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Scott Johnson of Power Line is in the Weekly Standard with a remedial history lesson for Obama.

BARACK OBAMA FIRST VOWED to meet unconditionally with the leaders of America’s foremost enemies in the YouTube Democratic candidates’ debate on July 23, 2007. Since then he has reaffirmed and expanded on the commitment in a variety of contexts, promoting such meetings as a sort of panacea for America’s national security challenges. In making these pronouncements, Obama sounds like a precocious college undergraduate who finds himself granted a vision that has eluded elders whose befuddled reckoning has brought them to an impasse.

In Portland on May 18, Obama cited John F. Kennedy’s 1961 summit with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna among the series of negotiations that led to America’s triumph over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Vienna summit, however, disproves Obama’s assertion regarding the unvarying value of meetings between enemy heads of state about as decisively as any historical episode can refute a thesis. In addition to poor judgment, Obama has demonstrated that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ….

Karl Rove notes the many revisions of Obama’s thoughts.

This week’s minor controversy about Barack Obama’s claim that an uncle liberated Auschwitz was quickly put to rest by his campaign. They conceded that it was a great uncle whose unit liberated Buchenwald, 500 miles away.

But other, much more troubling, episodes have provided a revealing glimpse into a candidate who instinctively resorts to parsing, evasions and misdirection. The saga over Rev. Jeremiah Wright is Exhibit A. In just 62 days, Americans were treated to eight different explanations. …

Ann Coulter says,”Who better to face down a Holocaust denier with a messianic complex than the guy who is afraid of a debate moderated by Brit Hume?

After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. That’s the only world leader we’re not allowed to compare to Hitler.

President Bush’s speech at the Knesset two weeks ago was somewhat more nuanced than liberals’ Hitler arguments. He did not simply jump up and down chanting: “Ahmadinejad is Hitler!” Instead, Bush condemned a policy of appeasement toward madmen, citing Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated talks with Adolf Hitler.

Suspiciously, Bush’s speech was interpreted as a direct hit on B. Hussein Obama’s foreign policy — and that’s according to Obama’s supporters.

So to defend Obama, who — according to his supporters — favors appeasing madmen, liberals expanded the rule against ad Hitlerum arguments to cover any mention of the events leading to World War II. A ban on “You’re like Hitler” arguments has become liberals’ latest excuse to ignore history. …

James Taranto writes on some recent Jimmy Carter remarks.

David Boaz makes a good point about McCain and Obama.

On Sunday Barack Obama urged graduates of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University to devote themselves to “collective service.” This is not an unusual theme for a commencement address. But it was interesting how long he went on discussing various kinds of nonprofit activism without ever mentioning the virtues of commerce or of individual achievement.

He also did not cite the military as an example of service to one’s country. This is a surprising omission in a Memorial Day weekend speech to college-age students by a man seeking to be entrusted with the defense of the U.S.

Sen. Obama told the students that “our individual salvation depends on collective salvation.” He disparaged students who want to “take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy.”

The people Mr. Obama is sneering at are the ones who built America – the traders and entrepreneurs and manufacturers who gave us railroads and airplanes, housing and appliances, steam engines, electricity, telephones, computers and Starbucks. Ignored here is the work most Americans do, the work that gives us food, clothing, shelter and increasing comfort. It’s an attitude you would expect from a Democrat. …

Vaclav Klaus has a book out, Blue Planet in Green Shackles.

… I see the current danger in environmentalism and especially in its strongest version, climate alarmism. Feeling very strongly about it and trying to oppose it was the main reason for putting my book together, originally in Czech language, in the spring of 2007. It has also been the driving force behind my active involvement in the current Climate Change Debate and behind my being the only head of state who in September 2007 at the UN Climate Change Conference in New York City openly and explicitly challenged the undergoing global warming hysteria.

My central concern is – in a condensed form – captured in the subtitle of this book. I ask: “What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?” My answer is: “it is our freedom.” I may also add “and our prosperity”.

The book was written by an economist who happens to be in a high political position. I don’t deny my basic paradigm, which is the “economic way of thinking”, because I consider it an advantage, not a disadvantage. …

John Stossel writes on “windfall profit” nonsense.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to raise the price of oil, as well as most everything else, and lower the value of the pension and mutual funds that union members and retirees depend on.

Of course, they don’t describe their plan that way. Instead, they call for a windfall-profits tax on the oil companies.

But it’s the same thing.

Taxing a “windfall” sounds appealing, but stock prices are based on expected profits. Throw a new tax on profits, and retirement portfolios of regular people take a hit.

“Hillary will impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies and use the money to temporarily suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gas tax and the 24.4 cent per gallon diesel tax during the upcoming peak summer driving months,” says her website (http://tinyurl.com/3jtlfp).

“They sure can afford it,” she told an audience in Indianapolis.

Whom does she think “they” are? …

David Warren takes off after junk mail.

… This is the principal environmental problem in our democracy today: the idiotization of the general public. It is the inevitable result of the bureaucratization of our public life. As the Nanny State expands, it sucks all the clean air out of civil discourse, and replaces it with the stench of “settled science” and institutional priorities, enumerated by persons who in turn have no idea what they are talking about, because the nonsense they are spouting is never challenged.

This is a terrible, and potentially fatal, environmental problem, for sleepwalking hardly ever ends well. It is why my own number one priority is to find new ways to cut through all the crap..

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Mark Steyn’s piece from Sunday was so good we run it again.

… But, before we start suing distant sheikhs in exotic lands for violating the NOPEC act, why don’t we start by suing Congress? After all, who “limits the production or distribution of oil” right here in the United States by declaring that there’ll be no drilling in the Gulf of Florida or the Arctic National Mosquito Refuge? As Rep. Wasserman Schultz herself told Neil Cavuto on Fox News, “We can’t drill our way out of this problem.”

Well, maybe not. But maybe we could drill our way back to $3.25 a gallon. More to the point, if the House of Representatives has now declared it “illegal” for the government of Saudi Arabia to restrict oil production, why is it still legal for the government of the United States to restrict oil production? In fact, the government of the United States restricts pretty much every form of energy production other than the bizarre fetish du jour of federally mandated ethanol production.

Nuclear energy?

Whoa, no, remember Three Mile Island? (OK, nobody does, but kids and anyone under late middle age, you can look it up in your grandparents’ school books.)

Coal?

Whoa, no, man, there go our carbon credits. …

Robert Samuelson says “progressives” who fight globalization are consigning billions to lives of poverty.

What’s the world’s greatest moral challenge, as judged by its capacity to inflict human tragedy? It is not, I think, global warming, whose effects — if they become as grim as predicted — will occur over many years and provide societies time to adapt. A case can be made for preventing nuclear proliferation, which threatens untold deaths and a collapse of the world economy. But the most urgent present moral challenge, I submit, is the most obvious: global poverty.

There are roughly 6 billion people on the planet; in 2004, perhaps 2.5 billion survived on $2 a day or less, says the World Bank. By 2050, the world may have 3 billion more people; many will be similarly impoverished. What’s baffling and frustrating about extreme poverty is that much of the world has eliminated it. In 1800, almost everyone was desperately poor. But the developed world has essentially abolished starvation, homelessness and material deprivation.

The solution to being poor is getting rich. It’s economic growth. We know this. The mystery is why all societies have not adopted the obvious remedies. Just recently, the 21-member Commission on Growth and Development — including two Nobel-prize winning economists, former prime ministers of South Korea and Peru, and a former president of Mexico — examined the puzzle. …

WSJ – Europe has more on al-Dura.

September 30, 2000, Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip: France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin offers the world a front seat on the video shooting of Mohammed al-Durra and his father Jamal. Targeted, according to Mr. Enderlin’s voice-over commentary, by “gunfire from the direction of the Israeli positions.” A few seconds later: “Mohammed is dead, his father is critically wounded.” The France 2 cameraman, later identified as Palestinian stringer Talal Abu Rahma, caught the child killers in the act. A prize-winning scoop!

Independent analysts and Israeli officials seeking clarification of inconsistencies in the al-Durra news report encountered stubborn resistance from the state-owned French channel and its Mideast correspondent. An Israeli army investigation concluded the gunfire could not have come from their position; independent investigators went further and declared that the incident had been staged. Exasperated by the controversy, France 2 and Mr. Enderlin sued four Web sites for defamation, won three cases and lost the fourth on a technicality. Philippe Karsenty, director of the Media-Ratings watchdog site (www.m-r.fr), convicted of defamation for calling the al-Durra report “a hoax,” took the case to the Court of Appeals.

