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Jennifer Rubin summarizes a Hitchens column on the false choice between Iraq and Afghanistan.

John McCain tried yesterday to argue that Barack Obama is setting up a false choice between Iraq and Afghanistan. Christopher Hitchens does a better job of it today, explaining “any attempt to play off the two wars against each other is little more than a small-minded and zero-sum exercise.” Hitchens argues that the problem of Afghanistan is not one of simply too few troops which might be eased by shifting troops from elsewhere. And then he concludes:

If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement, the situation would be the precise reverse: The Iraqi people would now be excruciatingly tyrannized by the gloating sadists of al-Qaida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the United States. I dare say the word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and, indeed, to other places where the enemy operates. Bear this in mind next time you hear any easy talk about “the hunt for the real enemy” or any loose babble that suggests that we can only confront our foes in one place at a time. …

Then Rubin does the same with Tom Friedman’s column questioning Obama’s quest for popularity in the world. Rubin closes with;

… And that I think is what is troubling about Obama’s formulation — that we have somehow made it oh-so-hard to be loved by the world. If we are really looking out for our own and the world’s best interests, we are going to ask our allies to do things they had rather not — like contribute more troops to Afghanistan and draw the line with tyrants and bullies. And we’re going to do a whole lot of things that our adversaries don’t like, such as impose sanctions and use military force when needed. That doesn’t mean we can’t be constructive, cooperative, and cordial in getting our allies on board, or go the extra mile to avoid military conflict with our foes. But this notion that we can get everyone to like us by simply sending George W. Bush into retirement is hooey.

We can and should be firm (like world leaders we will meet with), predictable (with regard to seeing through our military and moral commitments in a war, for instance), respectful of our agreements (trade agreements, even) and look for common ground. But unless we put our own interests on the back burner and allow the world to run amok, as Friedman puts it, a lot of countries aren’t going to like what we’re doing. And being resented or even disliked? Not always a bad thing.

Here’s Friedman’s column. (We’re not doing the Hitchens column because it’s poorly organized and poorly written. Rubin has a link if you want to go there anyway.)

Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.

But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.

Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.

I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe. …

What Pickerhead had originally intended for today was a review of some more of the Tony Snow tributes. So here’s some of them. Byron York writes about his effective work at the White House.

… Snow’s arrival was an immediate breath of fresh air for the White House communications operation. He set out to talk to reporters in front of the camera. That didn’t cause them to stop criticizing the White House, and it didn’t cause the war in Iraq to go better, but it did give George W. Bush an appealing and effective voice appearing daily on television. “Here they had a guy who could really parry with you, who could really joust with you, and who was not afraid to do that,” says David Gregory, the NBC White House correspondent who has done his share of jousting with spokesmen. “He could go on as a guest and really kick it around.”

So Snow became the best face the administration ever had. “Tony raised the bar for all future press secretaries,” Dana Perino, Snow’s deputy who now holds the press secretary’s job, told me. “He was especially effective talking about matters of national security — he understood the threat, he believed in the mission, and he had tremendous respect for our troops. He held the podium during the toughest days in Iraq, and we were grateful for his steadfastness in communicating that we would prevail if we didn’t let politics get in the way.” …

Fred Barnes too.

… But I think Tony will be especially remembered for something else: his time as White House press secretary for President Bush. Tony did the job differently. Most press secretaries are uninformative and defensive, none more so than Tony’s predecessor, Scott McClellan. Reporters grow to dislike them, at least at a professional level.

During some of the toughest days of the Bush presidency, Tony was on offense. He not only could articulate and explain Bush’s foreign and domestic policies, he could promote them. At the pressroom podium, Tony was an ardent and effective polemicist. When reporters argued with him, they usually lost. Yet Tony was so nice and civil and informative that the press hounds generally liked him while loathing his boss.

After 20-plus years of writing columns and yapping on TV, Tony knew a lot. He knew much more about policy and politics and the ideological wars in Washington than the vast majority of the reporters covering the White House. He had thought through and come to (mostly conservative) conclusions about nearly everything on the agenda. This gave him a distinct advantage. More often than not, he was a step ahead of the reporters.

Tony was press secretary during the darkest days of the Bush presidency. The Iraq war had turned into a sectarian bloodbath in 2006, but Tony understood how critical Iraq was to winning the war on terror and transforming the Middle East. He defended the president’s Iraq policy before and after the surge, never blinking or backing down. He was better at this than the president was. …

Lisa Schiffren finishes with a Corner post on Snow.

