting men and women of what they needed. A threefer! …

While in Contentions we have a series of posts on the election by Jennifer Rubin.

1. Yesterday Barack Obama said this about the prospects for an extended primary battle: “I think giving whoever the nominee is two or three months to pivot into the general election would be extremely helpful, instead of having this drag up to the convention.” Buried in that is a germ of self-awareness that Obama (unlike McCain, as I’ve commented before) will have to do some major league scrambling back to the political center if and when he captures the nomination.

Yes, he’s selling the familiar line that the liberal vs. conservative dichotomy is outmoded. But his comment indicates some recognition that he will have significant pivots ahead. (By the way, isn’t it rather old-school politics to sell your base on one message in the primary and sell the general electorate on another? How inauthentic and Clintonian.) …

 

2. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama seem to be in a contest over who can do the most damage to his or her spouse. Each reminds voters of the weaknesses of the respective candidates and gives their opponent’s supporters plenty of opportunities to say “Ah ha! See! Further evidence of . . .”

In the Clintons’ case, Bill is, of course, a walking, talking reminder that it is all about them. Their egos and their career ambitions take precedence over party and country. Self-discipline and restraint? Not from these two. And all those concerns about whether her experience is merely derivative are reignited every time voters hear the latest controversial or semi-controversial comment from him.

Michelle Obama has inadvertently emphasized the idea that she and her husband have lived a charmed and unappreciative life. …

 

3. With each new utterance on the topic of Reverend Wright, Barack Obama seems to confirm his own moral obliviousness. Worse yet, he seems to have disdain for those who are troubled by his own unwillingness, even now, to break with Wright. (Contrary to his liberal apologists who insist “leaving a church is never a simple transaction,” it is exceedingly easy–you just stand up and go.)

The latest: “I never heard him say some of the things that have people upset.” Let’s leave aside for a moment the Clintonian slipperiness of the word “some.” Let’s not dwell on the quite obvious possibility that he might have heard or read comments of Wright’s approximating those on the dozens of tapes that have now come to light. Here’s the meat of it: just “people” are upset–not him mind you, since he is operating on a higher moral plane. I suppose he would have defended Trent Lott’s single remark about Strom Thurmond with every fiber of his being.

 

4. Mickey Kaus thinks two negative themes are percolating about Barack Obama. The first: he lacks “moral courage” — “he won’t speak up against his own church’s victim mentality until he absolutely has to.” The second: he is arrogant. (Again, he cannot “even admit to the slightest mistake in the Wright affair.”)

There is plenty of evidence for both the courage problem (e.g. he really knows NAFTA didn’t cost America jobs, but couldn’t level with Ohio voters) and the arrogance (e.g. only he is above all the corruption of Washington and only through him can we achieve “change”). And John McCain is already making the case that he is the un-Obama on exactly these points.

On the courage front, McCain has two aces in the hole. The first, of course, is his personal valor and courage in war. The second, which was a liability in the primary but now a virtue in the general election, is his determination to maintain his own principled positions (e.g. on immigration and torture) to his political detriment and to tell voters “no — and I really mean it.” (He’ll tell anyone “no” – Michigan autoworkers, Florida coastal inhabitants and lots of homeowners.)

Charles Krauthammer on one big lie Obama shares with Clinton.

… As Lenin is said to have said: “A lie told often enough becomes truth.” And as this lie passes into truth, the Democrats are ready to deploy it “as the linchpin of an effort to turn McCain’s national security credentials against him,” reports David Paul Kuhn of the Politico.

Hence: A Howard Dean fundraising letter charging McCain with seeking “an endless war in Iraq.” And a Democratic National Committee press release in which Dean asserts: “McCain’s strategy is a war without end. . . . Elect John McCain and get 100 years in Iraq.”

The Annenberg Political Fact Check, a nonprofit and nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, says: “It’s a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage ‘endless war’ based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea.”

The Democrats are undeterred. “It’s seldom you get such a clean shot,” a senior Obama adviser told the Politico. It’s seldom that you see such a dirty lie.

Tomorrow is opening day at Wrigley Field. Stephen Moore does the honors. Says he used to skip school for opening day. Pickerhead was more honorable, he skipped work. However, never on opening day. Did not show up at Wrigley until June. The climate was not hospitable in early April, let alone March 31st. The forecast this Monday is for a high of 54 with a real feel of 46. The 8 degree difference is because the wind will be out of the east and so off the lake.

Congress might undo some of its stupidity according to the Examiner.

Rep. Michele Bachmann wants to put the brake on a national conversion from conventional incandescent light bulbs to energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, has sponsored the “Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act,” which would repeal the national phase-out of the old bulbs.

“This is about freedom, this is about consumer rights,” she said. …