May 21, 2008, Palais de Justice, 11th Chamber of the Court of Appeals: Presiding judge Laurence Trébucq announced the verdict with a delicate smile: Philippe Karsenty is acquitted; the plaintiff’s claims are dismissed. …

Gerard Baker says it is not misogyny, Hillary just s**ks.

… The principal reason voters give for not liking Senator Clinton is that they don’t trust her, that they sense that someone who would do or say anything to get elected is not someone who should be entrusted with the presidency. If anything has been demonstrated in the two long years in which she has been actively campaigning for the presidency, it is how right they are.

As she ratchets up her final efforts to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama’s grasp, she has finally cut herself free from the frayed moorings that connected her campaign with honesty and reality. This week, as Senator Obama moved closer to securing a majority of delegates needed for the Democratic nomination, she was insisting with more urgency than ever that the votes cast in Michigan and Florida must be counted.

These states, you’ll recall, broke the Democratic Party’s rules and went ahead with their primaries earlier than they were supposed to. As a result the Democratic Party – not the Republicans, or the Supreme Court or the Bush Administration – decided to disqualify those states from the process. In Michigan, Senator Obama was not even on the ballot papers, yet now Senator Clinton not only insists those votes must count towards the final vote totals, but says it would be a terrible denial of Americans’ civil rights if they did not.

She compared her effort to overturn the decision not only to Al Gore’s controversial defeat in Florida in a disputed recount in 2000, but to the victims of tyranny throughout history – from enslaved blacks in pre-Civil War America to the cheated voters in the election in March in Zimbabwe.

This is, truly, disturbing. It matters not whether it is a man or a woman saying it. It is not only hyperbolic and cynical. It is inflammatory nonsense. But it is at least of a piece with her increasingly desperate struggle. …

The Corner thinks we should be paying attention to Jake Tapper’s blog.

Over at ABC, Jake Tapper has done some first-rate reporting on the campaign this year; chiefly because he seems to be subjecting all the candidates to real scrutiny. Case in point, Tapper seems to be one of the few people not so mesmerized by his mellifluous baritone he hasn’t noticed that Obama’s a “one-man gaffe machine.” …

So, Here’s Jake who wants to know “what the FARC” Obama was talking about.

… There have also been gaffes of more consequence.

As ABC News’ David Wright and Sunlen Miller wrote, Obama seemed to either think Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan or he misunderstands the nature of military translators.

More recently, Obama as he traveled through Florida seemed to give some contradictory statements about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the Colombian terrorist group FARC.

On Thursday Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Chavez and “one of the obvious high priorities in my talks with President Hugo Chavez would be the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about.”

OK, so a strong declaration that Chavez is supporting FARC, which Obama intends to push him on.

But then on Friday he said any government supporting FARC should be isolated. …

WaPo’s Fact Checker gives Obama three Pinocchio’s for his Auschwitz gaffe.

… In an attempt to burnish his credentials with America’s veterans, Barack Obama has frequently talked about his grandfather “who served in Patton’s army.” He has now added a new episode to his World War II repertoire: the uncle who liberated Auschwitz. Unfortunately, the story shows that the presumptive Democratic nominee has a poor grasp of European history and geography. …

Byron York thinks Obama’s continual family references might be a mistake.

I think it’s a mistake for Obama to make so many references to his family, as he did with his maternal grandfather’s military service over the Memorial Day weekend and as he will reportedly do again, with the same grandfather, in a trip to Punchbowl National Cemetery sometime in the future.  It’s a mistake because it invites this question: How come he talks about his family a lot, but only one side?  And then mostly just his grandparents on that side?

Before his marriage, Obama’s mother’s parents were his only real familial link to the sort of life experience that most Americans would recognize.  His mother was basically an expatriate, and his father was a visitor from Kenya.  (Although Obama has at times portrayed his father as drawn to the United States by the immigrant dream, he in fact came to the U.S. for school and went back home.)  That leaves Toot and Gramps, the maternal grandparents who raised Obama as an adolescent in Hawaii while his mother was in Indonesia and his father had abandoned the family for Africa.  Since Gramps was a World War II veteran, Obama has focused on him to show patriotic bona fides. …

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Rebecca Walker, daughter of the author Alice Walker (The Color Purple) describes her journey away from her mother’s rabid hate-filled feminism.

… I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.

As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

My mother’s feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn’t even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.

I love my mother very much, but I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son  -  her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.

Well, so be it. My mother may be revered by women around the world  -  goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it’s time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution. …

… Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women’s movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them  -  as I have learned to my cost. I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

I hope that my mother and I will be reconciled one day. Tenzin deserves to have a grandmother. But I am just so relieved that my viewpoint is no longer so utterly coloured by my mother’s.

I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters  -  a happy family.

Melanie Phillips lays the blame for cultural rot at he feet of the left intelligencia.

Peggy Noonan writes on three accomplished women, Golda Mier, Indira Ghandi, and Margaret Thatcher.

She was born in Russia, fled the pogroms with her family, was raised in Milwaukee, and worked the counter at her father’s general store when she was 8. In early adulthood she made aliyah to Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz, picking almonds and chasing chickens. She rose in politics, was the first woman in the first Israeli cabinet, soldiered on through war and rumors of war, became the first and so far only woman to be prime minister of Israel. And she knew what it is to be a woman in the world. “At work, you think of the children you’ve left at home. At home you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. . . . Your heart is rent.” This of course was Golda Meir. …

Camille Paglia thinks Hillary has done women no favors.

When the dust settles over the 2008 election, will Hillary Clinton have helped or hindered women’s advance toward the US presidency?

Right now, Hillary is in Godzilla mode, refusing to accept Barack Obama’s looming nomination and threatening to tie the Democratic party in legal knots until the August convention and beyond.

Those who think she will withdraw gracefully in a few weeks are living in cloud cuckoo land. The Clintons are ruthless scrappers who will lock their bulldog teeth in any bloody towel.

In  her raw ambition and stubborn, grinding energy, Hillary will certainly cast a long shadow on young women aspiring to high office. She is both inspiring role model and cringe-making bad example — an overtly feminist careerist who never found a way to succeed without her husband’s connections, advice, and intervention. …

Maureen Dowd imagined a conversation between Barack and Hillary.

“What do you want? Please, Sweetie, would you just tell me what you want?”

“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I want.”

“Besides that, Hillary. Seriously, you don’t want your delusion to put John McCain in the White House. Or maybe you do. You have no shot. I’m 60 delegates away from nomination nirvana. You should stop stalking me. I come down to Florida for a victory lap and you follow me down here and call for a recount. Look what that did for Al Gore. If you show a shred of common sense and take a powder now, the party will put you on a pedestal.”

“Pedestals are for losers. You’re on a pedestal. I’ve never been a loser. I refuse to lose. I won the West Virginia and Kentucky derbies, and I’m not going to end up like Eight Belles.”

“Hillary, you’ve been a great candidate, better than your train-wreck campaign. You’re Churchillian in your indomitable tenacity. You’ve inspired women all over the country. In fact, you’ve inspired some of them to hate me. But now it’s time for you to try to muster a gracious exit.”

“Forget it, Bones. …

Claudia Rosett with the lowdown on the UN inspector who’s checking to see if there’s racism in the presidential election this year.

In the Rashomon world of UN flim-flam, some might call it a junket, some might call it a farce, some might call it a political hit job in an election year — and they’d all have a good case. Here comes Monsieur Doudou Diene of Senegal, dispatched to America as a special investigator by the UN’s Geneva-based Human Rights Council (yes, the outfit where the delegates of China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia et al meet regularly to define human rights right down into the sewer, slam Israel, and then repair to the Mercedes and BMWs waiting to ferry them off to dinner). Diene is jetting around on a two-week tour that will — as Benny Avni reports in the NY Sun, and Nile Gardiner describes on NRO  – take him to Washington, New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico (we are not told whether he brought beach reading and a bathing suit).

