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Joe Klein had unkind things to say about Peter Wehner. So, Wehner started quoting Klein. Turns out that was unkind.
… On February 22, 2003, he told Tim Russert on his CNBC program that the war was a “really tough decision†but that he, Klein, thought it was probably “the right decision at this point.†Klein then offered several reasons for his judgment: Saddam’s defiance of 17 U.N. resolutions over a dozen years; Klein’s firm conviction that Saddam was hiding WMD; and the need to send that message that if we didn’t enforce the latest U.N. resolution, it “empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there.â€
Earlier this year Klein called the Iraq war the “stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President.†This raises a question: does Klein’s statements to Russert qualify as the stupidest endorsement of the stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President? One difference between President and Klein is that the President didn’t pretend, as Klein has, that he was against the war after he was for the war. Another difference is that the President favored the surge, which Klein opposed. On January 8, 2007, for example, Klein wrote this:
I’m afraid I’m going to get cranky about this: The Democrats who oppose the so-called “surge” are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it.
And on April 5, 2007 Klein wrote this:
Never was Bush’s adolescent petulance more obvious than in his decision to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report and move in the exact opposite direction: adding troops and employing counterinsurgency tactics inappropriate to the situation on the ground. “There was no way he was going to accept [its findings] once the press began to portray the report as Daddy’s friends coming to the rescue,” a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission told me. As with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine.
Klein, then, favored going to war with Iraq and was a critic of the strategy that has been succeeding and may actually help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq. All of which makes Klein’s effort to portray himself as an expert on and prescient about Iraq not terribly convincing. …
Mark Steyn on Mrs. Obama’s America.
… Her “adult lifetime†has been spent in some of the most unrepresentative quarters of American life: Princeton, the ever-metastasizing bureaucracy of diversity enforcement, and Jeremiah Wright’s neo-segregationist ghetto of Afrocentric liberation theology and conspiracy theory. If young people were to follow the Obamas’ message and abandon “corporate America†for the above precincts, the nation would collapse. Michelle Obama embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology, which is not where most Americans live. On the other hand, it does make her a terrific Oprah guest: Unlike her sonorous, dignified, restrained husband, she has exactly the combination of wealth and vulnerability prized by connoisseurs of daytime talk shows.
There’s something pitiful about a political culture that has no use for Mitt Romney, a hugely successful businessman, but venerates a woman who gets more than 300 grand for running a “neighborhood outreach†and “staff diversity†program. They seem curious career choices for the closest confidante of a man who claims to be running as a “post-racial†candidate. Which Barack Obama certainly could have been: He’s no tired old race-baiter making a lucrative career out of grievance-mongering, like Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the Republic of Himself. In many ways, he’s similar to Colin Powell, a bipartisan figure born to a British subject (in Powell’s case, from the Caribbean; in Obama’s, from colonial Kenya) and thus untinged by the bitterness of the African-American experience. And yet the two most important figures in Obama’s adult life exemplify all the tired obsessions he was supposed to transcend. …
John Fund with a short on Condi Rice as VP.
Camille Paglia likes a question she gets about Hillary.
Corner post with good economic and politcal comparison.
John Stossel continues his knock on abuse by lawyers.
“We cannot use force.”
That was my response last week when a lawyer shouted at me, “You media types are bullies, too!”
We were arguing about my Wall Street Journal op-ed that called class-action and securities lawyers bullies and parasites who enrich themselves through extortion. It’s legal extortion, but extortion nonetheless.
These aggressive lawyers and their Naderite defenders don’t get it. Or they pretend they don’t.
There are only two ways to do things in life: voluntarily or forced. We reporters may be obnoxious, intrusive, stupid, rude, etc., but we cannot force anyone to do anything. All our work is in the voluntary sector.
But litigation is force. When a plaintiff sues, a defendant is forced to mount a defense. If he settles or loses, he’s forced to pay. Government is the enforcer. …
Weekly Standard says the polar bears wil be able to bear it.
… Lindzen flatly describes worry over polar bears as “gibberish.” “Polar bears are going up in number,” he says. “They’re not worried; they can swim a hundred kilometers.” The notion of threatened polar bear populations was recently challenged by J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. In an article for the journal Interfaces, Armstrong and his coauthors argued that a series of complex and “erroneous assumptions” undergird much of the research showing polar bears at risk, and they offer compelling evidence that the animals have survived far warmer conditions in the past.
Still there is a push to have the polar bear officially listed as a “threatened species.” Hugh Hewitt, who practices natural resources law in addition to hosting a radio show, explained in a recent column that the move would clear a path for environmentalists to “argue that every federal permit that allows directly or indirectly for increased emissions of hydrocarbons is a federal act that might impact the polar bear.” Such permits would thus be subject to a new range of environmental regulations affecting all manner of industry.