In the end, which came too soon, Tony Snow was a well-known TV personality, who gave it up to articulate the views of a White House that couldn’t talk straight. In the beginning, he was the deputy editorial page editor at the Detroit News, the place he became the man everyone knew later. I worked with Tony there, for the three years that I was an editorial writer on his staff. Our editor, Tom Bray, had come to Detroit from the Wall Street Journal in 1983 to turn a stodgy, traditionally Republican editorial page into an exciting, powerful voice of the Reagan Revolution. For this mission he assembled a staff of mostly very young people — there weren’t many seasoned Reaganites back then, and fewer still willing to leave Washington. …

Every four years someone proposes abolishing the electoral college. Playing the part of the ignoramus this year is Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida. Jeff Jacoby takes the part of intelligent grown-up.

… The Electoral College (like the Senate) was designed to preserve the role of the states in governing a nation whose name – the United State of America – reflects its fundamental federal nature. We are a nation of states, not of autonomous citizens, and those states have distinct identities and interests, which the framers were at pains to protect. Too many Americans today forget – or never learned – that the states created the central government; it wasn’t the other way around. The federal principle is at least as important to American governance as the one-man-one-vote principle, and the Electoral College brilliantly marries them: Democratic elections take place within each state to determine that state’s vote for president in the Electoral College. …

Ann Coulter comments on our lack of will to drill.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, “the worst speaker in the history of Congress,” explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.”

Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier … and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.

Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by “oilmen”? Wait — it doesn’t cost pennies to them? That’s weird.

In response to the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada, Pelosi blamed: “President Bush and Rep. Tom DeLay’s oil-company interests.” The blackout was a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing to do with oil. And I’m not even “an oilman.”

But yes — good point: What a disaster having people in government who haven’t spent their entire lives in politics!  …

Jonah Goldberg’s column on “evil oil speculators” is priceless.

Contrary to nearly all received wisdom in Washington, not to mention the rhetoric of the presumptive nominees of both major parties, the scariest moments in American politics are often its most bipartisan. Some would say this was demonstrated in the wake of 9/11, when all those allegedly terrible national security laws were enacted by both parties, or in the run-up to war, when Democrats and Republicans united to topple Saddam Hussein. But I find it is most true when Washington takes a populist turn, which it is doing now with pugnacious stupidity, attacking that classic populist boogeyman: the “oil speculator.”

Sen. John McCain has declared the profits of American oil companies “obscene” and wants to hunt down “speculators” with congressional investigations. Sen. Barack Obama also sees “speculation” as the culprit behind our energy woes. Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.) blames Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street star chambers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warns that “we are putting oil speculators on notice.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vows to “end speculation on the oil markets.” Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — who actually knows how markets work and is better at explaining them than any other politician today — says we have to “punish the speculators” for “betting against America.”

Et tu, Newt? …

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Great piece on the danger to our freedom posed by environmentalists. In the Guardian, UK, no less, by an iconoclast named Brendan O’Neill. The title and sub-title are;  Greens are the enemies of liberty, Environmentalists want to curb our freedom far more than the government’s anti-terrorist laws ever will.

… In the current debate on liberty, we hear a lot about the attack on our democratic rights by the government’s security agenda, but little about the grave impact of environmentalism on the fabric of freedom. It seems to me that green thinking – with its shrill intolerance of dissenting views, its deep distaste for free movement and free choice, and its view of individuals, not as history-makers, but as filthy polluters – poses a more profound threat to liberty even than the government’s paranoid anti-terrorist agenda.

Environmentalists are innately hostile to freedom of speech. Last month James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate change scientists, said the CEOs of oil companies should be tried for crimes against humanity and nature. They have been “putting out misinformation”, he said, and “I think that’s a crime”. This follows green writer Mark Lynas’s insistence that there should be “international criminal tribunals” for climate change deniers, who will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths”. They will “have to answer for their crimes”, he says. The American eco-magazine Grist recently published an article on deniers that called for “war crimes trials for these bastards… some sort of climate Nuremberg.” …

Neal Boortz has an example.