One might hope that Doudou Diene has come here to learn about and report back on the virtues and workings of a free country — a field which for some at the UN Human Rights Council would be virgin terrain. But let’s not get ridiculous. This is the UN at work, and Diene is no de Toqueville — here he is in 2006 parading as a UN expert on “Islamophobia,” by-passing some of the most racist and repressive societies on earth in order to dwell upon the failings of democracies, and his desire for the Danes to corral their cartoons.

Diene will now be touring America to inquire into whether “racism,” as understood by the UN, figures in the presidential campaign. What does that portend? …

The greens have taken over college dorms. WSJ with details.

On Monday the trustees of the University of Delaware voted to approve a new yearlong residence life program. Undergraduates will be asked, in a reprise of “show and tell,” to bring in one of their “favorite material objects” and explain why it is important to them. They will be instructed to discuss intrusive questions like “How do you define love?” and “Who are you voting for” with their dorm-mates. Finally, this extracurricular curriculum will ask students to “pick a metaphor that illustrates their view of sustainability.”

If you have spent any time on a college campus recently, you will realize that “sustainability” is the academy’s favorite new buzzword. There’s the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE); a Sustainable Endowments Institute that publishes a College Sustainability Report Card; an Ivy Plus Sustainability Working Group, and another one for colleges in the Northeast. There are sustainability offices and officers at dozens of schools nationwide.

People unfamiliar with this subject might think that sustainability is just a fancy-sounding term for a smattering of environmentally friendly campus activities. But while it’s true that the word does encompass recycling and higher-efficiency light bulbs, college administrations in recent years have started to give the term a more dramatic meaning.

More than 500 schools have signed AASHE’s American College and University President Climates Commitment, which sets them on a path toward “climate neutrality.” Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University and one of the document’s signers, released this humble statement: “Colleges and Universities must lead the effort to reverse global warming for the health and well being of current and future generations.”

According to Lee Bodner, president of EcoAmerica, an organizer of the pledge, the schools have two years to create a comprehensive plan for “eliminating direct emissions” from their campuses and for integrating sustainability into their classrooms. …

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Proving Mark Twain’s dictum that a lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes, Anti-Semites started eight years ago on their latest blood libel ably assisted by a French news organization. Pickerhead refers to the story of Muhammad Al-Dura. French courts are beginning to correct the damage. David Warren has details.

My column today will be about just one incident in the Middle East, that happened nearly eight years ago. It was a significant incident in its own right, with repercussions to the present day. It is more broadly significant, because it provides a clear example of the way malicious dishonesty in media reporting costs lives, inflames conflicts, feeds ignorance, and spreads murderous racial hatred.

The incident was the alleged shooting of a little boy by Israeli troops in Gaza, in September 2000. His name was Muhammad Al-Dura, and if my reader has been watching any television over the last eight years, he will have seen the clip, probably many times. A Palestinian man and boy are shown cowering by a wall. Then suddenly the boy is shown dead in his father’s arms. The voice-over explains that he was picked off by an Israeli marksman.

The clip was produced for the French state television channel, France-2. After assembly in Paris, it was immediately aired, and also distributed free of charge to media the world over. It received huge play everywhere, and in most Muslim countries it continues to be shown, endlessly. The Arab League declared Oct. 1 to be “Al-Dura Day” to commemorate all Arab children “victimized by Zionists.” Hundreds of schools have been named after the child throughout that world, where depictions of his dead body have become iconic. Orchestrated demonstrations of rage over this have cost additional lives. …

Melanie Phillips blogs on Al-Dura.

Amer. Spectator imagines what it would be like if the media approached all events like those in Israel.

Bill Kristol’s Memorial Day message.

Last Thursday, the soldiers of the Third United States Infantry Regiment (the Old Guard) placed a small American flag in front of each of the 260,000 or so grave markers in Arlington National Cemetery. The soldiers remained on duty throughout the weekend, replacing flags that had fallen or been removed, to ensure that each grave was appropriately decorated and honored on Memorial Day.

This decades-old tradition exemplifies the attention the military pays to honoring its veterans and, above all of course, its fallen warriors. But what of the rest of us? Most of us in the Washington area didn’t visit Arlington this weekend. Most of us across America aren’t participating in Memorial Day services or commemorations.

This doesn’t mean Americans are indifferent to the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform. In fact, I suspect that many of us feel so much in debt to our servicemen and women, and so much in awe of the ultimate sacrifice some of them have made and all of them are willing to make, that we worry any effort to honor them wouldn’t be commensurate with their deeds.

One retired general I know urges civilians to go out of their way to say thank you to servicemen and women they happen to encounter. At first I thought such a gesture might be intrusive, or awkward, or unwelcome. I was wrong. When civilians walk over to express appreciation to men and women in uniform, in airports or restaurants or the like, the recipients seem a little embarrassed — but grateful. So perhaps we all should be less shy about thanking our troops for their service. …

Matthew Continetti wonders why the Dems won’t recognize progress in Iraq.

General David Petraeus was back in Washington last week. President Bush has promoted him to chief of Central Command (CENTCOM), which requires Senate confirmation. Under Petraeus’s leadership, Iraq has changed dramatically. Why can’t the Democrats change with it?

Bush announced the surge in January 2007. Iraq was a violent place. Al Qaeda in Iraq held large swaths of territory. Shiite death squads roamed much of Baghdad. The Iraqi political class seemed feckless. Hence Bush’s decision to send more troops, replace General George Casey with Petraeus, and change the mission from force protection and search-and-destroy to population security. The new strategy’s strongest proponent and supporter was Senator John McCain.

Democrats opposed the surge almost without exception. Barack Obama said that the new policy would neither “make a dent” in the violence plaguing Iraq nor “change the dynamics” there. A month after the president’s announcement, Obama declared it was time to remove American combat troops from Iraq. In April, as the surge brigades were on their way to the combat zone, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid proclaimed “this war is lost” and that U.S. troops should pack up and come home. In July, as surge operations were underway, the New York Times editorialized that “it is time for the United States to leave Iraq.” The Times’s editorial writers recognized Iraq “could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave.” But that didn’t matter. “Keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.”

Wrong. When Petraeus returned to Washington in September 2007, he reported that the numbers of violent incidents, civilian deaths, ethnosectarian killings, and car and suicide bombings had declined dramatically from the previous December. Why? The surge–and the broadening “Awakening” movement, which began when the sheikhs in Anbar province rebelled against al Qaeda in late 2006 and accelerated when the tribal leaders understood America would not abandon them in 2007. …

NY Times thinks McCain had a bad week. Jennifer Rubin begs to differ in Contentions.

The New York Times and other mainstream media pundits are convinced that John McCain is in dire straits and everything is going swimmingly for their favorite son Barack Obama. But is this right?

It is hard to ignore the stream of Obama gaffes. The Cuban community in Florida is unimpressed. Foreign leaders continue to express concern about Obama’s foreign policy pronouncements. And for someone who is now the certain nominee of the party “destined” to win in November his poll numbers are mediocre at best. Why after all this supposedly horrible news for McCain would Obama only be tied with him (and Clinton only slightly ahead of McCain) in the last Newsweek poll? (In Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls McCain is up slightly over Obama.)

Previously, Pickings posted on Amir Taheri’s concern for the damage Obama’a remarks have caused to the opposition in Iran. Abe Greenwald follows the story.

Great post from Power Line.

On the stump, Barack Obama usually concludes his comments on Iraq by saying, “and it hasn’t made us safer.” It is an article of faith on the left that nothing the Bush administration has done has enhanced our security, and, on the contrary, its various alleged blunders have only contributed to the number of jihadists who want to attack us.

Empirically, however, it seems beyond dispute that something has made us safer since 2001. Over the course of the Bush administration, successful attacks on the United States and its interests overseas have dwindled to virtually nothing.

Some perspective here is required. While most Americans may not have been paying attention, a considerable number of terrorist attacks on America and American interests abroad were launched from the 1980s forward, too many of which were successful. What follows is a partial history: …

Nicholas Kristoff says if the earthquakes don’t kill the Chinese, the air they breathe will.

China’s biggest health disaster isn’t the terrible Sichuan earthquake this month. It’s the air.

The quake killed at least 60,000 people, generating a response that has been heartwarming and inspiring, with even schoolchildren in China donating to the victims. Yet with little notice, somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Chinese die prematurely every year from the effects of outdoor air pollution, according to studies by Chinese and international agencies alike.

In short, roughly as many Chinese die every two months from the air as were killed in the earthquake. And the problem is becoming international: just as Californians can find Chinese-made shoes in their stores, they can now find Chinese-made haze in their skies. …

Don Boudreaux looks at green initiatives.

… I wince at these efforts for two reasons. The first is identical to the reason why I wince at the thought of people voluntarily buying books that explain how to get rich quick or how to lose weight while they sleep. While I don’t wish to forcibly prevent adults from choosing to spend their money on such gimmicks, the fact remains that these things are fraudulent. Their purveyors prey on people’s gullibility.

And so it is with many of the ideas for how to “live green.” For example, consider the admonition to use ceramic cups rather than paper or Styrofoam cups. The idea is that production of paper cups causes more trees to be felled and Styrofoam cups cause more oil to be extracted. Such activities are deemed “ungreen.” But the production of ceramic cups requires intense heat — a requirement that consumes resources. And being heavier than disposable cups, ceramic cups require greater amounts of energy to be shipped to market. Finally, let’s not forget that washing ceramic cups also uses energy and water.

Now I have no idea if disposable cups are better or worse for the environment than are ceramic cups — which is my point. The complexity of our modern economy is far, far greater than most people realize. As Milton Friedman (taking his cue from his friend Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education) famously explained in his 1979 TV show “Free to Choose,” no one knows how to make even an ordinary pencil. …

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Slate had a number of cool pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge. Here’s two.

Charles Krauthammer has lots of fun with Obama’s mistake that has “metastasized.”

When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has entered the realm of the surreal. Another unmistakable sign is when a presidential candidate makes a gaffe, then, realizing it is too egregious to take back without suffering humiliation, decides to make it a centerpiece of his foreign policy.

Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure — then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration’s refusal to do so not just “ridiculous” but “a disgrace.”

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity. …

Eight months back Israeli jets destroyed an installation of some type in north-eastern Syria. At the time, there was speculation it was a nuclear reactor. In a perfect illustration of how the New Yorker’s readers become ignorant, Seymour Hirsh found an expert to say that was not possible. We now know the expert was wrong. Said expert is now one of Obama’s advisors. Gabriel Schoenfeld considers the implications for the LA Times.

ONE OF THE least noticed and most peculiar campaign promises made by Barack Obama is his pledge, if elected president, to “secure all loose nuclear materials in the world within four years.” Without doubt that is a laudable goal, but one is left wondering how exactly he expects to accomplish it in four years, or even, for that matter, in 40.

One of many obstacles is that our intelligence agencies seldom know where loose nuclear materials are, especially when they are hidden on the territory of hostile states. An even bigger problem is that when we they do locate them, there always will be some expert or another telling us that, despite all the evidence, they are not really there. Obama, of all people, should know this.

He has one such expert advising his campaign. …

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics says Hillary’s biggest mistake was not finding Rev. Wright before Iowa when it could have done her some good. Now it only helps McCain. This from the “world’s smartest woman?”

Coming off her landslide win in West Virginia on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton plods on to the end of the primary season on June 3. But her campaign has already been declared dead by many pundits, and the postmortems on why her campaign failed have already begun.

Most prominent among them, at least thus far, is Karen Tumulty of Time magazine, who in last week’s issue recounted Mrs. Clinton’s “five big mistakes, each of which compounded the others.”

According to Ms. Tumulty, those mistakes, in order, were: 1. She misjudged the mood, 2. She didn’t master the rules, 3. She underestimated the caucus states, 4. She relied on old money, and 5. She never counted on a long haul.

All of these points are no doubt true, but they miss the mark. Mrs. Clinton’s first and biggest mistake, which eventually led to her undoing, can be summed up in a single question: How and why did her campaign miss Mr. Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

Put simply, had Mr. Wright been introduced to voters a few days before the Iowa caucuses, odds are Barack Obama would not be a hair’s breadth away from clinching the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. …

And for Hillary’s latest mistake, Maureen Dowd columns.

… Obama now has the perfect excuse not to pick Hillary as his running mate. She has been too unseemly in her desire to be on the scene if he trips, or gets hit with a devastating story. She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.

That’s where the runners-up can be found, prettily lurking, in case it turns out the girl with the crown has some naked pictures in her past.

Mark Steyn was watching the congressional oil hearings.

I was watching the Big Oil execs testifying before Congress. That was my first mistake. If memory serves, there was lesbian mud wrestling over on Channel 137, and on the whole that’s less rigged. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz knew the routine: “I can’t say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not.”

Had I been in the hapless oil man’s expensive shoes, I’d have answered, “Hey, you first. I can’t say that there is evidence that you’re sleeping with barnyard animals, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence and prima facie evidence, lady? Do I have to file a U.N. complaint in Geneva that the House of Representatives is in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?”

But that’s why I don’t get asked to testify before Congress. So instead the Big Oil guy oozed as oleaginous as his product before the grand panjandrums of the House Subcommittee on Televised Posturing, and then they went off and passed 324-82 the so-called NOPEC bill. The NOPEC bill is, in effect, a suit against OPEC, which, if I recall correctly, stands for the Oil Price-Exploiting Club. “No War For Oil!,” as the bumper stickers say. But a massive suit for oil – now that’s the American way. …

David Harsanyi of Dever Post says if the Senate is looking for villians, they should look in the mirror.

… This week’s sham of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing saw Big Oil executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron and three other companies take the stand. With quivering voices, they explained basic economic principles to Senate demagogues who, incidentally, bear far more responsibility for high prices than the execs themselves.

The lead demagogue, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, leveled numerous preposterous charges. He claimed that there was a “disconnect” between supply and demand and the gasoline prices that consumers are wrestling with at the pump.

Leahy, one hopes, knows that oil companies have little to do with the price of oil per barrel. He knows full well that they can’t control OPEC production or Hugo Chavez or the dramatic increase in oil demand by China, India and other developing nations. So in this case, the only “disconnect” is between facts and Sen. Leahy. …

Amazing story from George Will.

CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — Numbers come precisely from the agile mind and nimble tongue of Frank Buckles, who seems bemused to say that 4,734,991 Americans served in the military during America’s involvement in the First World War and that 4,734,990 are gone. He is feeling fine, thank you for asking. …

It’s really kinda funny to read a defense of free trade in The New Yorker. James Surowieki tries to make it simple so the ignorati will catch on, in “The Free Trade Paradox.”

… The reason for this is simple: free trade with poorer countries has a huge positive impact on the buying power of middle- and lower-income consumers—a much bigger impact than it does on the buying power of wealthier consumers. The less you make, the bigger the percentage of your spending that goes to manufactured goods—clothes, shoes, and the like—whose prices are often directly affected by free trade. The wealthier you are, the more you tend to spend on services—education, leisure, and so on—that are less subject to competition from abroad. In a recent paper on the effect of trade with China, the University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis estimate that poor Americans devote around forty per cent more of their spending to “non-durable goods” than rich Americans do. That means that lower-income Americans get a much bigger benefit from the lower prices that trade with China has brought. …

WSJ Op-Ed on the joys of the “Staycation” – vacationing at home.

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Karl Rove writes today on Obama’s troubling foreign policy instincts.

… On Wednesday, Mr. Obama said in Florida that in a meeting with the Iranians he’d make it clear their behavior is unacceptable. That message has been delivered clearly by Republican and Democratic administrations in public and private diplomacy over the past 16 years. Is he so naïve to think he has a unique ability to make this even clearer?

If Mr. Obama believes he can change the behavior of these nations by meeting without preconditions, he owes it to the voters to explain, in specific terms, what he can say that will lead these states to abandon their hostility. He also needs to explain why unconditional, unilateral meetings with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korea’s Kim Jong Il will not deeply unsettle our allies.

If Mr. Obama fails to do so, voters may come to believe that he is asking them to accept that he has a “Secret Plan,” and that he is hopelessly out of his depth on national security.

Amir Taheri outlines how Obama’s foolishness has already done extensive damage to Ahmadinejad’s opposition in Iran.

BUOYED by their modest electoral success last month, critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s provocative foreign policy were preparing to launch a series of attacks on him in the Islamic Majlis, Iran’s ersatz parliament. But then Ahmadinejad got an unexpected boost from Barack Obama.