The Environmental Protection Agency is determined to do everything it can to regulate your lives. Last Friday the EPA issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking … that’s a fancy way of saying “asinine government regulations on the economy and your lives.”

Take this one for example. The EPA wants to get its hands on your lawnmower. Yep. …

Speaking of losing liberty, John Stossel thinks there are too many traffic laws.

… Please. I’m all for highway safety, but I suspect that America’s roads have too many rules, and that gives cops too much arbitrary power to harass people or profit off them. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse said, “The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced”.

I bet most Americans roll through stop signs. I do. It makes for a smoother ride, and it saves gas.

“ABC News” put cameras by stop signs in Warren, Mich., and in New York City. The video showed that in Warren, 72 percent of drivers did not come to a complete stop. In New York, 82 percent kept going.

Warren and other towns probably have too many stop signs. There’s no proof that more signs save lives. Studies show that sometimes installing stop signs lowers accident rates, but in some cases more accidents occurred after signs were installed. …

James Kirchick thinks the Dems have strange ways to improve our image abroad.

… In the simplistic narrative of the Obama boosters, President Bush and his party’s successor, John McCain, are cranky nationalists who view the world through the barrel of a gun. But the fact is, in this election it is the Democratic candidate who is proposing policies profoundly at odds with his promise to restore America’s preeminent place in the world.

Take the issue of trade. In Senate debates earlier this year, Obama vocally opposed free trade deals with both South Korea and Colombia. Asked what Congress’s failure to pass the Colombia Free Trade Act would mean for bilateral relations between his country and the United States, Colombian president Alvaro Uribe replied, “It would be very serious.” …

Power Line lists three of the many groups that own the Dems.

WSJ Op-Ed outlines the GOP’s record on race.

John McCain is scheduled to address the NAACP’s annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, today. Although he is unlikely to gain many black votes this year, he should use the occasion to increase Republican efforts to reach out to African-Americans. He can start by setting the record straight on the records of the two parties on race.

Everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and was established in 1854 to block the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery: Its two founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, owned large numbers of slaves, and every party platform before the Civil War defended the institution unequivocally.

After the war, it was the Republican Party that rammed through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution over Democratic opposition. Republicans also enacted a series of civil-rights laws that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which basically did what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 accomplished. …

Clint Bolick points the way to another chance for McCain.

Education is slipping in priority among many voters but not among Hispanics, many of whom see school choice as a deciding factor in whom to vote for this fall. This has implications for the presidential election.

A new poll shows that 82% of Hispanics consider education as one of three most important issues facing this country. The survey also shows that, even while Hispanics trust Democrats over Republicans on education by more than a two-to-one margin, that ratio could change if Republicans heavily promote school choice while Democrats oppose it. …

David Remnick, New Yorker editor, defends the cover saying, in effect, they were just trying to help. Maureen Dowd, to her credit, is having none of that in, “May We Mock, Barack?”

… If Obama keeps being stingy with his quips and smiles, and if the dominant perception of him is that you can’t make jokes about him, it might infect his campaign with an airless quality. His humorlessness could spark humor.

On Tuesday, Andy Borowitz satirized on that subject. He said that Obama, sympathetic to comics’ attempts to find jokes to make about him, had put out a list of official ones, including this:

“A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, ‘I was expecting the farmer’s daughter.’ Barack Obama replies, ‘She’s not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream.’ ” …

If the GOP wants to win, they should read this Dick Morris column everyday until November.

… Obama’s breathtaking flips and flops are materially different from McCain’s. While McCain had opposed offshore oil drilling and now supports it, the facts have obviously changed. Obama’s shifts have nothing to do with altered circumstances, just a change in the political calendar.

As a candidate who was nominated to be a different kind of politician, Obama has set the bar pretty high. And, with his flipping and flopping, he is falling short, to the disillusionment of his more naïve supporters. One wag even called him the “black Bill Clinton,” a turnaround of the “first black president” moniker that had been pinned on Bill.

Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue — oil drilling — exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West. The Democratic claim that we “cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices” begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.

The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.

Obama said that he was unhappy that there was not a period of “gradual adjustment” to the high prices, but seems to shed few tears over the current levels. After all, if your imperative is climate change, a high gas price is worth 10 times a ratified Kyoto treaty in bringing about change. …

As regards Obama’s campaign, Thomas Sowell asks if facts are obsolete.

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.