Ali Larijani, Iran’s former nuclear negotiator and now a Majlis member, was arguing that the Islamic Republic would pay a heavy price for Ahmadinejad’s rejection of three UN Security Council resolutions on nukes. Then the likely Democratic presidential nominee stepped in.

Obama announced that, if elected, he wouldn’t ask Iran to comply with UN resolutions as a precondition for direct talks with Ahmadinejad: “Preconditions, as it applies to a country like Iran, for example, was a term of art. Because this administration has been very clear that it will not have direct negotiations with Iran until Iran has met preconditions that are essentially what Iran views, and many other observers would view, as the subject of the negotiations; for example, their nuclear program.”

“Talking without preconditions” would require America to ignore three unanimous Security Council resolutions. Before starting his unconditional talks, would Obama present a new resolution at the Security Council to cancel the three that Ahmadinejad doesn’t like? Or would the new US president act in defiance of the United Nations – further weakening the Security Council’s authority?

President Bush didn’t set the preconditions that Obama promises to ignore. They were agreed upon after the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran was in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Acting in accordance with its charter, the IAEA referred the issue to the Security Council.

Dismissing the preconditions as irrelevant would mean snubbing America’s European allies plus Russia and China, all of whom participated in drafting and approving the resolutions that Ahmadinejad doesn’t like. …

The NY Times, of all places, has an op-ed on the beating Khrushchev delivered to Kennedy, when the inexperienced president met with the hardened veteran of Stalin’s Soviet Union and WWII’s Eastern Front.

Only a few minutes after parting with Khrushchev, Kennedy, a World War II veteran, told James Reston of The New York Times that the summit meeting had been the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy went on: “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”

A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall. Kennedy had resigned himself to it, telling his aides in private that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The following spring, Khrushchev made plans to “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants”: nuclear missiles in Cuba. And while there were many factors that led to the missile crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that the impression Khrushchev formed at Vienna — of Kennedy as ineffective — was among them.

If Barack Obama wants to follow in Kennedy’s footsteps, he should heed the lesson that Kennedy learned in his first year in office: sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate. …

Jennifer Rubin notes Obama used to sound like McCain or Bush 43.

The Best of the Web (h/t Andy McCarthy) points out that in 2004 Barack Obama sounded a far different note on Iran, declaring:

“[H]aving a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran. . . . And I hope it doesn’t get to that point. But realistically, as I watch how this thing has evolved, I’d be surprised if Iran blinked at this point.” . . .Obama said that violent Islamic extremists are a vastly different brand of foe than was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they must be treated differently. “With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don’t want to be blown up, we don’t want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain,” Obama said. “I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don’t make those same calculations.” …

Ann Coulter gives her thoughts on Bush’s Knesset speech.

You always know you’ve struck gold when liberals react with hysteria and rage to something you’ve said. So I knew President Bush’s speech at the Knesset last week was a barn burner before even I read it. Liberals haven’t been this worked up since Rev. Jerry Falwell criticized a cartoon sponge.

Calling the fight against terrorism “the defining challenge of our time” — which already confused liberals who think the defining struggle of our time is against Wal-Mart — Bush said:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The way liberals squealed, you’d think someone had mentioned Obama’s ears. Summoning all their womanly anger, today’s Neville Chamberlains denounced Bush, saying this was an unjustified attack on Obambi and, furthermore, that it’s absurd to compare B. Hussein Obama’s willingness to “talk” to Ahmadinejad to Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler. …

George Will has a great column on the polar bear’s protectors.

… No one can anticipate or control the implications that judges might discover in the polar bear designation. Give litigious environmentalists a compliant judge, and the Endangered Species Act might become what New Dealers wanted the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 to be — authority to regulate almost everything.

What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” — the idea that government can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding — is the left’s agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state’s supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left’s hostility to markets. And to automobiles — people going wherever they want whenever they want.

Today’s “green left” is the old “red left” revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history’s violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.

The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon.

Environmentalism is, as Lawson writes, an unlimited “license to intrude.” “Eco-fundamentalism,” which is “the quasi-religion of green alarmism,” promises “global salvationism.” Onward, green soldiers, into preventive war on behalf of some bears who are simultaneously flourishing and “threatened.”

Perfect lead to Dr. Tim Ball, Canadian environmentalist, on the anti-human agenda of many greens.

A tongue-in-cheek comment from my university said if we could just get rid of the students it would be a great place to work. Some environmentalists think if we could just get rid of all the people on the planet it would be a great place to live. Generally over-population is a major part of the environmentalists’ argument that humans are causing all the problems, including climate change. Satire is a good measure of this position typified by the bumper sticker that says, “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself.”

The relationship between population and resources has been an issue throughout history. All predictions to date were wrong including Thomas Malthus in the 19th century, who claimed the population would outgrow the food supply. The most recent flurry of alarmism over population growth was a key piece of the ideas of the Club of Rome and the now discredited book “Limits to Growth”. It received momentum through Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb.” …

… The English TV comedy series “Yes Minister” had a wonderful episode in which the most efficient and economical hospital was one that had no patients. Well environmentalists don’t harbor those views lightly. Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said,

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” “If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species, Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”

It’s too bad the dinosaurs or all the other species that became extinct long before Homo Sapiens came on the scene did not know of this. …

Fascinating Corner post by Peter Wehner. Seems even the unrelentingly grotesque New York Review of Books has figured out the frauds behind global warming.

Professor Dyson, a renowned theoretical physicist and mathematician famous for his work in, among other things, quantum mechanics, believes in anthropogenic global warming. But he also believes that there is a dangerous tendency among an increasing number of advocates of global warming to be “dogmatic” and shut down the debate. In that context, the concluding three paragraphs of Dyson’s New York Review of Books essay are worth highlighting: …

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic has a book on global warming coming out in English next week. Iain Murray Corner post with details.

More proof God has a sense of humor. Burlington Free Press says snow will greet Memorial Day hikers in the People’s Republic of Vermont.

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Mark Steyn was wearing his Happy Warrior hat at the National Review.

Of late I’ve been having some sport with a fellow named Oscar van den Boogaard. He’s a novelist over in Europe, and, while I’m not the most assiduous reader of Continental fiction, my eye was caught by an interview he gave to the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. Reflecting on Europe’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Eutopia he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

This seemed such a poignant epitaph for the Continent that I started quoting it hither and yon. And one thing led to another and I started explaining that Mr. van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay humanist, which is, as I like to say, pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool. A cheap joke, but it got a laugh. And before you know it Mr. van den Boogaard was playing the same function in my act that Elizabeth Taylor does in Joan Rivers’s. (I haven’t seen Miss Rivers since, oh, 1973, so this may have changed.) …

Real Clear Markets has a good piece on the recent voting in Great Britain.

Perhaps it was intense coverage of our own hotly contested Democratic presidential primaries which prompted the American press largely to ignore or downplay the results of elections held in the United Kingdom earlier this month.

Only a handful of America’s newspapers even bothered to mention the U.K vote, in which seats on some 159 local governing councils were up for grabs. Our paper of record, the New York Times, focused most of its coverage on the personality-driven race for mayor of London between eccentric TV personality Boris Johnson and the incumbent and controversial Ken Livingstone–who once compared a newspaper reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard and said in a speech that he longed “for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi Royal Family are swinging from lamp-posts.”

But although Brits were only voting for local councils, the election bears some striking similarities to ours. In the U.K. as here, a party which has been in office through several national election cycles, Labour, faced an electorate at a time of growing economic worry. England’s long housing boom, which has been at times even frothier than ours, has ended, and foreclosures are rising. A major financial institution recently had to be bailed out by the government. Prices, including the already steep price of gas, are rising, eliciting grumbling among voters who have quickly forgotten their own income gains over the last several years.

Facing these circumstances, Labour took a drubbing, winning just 24 percent of the vote nationwide, because its leaders ignored James Carville’s oft-repeated advice that in tough times, it’s the economy that voters care about. Instead, Labour acted positively stupid about the economy, in the process appearing out of touch with voters by seeming almost indifferent to economic news. It’s a lesson that the Republican Party’s looming presidential nominee, John McCain, who occasionally appears as if the economy is the last thing on his mind, can learn from. …

Joe Lieberman gave a good speech last week. WSJ has excerpts.

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom.” …

Bret Stephens takes up the subject of Obama and the Jews.

America’s Jews account for a mere 2% of the U.S. population. But they have voted the Democratic ticket by margins averaging 78% over the past four election cycles, and their votes are potentially decisive in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. They also contribute an estimated half of all donations given to national Democratic candidates.

So whatever his actual convictions, it is a matter of ordinary political prudence that Barack Obama “get right with the Jews.” Since Jews tend to be about as liberal as the Illinois senator on most domestic issues, what this really means is that he get right with Israel.

And so he has.

Over his campaign’s port side have gone pastor Jeremiah Wright (“Every time you say ‘Israel’ Negroes get awfully quiet on you because they [sic] scared: Don’t be scared; don’t be scared”); former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (“I think what the Israelis are doing today [2006] for example in Lebanon is in effect – maybe not in intent – the killing of hostages”); and former Clinton administration diplomat Robert Malley (an advocate and practitioner of talks with Hamas).

The campaign has also managed to clarify, or perhaps retool, Mr. Obama’s much-quoted line that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” What the senator was actually saying, he now tells us, is that “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region.” …

Christopher Hitchens rather likes McCain’s idea for a prez “question time” on Capitol Hill.

… The preferred American way of keeping a bridle and check on the executive branch is the committee system, which has, in turn, been emulated across the Atlantic by some strengthening of parliamentary committees of supervision and inquiry, both permanent and extraordinary. British Cabinet members, too, have to face their own mini-Question Times at regular intervals. Does McCain also propose to subject his appointees to the process? It would be interesting to know. For the moment, though, he has made a rather generous and intelligent offer. He probably thinks that it is in keeping with his expressed commitment to that chimera known as “bipartisanship.” He would soon find out that nothing intensified political rancor more than a good old-fashioned Question Time, but no doubt the idea was well-meant, and I was sorry to see that discussion of it was mostly lost in the general sneering.

Canada’s National Post on globalony’s “settled science.”

… According to the U. S. National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th-Century mean for the first time since 1982.

Also in January, Southern Hemisphere sea ice coverage was at its greatest summer level (January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere) in the past 30 years.

Neither the 3,000 temperature buoys that float throughout the world’s oceans nor the eight NASA satellites that float above our atmosphere have recorded appreciable warming in the past six to eight years.

Even Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, reluctantly admitted to Reuters in January that there has been no warming so far in the 21st Century.

Does this prove that global warming isn’t happening, that we can all go back to idling our SUVs 24/7? No. But it should introduce doubt into the claim that the science of global warming is “settled.”

Year ago BBC reported we were to have more hurricanes. Now, not.   Corner post with details.

Good point to include John Stossel’s column on McCain’s globalony speech.

… As The Wall Street Journal commented, “His plan is ‘market based’ insofar as it requires an expensive, invasive government bureaucracy to interfere with the market“.

McCain’s cap-and-trade system would have a bureaucracy set a limit for CO2 emissions and auction tradable permits to carbon-emitting companies. McCain says the revenue would be “put to good use.” Specifically, “We will add to current federal efforts to develop promising technologies. … We will also establish clear standards in government-funded research, to make sure that funding is effective and focused on the right goals.”

We’ve heard that before. You’d think McCain would have learned that government isn’t cut out for this sort of thing.

For all his lip service to markets, there is no getting around the fact that McCain will use force — that’s what government is — to accomplish his goals. There are only two ways to do things: voluntary or forced. The market is voluntary. No one is ever forced to buy or sell anything.

Cap-and-trade sounds good. Trade is good. But “cap” is force. Government will make arbitrary decisions about how much CO2 will be permitted in a thousand different situations. I can only begin to imagine the bureaucracy that will be required. Will chimney police go to every business and home telling you how much you can emit? Will armed officials from a Department of Global Warming raid your house and jail you if you run your air-conditioner too much? I assume friends of Al Gore will get special dispensation because they are working for the good of the nation. …

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The farm bill was typical pigs at the trough. David Brooks comments first.

… The question amid this supposed change election is: Who is going to end this sort of thing?

Barack Obama talks about taking on the special interests. This farm bill would have been a perfect opportunity to do so. But Obama supported the bill, just as he supported the 2005 energy bill that was a Christmas tree for the oil and gas industries.

Obama’s vote may help him win Iowa, but it will lead to higher global food prices and more hunger in Africa. Moreover, it raises questions about how exactly he expects to bring about the change that he promises. …

… John McCain opposed the farm bill. In an impassioned speech on Monday, he declared: “It would be hard to find any single bill that better sums up why so many Americans in both parties are so disappointed in the conduct of their government, and at times so disgusted by it.” …

Examiner editors next.

Pathetic. Craven. Irresponsible. Unprincipled. Those and similar adjectives apply to every member of Congress who voted for the bloated, anti-consumer piece of legislative corruption known as the Food and Energy Conservative Act of 2008 a k a as “the farm bill.” President Bush has promised to veto the bill. To put it plainly, everybody in Congress who votes to override the coming Bush veto should be retired come November because they will have voted for a measure that is nothing more — or less — than a $300 billion giveaway of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. This is especially true for conservative Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats who brag about their fiscal rectitude. …

St. Louis Post Dispatch’s David Nicklaus.

It’s hard to find anything to like about the 2008 farm bill, unless you get all misty-eyed when politicians start talking about bipartisanship.

Democrats and Republicans indeed have agreed — in large enough numbers that the House and Senate should be able to override a threatened presidential veto — to spend roughly $300 billion on a bill that subsidizes wealthy farmers at a time when farm income is at a record level. For good measure, this pork-laden bill interferes with trade policy and undercuts environmental goals. …

… As if Congress hadn’t rolled enough bad policies into a single bill, it added a tax break for millionaire owners of racehorses.

“This bill sets a very high standard for pork,” said Washington University economist Murray Weidenbaum. “The basic explanation is the power of tightly knit special-interest groups. This is a very cynical example of public-policy formation.”

When it comes to big, important issues like war, trade and immigration, our nation’s leaders are sharply divided. But when it comes to handing out goodies to the politically powerful, they’re all on the same side.

If this is what bipartisanship is all about, I want my gridlock back.

Hot Air gets to lead off with Obama’s nutty suggestion we should ask the world where we set our thermostats. Corner posts follow.

… “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said. …

Power Line gets in on the fun.

Caroline Glick comments on the unique appeasement style of Barack Obama.

Spin doctors were relabeled “strategists” in the early 1990s. And as Mark Steyn wrote last week in National Review, “Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies.”

The latest attitude to be flouted as policy is indignation. Specifically, Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama’s furious indignation at President George W. Bush’s address before the Knesset last week where he celebrated Israel’s 60th anniversary and extolled the US’s alliance with Israel. Beyond praising the Jewish people’s 4,000 year-old devotion to the Land of Israel and to liberty, Bush used the speech to warn against those who think that Iran and its terror proxies can simply be wished away through appeasement.

As the president put it, “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided. We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

To Israeli ears, Bush’s words were uncontroversial. Israel is beset by enemies who daily call for its physical annihilation and while doing so, build and support terror forces who attack Israel. For most Israelis, the notion that these enemies can be appeased is absurd and deeply offensive.

The only strong reaction that Bush’s remarks provoked in Israel was relief. In spite of the Bush administration’s own participation in the six-party talks with North Korea, its support for the EU-3′s feckless discussions with the mullahs, its paralysis in the face of Hizbullah’s takeover of Lebanon, and its support for the establishment of a Palestinian state run by Fatah terrorists dedicated to Israel’s destruction, at the very least, standing before the Knesset, Bush effectively pledged not to allow Iran to acquire the means to conduct a new Holocaust.

From an Israeli vantage point then, it was shocking to see that immediately after Bush stepped down from the rostrum, Obama and his Democratic supporters began pillorying him for his remarks. Most distressing is what Obama’s reaction said about the Democratic presidential hopeful.

OBAMA’S RESPONSE to Bush’s speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama. …

Roger Simon reacts to Tom Friedman’s “Obama and the Jews” so you don’t have to waste your time.