As the hypnotic mantra of “change” is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.

Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.

One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country’s problems, just because they say so— or say so loudly or inspiringly. …

Corner posts demonstrate why Ohio’s economy is on the skids. A Plain Dealer blog post was the kick-off for this.

A behemoth lies in our midst, sucking in ever greater amounts of cash and growing at twice the rate of inflation.

What’s more, we’re feeding it with billions and billions of tax dollars. An unprecedented study released today shows that the combined cost of government across 16 northeastern Ohio counties — teaching our children, running our cities and tending myriad other public services — had reached at least $16 billion by 2002.

That amounted to $3,750 for every man, woman and child in the targeted region, which includes counties including Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage and Summit.

The $175,000 study, paid for by civic and business leaders to gauge government spending, used the latest available U.S. census data to look at 800 publicly funded entities in the region.

And while the numbers are dated and incomplete, they suggest our system of governance is bloated and drags down the region’s economy, according to the people who commissioned the study. …

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Andy McCarthy Corner post on AG Mukasey’s letter to Rep Conyers refusing to appoint a special prosecutor to look into CIA interrogation practices. From Mukasey’s letter;

… Your request for a criminal investigation into the actions Executive Branch policymakers and national security lawyers undertook to defend the Nation reflects a broader trend whose institutional effects may outlast the present Administration and harm our national security well into the future. I spoke in more detail about this problematic trend in a speech at Boston College Law School on May 23, 2008, which in turn drew substantially from former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith’s recent book, The Terror Presidency. In his book, Professor Goldsmith describes what he calls “cycles of timidity and aggression” among political leaders and commentators in their attitudes towards the intelligence community. As I pointed out in my speech, the message sent to our national security policymakers and lawyers in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was clear, it was bipartisan, and it was all but unanimous. As Professor Goldsmith explains, “The consistent refrain from the [9/11] Commission, Congress, and pundits of all stripes was that the government must be more forward-leaning against the terrorist threat: more imaginative, more aggressive, less risk-averse.”

We have gone six and one-half years without another terrorist attack within the United States, and now our intelligence professionals and national security lawyers are hearing a rather different message. Your letter, which urges me to subject those involved in developing or implementing our counterterrorism policies to criminal investigation, reflects that message. Taking such a step would not only be, in my judgment, unjust, but would also have potentially grave national security consequences. …

Yesterday, the NY Times printed an Obama op-ed on Iraq. Many of our favorites had comments. Peter Wehner is first.

… Among the most striking things about Obama’s op-ed is how intellectually dishonest it is, particularly for a man who once proudly proclaimed that he would let facts rather than preconceived views dictate his positions on Iraq.Obama’s op-ed is the effort of an arrogant and intellectually rigid man, one who disdains empirical evidence and is attempting to justify the fact that he has been consistently wrong on Iraq since the war began (for more, see my April 2008 article in Commentary, “Obama’s War“).

Senator Obama is once again practicing the “old politics” he claims to stand against, which is bad enough. But that Obama would have allowed America to lose, al Qaeda and Iran to win, and the Iraqi people to suffer mass death and possibly genocide because of his ideological opposition to the war is far worse. On those grounds alone, he ought to be disqualified from being America’s next commander-in-chief.

Max Boot is next.

Peter has already offered a trenchant response to Barack Obama’s New York Times op-ed, “My Plan For Iraq.” But the article is filled with so many misstatements and distortions that I feel compelled to weigh in as well. Herewith some thoughts on specific passages, from someone who is admittedly part of the McCain team of foreign policy advisers. Obama’s statements are in italics; my responses follow:

The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated.

The lead paragraph of Obama’s article makes it sound as if the Iraqi leader has endorsed the Democratic candidate’s call for withdrawing all U.S. brigades from Iraq within 16 months of assuming office. He has done no such thing. Iraqi leaders have kept talk of timetables vague on purpose because they know how much they still depend on American assistance.

I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The question of how much of a threat Saddam Hussein posed is certainly debatable. If their public statements are anything to judge by, Bill Clinton and senior members of his administration had a much graver view of the threat than did Obama. So did many Democratic members of the Senate, including Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, who voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. None of them connected Saddam Hussein with 9/11 (neither did George W. Bush) but they believed, as Bill Clinton put it in 1998, “The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow.” …

Power Line gets in on the act.