As a non-subscriber, I don’t keep up with NYT op-eds the way I used to, so I didn’t read Thomas Friedman’s thumbsucker “Obama and the Jews” until today. And I don’t read Friedman much anymore anyway, finding his unchanged (for decades) views so predictable my head falls onto the page (or computer screen) in near sleep by the time I have read the second paragraph. …

Jennifer Rubin starts a series of Contentions posts on Obama and his ideas.

This remarkable bit of footage from Barack Obama’s appearance in Oregon last night is now floating around on YouTube. It might be useful as an undergraduate course exam: how many errors can you spot? Obama apparently believes that Iran and other rogues states (he lists Iran, Cuba and Venezuela) “don’t pose a serious threat to the U.S.” Iran, specifically, he tells us spends so little on defense relative to us that if Iran “tried to pose a serious threat to us they wouldn’t . . . they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

So, taken literally, he seems not much concerned about Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, its sponsorship of terrorist organizations, its commitment to eradicate Israel, its current actions in supplying weapons that have killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq, and its role in eroding Lebanon’s sovereignty through its client Hezbollah. …

Abe Greenwald continues with his reaction to thermostat-gate.

… In other words, now our domestic policies have to pass a global test, too. And not just our domestic policies, but our individual domestic lives. Barack Obama has rendered the American hearth and home subject to world opinion. We can’t “eat as much as we want” and hope to be popular. We can’t sit comfortably in our warm domiciles and hope to build alliances with other countries. Only as a nation of shivering hungry supplicants will America, it seems, reclaim its dominance on the world stage.

And to the Dem confusion about Obama’s positions.

Jennifer Rubin again …….

And once more …..

Linda Chavez reacts to “Lay off my wife.”

… Michelle Obama doesn’t just show up at fundraisers or make the occasional, canned surrogate speech. She is, as The New York Times noted here, involved in shaping campaign strategy, and her speeches have sometimes generated as much attention as his. Why shouldn’t she be fair game for speculation, dissection, and criticism?

Michelle Obama is an Ivy League-educated lawyer with strong opinions and an activist career.  The last First Lady with a similar pedigree ended up using the hitherto ceremonial role to launch her own political career.

More random thoughts from Thomas Sowell.

… It would be hard to think of a more ridiculous way to make decisions than to transfer those decisions to third parties who pay no price for being wrong. Yet that is what at least half of the bright ideas of the political left amount to. …

… At one time, to call someone “green” was to disparage them as inexperienced or immature. Today, to call someone green is to exalt them as one of the environmentalist saviors of the planet. But it is amazing how many people are green in both senses. Some people who think it is wrong to tell children to believe in Santa Claus nevertheless think it is all right to tell adults to believe that the government can give the whole population things that we cannot afford ourselves. Believing in Santa Claus is apparently bad for children but OK for adults. …

… Whoever said that overnight is a lifetime in politics knew what he was talking about. Just 6 months ago, the big question was how Hillary and Giuliani would do against each other in this year’s presidential elections.

Debra Saunders is losing sleep over the prospects for Clinton Dems.

… Before Iowa, when the Clintons were the party’s power couple, the faithful quickly became indignant at any criticism, deserved or not, of either Clinton. As Obama racks up more delegates, Republicans and Democrats can say anything they want about either Clinton, and there is no outrage. Worse, it is now apostasy to criticize Obama.

Even if they were white, middle-aged and living in mostly white enclaves, Clintonians had a quick ticket to the votes of black America. If a Republican said something that could be construed as racist, they did not hesitate to pull the race card.

Now the First Black President and his missus, Hillary, are the race-baiters. The world is upside-down. …

… Poor, poor Clinton Democrats. Now they know how it feels to be Republicans.

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John Bolton says if Obama wants to debate foreign policy, McCain should jump at the chance.

… Like all human activity, negotiation has costs and benefits. If only benefits were involved, then it would be hard to quarrel with the “what can we lose?” mantra one hears so often. In fact, the costs and potential downsides are real, and not to be ignored.

When the U.S. negotiates with “terrorists and radicals,” it gives them legitimacy, a precious and tangible political asset. Thus, even Mr. Obama criticized former President Jimmy Carter for his recent meetings with Hamas leaders. Meeting with leaders of state sponsors of terrorism such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il is also a mistake. State sponsors use others as surrogates, but they are just as much terrorists as those who actually carry out the dastardly acts. Legitimacy and international acceptability are qualities terrorists crave, and should therefore not be conferred casually, if at all.

Moreover, negotiations – especially those “without precondition” as Mr. Obama has specifically advocated – consume time, another precious asset that terrorists and rogue leaders prize. Here, President Bush’s reference to Hitler was particularly apt: While the diplomats of European democracies played with their umbrellas, the Nazis were rearming and expanding their industrial power.

In today’s world of weapons of mass destruction, time is again a precious asset, one almost invariably on the side of the would-be proliferators. Time allows them to perfect the complex science and technology necessary to sustain nuclear weapons and missile programs, and provides far greater opportunity for concealing their activities from our ability to detect and, if necessary, destroy them. …

The American.com with a great piece comparing and contrasting Botswana and Zimbabwe. The countries sit side by side just north of South Africa and couldn’t be more different. Botswana has become the jewel of developing Africa. Zimbabwe has become a hell hole since being blessed by America’s worst president and worst ex-president – Jimmy Carter.

“We used to look at Botswana as our poor cousin, but now we do all of our shopping there,” said David Coltart, an opposition member of the Zimbabwean parliament, when I met him a few months ago. The Coltarts are doing relatively well. David’s successful legal practice and parliamentary salary enable them to shop in Botswana—if only to buy basic necessities. Most of their countrymen do not have that option.

Zimbabwe suffers from an 80 percent unemployment rate and, according to the International Monetary Fund, an inflation rate exceeding 150,000 percent. Since 1994, the average life expectancy for women in Zimbabwe has fallen from 57 years to 34 years; among men it has dropped from 54 years to 37 years. Some 3,500 Zimbabweans die every week from the combined effects of HIV/AIDS, poverty, and malnutrition. Half a million Zimbabweans may have died since 2000, while some 3 million fled to South Africa alone.

A country that used to be called the “jewel” and the “breadbasket” of Africa is now an Orwellian nightmare. With the economy in ruins and political freedom eviscerated, Zimbabwe’s state-run media rail against a phantom international conspiracy consisting of Western powers and led by “liar” George Bush, “gay” Tony Blair, “uncle Tom” Colin Powell, and “a slave to white masters” Condoleezza Rice.

I visited Zimbabwe twice during the 1990s. Back then, the country was in the midst of an earlier economic crisis caused by sluggish growth and excessive government spending. The IMF stepped in with an “economic structural adjustment program” worth hundreds of millions of dollars that, alas, bore little fruit. Still, I was shocked to see the extent of Zimbabwe’s economic decline when I returned there last November.

I crossed the border between Zimbabwe and Botswana at the Kazangula junction, just a few miles from the spectacular Victoria Falls. While the other tourists drove up to the beautiful, though now almost completely empty, Elephant Hills Hotel that overlooks the falls, I remained in the town below to see for myself the outcome of Robert Mugabe’s 27-year rule.

The once charming town of Victoria Falls that used to teem with tourists from around the world looked run-down and empty. About half of the shops were either empty or closed altogether. The main shopping center looked more like a warehouse. It offered few products thinly spread out on half-empty shelves—an obvious attempt to mask the widespread shortages of consumer goods. A handful of tourists, mostly young backpackers from Canada and Australia, wandered around the town center in futile search of edible food. Like them, I could not find meat or bread anywhere.

Few ordinary Zimbabweans would agree to talk to me about their problems. Those who did, looked over their shoulders, worried that someone from Mugabe’s omnipresent Central Intelligence Organization might be listening. They are right to be afraid, for Zimbabwe today is a police state where armed gangs of government supporters harass, beat and kill members of the opposition with utter impunity.

How different, I thought, was Zimbabwe from Botswana, the latter of which is safe and increasingly prosperous. But what accounts for such striking differences between the two neighbors? It turns out that much of the difference stems from the degree of freedom that each populace enjoys. …

Michelle Cottle of The New Republic assembles a post-mortem from Hillary’s staff.

Endings are rarely as joyous as beginnings–and in the case of a long, wearing, and ultimately disappointing campaign, they can be downright brutal. But they also have the potential to be educational, for participants and gawkers alike. So it is that we asked (begged, really) a range of Hillarylanders for their up-close and personal lists of “What Went Wrong?” Not everyone wanted to play. Many stubbornly pointed out that their candidate is not yet dead. But, on the condition of total anonymity, a fairly broad enough cross-section of her staff responded–more than a dozen members all told, from high-level advisors to grunt-level assistants, from money men to on-the-ground organizers.

Many answers fell into a handful of broad themes we’ve been hearing for months now. (She shouldn’t have run as an incumbent. She should have paid more attention to caucus states. She should have kept Bill chained in the basement at Whitehaven with a case of cheese curls and a stack of dirty movies.) Others had a distinct score-settling flavor. One respondent sent in a list of Top 25 screw ups, the first three being:

1. Patti
2. Solis
3. Doyle

While from another corner came another list, reading:

1. Mark Penn
2. Mark Penn
3. Mark Penn …

Jim Taranto figures out Tom Harkin.

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Charles Krauthammer gets around to his column on Israel’s 60th birthday.

… Six months before Israel’s birth, the United Nations had decided by a two-thirds majority that the only just solution to the British departure from Palestine would be the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state side by side. The undeniable fact remains: The Jews accepted that compromise; the Arabs rejected it.

With a vengeance. On the day the British pulled down their flag, Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq — 650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs.

Israel prevailed, another miracle. But at a very high cost — not just to the Palestinians displaced as a result of a war designed to extinguish Israel at birth, but also to the Israelis, whose war losses were staggering: 6,373 dead. One percent of the population. In American terms, it would take 35 Vietnam memorials to encompass such a monumental loss of life.

You rarely hear about Israel’s terrible suffering in that 1948-49 war. You hear only the Palestinian side. Today, in the same vein, you hear that Israeli settlements and checkpoints and occupation are the continuing root causes of terrorism and instability in the region.

But in 1948, there were no “occupied territories.” Nor in 1967 when Egypt, Syria and Jordan joined together in a second war of annihilation against Israel. …

David Warren on the world’s most despicable socialist regime. Now that’s saying something.

… While, to my knowledge, substantial efforts have been made by the U.S. and Australia to assist in moving supplies, they have learned their lesson, and the noise and posturing about Burma’s non-cooperation is therefore coming chiefly from the diplomatic corps of the European Union — with their long history of generating heat without action.

My answer to correspondents has been, “What does one say?” The value of hand-wringing is limited. It is an appropriate expression of lamentation at funerals, but it does not bring the dead back to life, nor in this case prevent the spread of death among a people who have had the misadventure to fall under one of the world’s most despicable socialist regimes. Comment is almost out of place, and the best journalistic effort must be to report and document accurately what has happened. For a day will come when Burma’s current masters have migrated from earth to hell, and their survivors will need assistance in recovering their own history.

The officially-stated “Burmese Road to Socialism” was embarked upon after a coup in 1962, and the country has been effectively sealed ever since. It does not occupy a vacuum, however. The very journalists who have heaped comparative praise on China’s own relief operations after last week’s earthquake in Sichuan — mostly sight unseen — should note that it was the Chinese politburo, as usual, employing its veto at the U.N. Security Council, to prevent even a discussion of what its brother politburo in Burma has done.

Margaret Thatcher, the lady who put the backbone in Bush 41, gets a cool statue at Hillsdale College

Mark Steyn comments on the reaction to Bush’s Knesset speech.

… President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president’s speech was really about him, and he didn’t care for it. He didn’t put it quite as bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same: “That’s enough. That’s a show of disrespect to me.” And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee’s weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush’s outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.

Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. …

Steyn Corner Post on what the Dems think is acceptable military service this year.

I confess I find it hard to keep up to speed with the Democrat view of military service.

As I understand it, when veterans like Bush Sr and Bob Dole are running against Bill Clinton, then military service is of no value and Vietnam draft-dodging is irrelevant if not, in fact, the principal qualification for being Commander-in-Chief.

On the other hand, when Bush Jr is running against John Kerry, then nothing less than a combat veteran who says he’s “reporting for duty” will do in the White House and a fellow who flew fighter jets over Texas in the Air National Guard is a contemptible draft-dodging chickenhawk.

Four years on, the term “chickenhawk” seems to have dropped out of the Dem lexicon and one assumes Senator Obama will not be “reporting for duty” at this summer’s convention. So what’s the party’s current position? …

Gerard Baker of the London Times says the media are fitting Obama for a halo.

… But it’s fairly clear now that, with the near-certain nomination by the Democrats of Barack Obama everything is in place for the media to indulge in one of the greatest, orgiastic media fiestas of hero-worship since Elvis Presley.

You will not see a finer example of the genre than the cover story of this week’s Newsweek, which was entitled “The O Team”. This rhapsodic inside account of Senator Obama’s campaign reads a little like a cross between Father Alban Butler’s Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang.

Mr Obama is portrayed throughout as an immanently benevolent figure. Not human really, more a comforting presence, a light source. He is always eager to listen to all aides of an argument, always instilling confidence in the weak-willed, resolutely sticking to his high principles and tirelessly spurning the low road of electoral politics. I stopped reading after a while but I’m sure by the end he was healing the sick, comforting the dying, restoring sight to the blind and setting prisoners free.

The panegyric included the now conventional wisdom in the media that Republicans have only ever won elections in the past 40 years through lies and fearmongering – smearing their opponents and spreading false fears that a vote for a Democrat would open the country to foreign invasion.

To be fair, the Newsweek credo was only the latest and perhaps most shameless phase of the pro-Obama liturgy in the media. Some cable TV channels prostrate themselves nightly before him. Most newspapers worship at the altar. They have already set up a neat narrative for the election between Senator Obama and John McCain in November – the Second Coming versus Old Grouchy, The Little Flower of Illinois up against the Scaremongering Axeman from Arizona. …

Good post from Michael Barone about Douglas Feith’s Iraq book.

In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision-making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we’ve learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists could only guess at what was going on behind the scenes.

Today we’re only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes on Iraq. One important new source is the recently published War and Decision by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in Roosevelt and Hopkins and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we’ve become familiar.

One such narrative is “Bush lied, people died.” The claim is that “neocons,” including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have already concluded. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam’s hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat. …

Dick Armey says the GOP should not surrender on health care.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations may have died in North Carolina last week, but her most famous bad idea is alive and well in Washington, D.C. With likely increases in Democrat ranks in the House and Senate, and a Democrat (possibly) in the White House, plan on a big fight in 2009 over who – you or the federal government – will control your family’s health-care decisions.

We won this fight last time around. One of the GOP’s shining moments was our principled opposition to HillaryCare in 1994. The first lady’s overreach helped lay the groundwork for the Republican takeover of Congress that November.

We may not be so lucky next time. While the Democratic Party appears unified under the banner of big-government health care, the GOP seems conflicted and running scared. This is a classic case of Republicans being afraid that the public will not understand good policy reforms. Rather than promoting the principles of consumer choice, individual responsibility and provider competition that would transform our broken health-care system, key Republicans are bowing to political pressure and signing on with the government-run health-care Democrats.

Emblematic of this phenomenon is Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who, as the Finance Committee’s ranking Republican, will play an influential – perhaps crucial – role in next year’s debate. …

Denver Post’s David Harsanyi on the drug war.

It could be argued that the most useless job in Washington, D.C., is held by John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He’s otherwise known as the country’s Drug Czar.

And when you consider the spectacular number of useless jobs in Washington, that’s quite an accomplishment.

No one is saying, of course, that it’s easy being a figurehead of a cost-inefficient organization charged with implementing the biggest domestic policy disaster since Prohibition. After all, it means advocating that thousands of non-violent offenders be sent to prison — quite often after paramilitary raids have reeled them in.

It means denying citizens dying of cancer, AIDS and other painful diseases the medical marijuana they claim alleviates their pain. It means ignoring the will of citizens in states like California and Colorado, where medical marijuana was legalized.

Being the Drug Czar means overstating and misleading Americans with so-called studies. He’s not alone. From the Centers for Disease Control to the Surgeon General, government agencies are under the impression that when their view of some “greater good” is at stake, concocting studies to propagate flawed policy is acceptable. …