… Finally, Afghanistan: Obama would have us believe that he urged defeat in Iraq because he was so firmly committed to victory in Afghanistan. Once again, he misrepresents the record.

In fact, Obama has never supported our troops in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said on August 14, 2007–less than a year ago–that our forces there are mostly committing war crimes:

We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.

Obama has been so uninterested in Afghanistan that when he went to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with a Congressional delegation in January 2006, he skipped the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan, which was taken by others who made the trip with him, including Kit Bond and Harold Ford. And, in an embarrassing gaffe, Obama claimed on May 13, 2008, that we don’t have enough “Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers” in Afghanistan because they are all being used in Iraq. Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don’t speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world.

Worst of all, far from being committed to victory in Afghanistan, Obama voted to cut off all funding for all of our military efforts in Afghanistan on May 24, 2007 (H.R. 2206, CQ Vote #181), thereby seeking to bring about defeat there as well as in Iraq. His current effort to portray himself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing on Afghanistan is a complete fraud.

It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can’t offhand think of such a miscreant.

Peter Hegseth of Vets for Freedom in National Review.

As someone who monitors the Iraq-war-policy debate closely, I was puzzled to open the New York Times and see an oped authored by Sen. Barack Obama entitled “My Plan for Iraq.” Besides the seemingly moderate tone — and calling for an Afghanistan “surge” (an idea I agree, and one proposed by Sen Joe Lieberman in March)  — not much in the piece is new or newsworthy. In the final analysis, the oped is another dogmatic addendum to Obama’s “withdrawal at any cost” position.

In fact, just one question entered my head when I finished reading: Why now? Why would Sen. Obama — or any legislator, for that matter — write such a piece before visiting the country for himself, seeing the situation with his own eyes, and speaking with commanders and troops who actually know what’s going on?

It strikes me that only someone who is signaling no interest in consulting with commanders on the ground would spell out his “plan” for Iraq just one week before he visits the country for the first time in 918 days. Only someone who is arrogant enough to believe he always knows best would outline his Iraq policy before once meeting one-on-one with General David Petraeus. …

Weekly Standard.

It’s reassuring to hear Sen. Barack Obama, a man who based his presidential bid on the supposed inevitability of defeat in Iraq, recognize the success of the surge, which he also predicted was bound to fail. But his New York Times op-ed today betrays a strategic understanding that is more deeply disturbing; it’s not just his “Plan for Iraq” that’s worrisome, but his plan for America in the world.

In Obama’s view of international politics and power, Iraq is not simply “the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy,” but a diversion, a strategic sideshow. He claims “Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and never has been,” and offers “broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Obama needs to look at a map and a history book. Iraq long has been and today remains one of the two naturally dominant powers in the Persian Gulf region, home to the second-largest proven oil reserves on the planet and a front-line bulwark against revolutionary Iran. ..

Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist defends Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart hammered by judge,” shouted a front-page Star Tribune headline earlier this month. The Dakota County judge — responding to a class-action assault on the giant retailer — labeled Wal-Mart “dehumanizing” and set it up for a possible $2 billion penalty.

Many Minnesotans probably shrugged. What else is new? The story seemed consistent with charges we’ve heard for years: Wal-Mart exploits its workers by paying skinflint wages and skimping on health insurance. Not to mention driving legions of mom-and-pop stores out of business.

With such a reputation for ruthlessness, Wal-Mart must be struggling to find workers, right?

Yet when the company opened a new store in St. Paul’s Midway area in May 2004, about 6,000 applicants vied for 325 job openings, according to Joyce Niska, the store’s acting manager in 2005. That, too, was nothing new. For years, people have beaten down the doors to work at Wal-Mart. …

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Michael Barone with a history lesson on the Berlin airlift.

Sixty years ago this month, the top story in campaign year 1948 was not the big poll lead of Republican nominee Thomas Dewey or the plight of President Harry Truman. It was the Berlin airlift. On June 23, the Soviets cut off land access to West Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor in Germany, called for sending convoys up the autobahns, but Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by the Red Army, and everyone feared it would overrun Western Europe unless the United States retaliated with the atomic bomb. Air Force generals said that there was no way planes could ferry the 8 million pounds of food and coal Berlin would need every day. Secretary of State George Marshall and Joint Chiefs Chairman Omar Bradley, two of America’s most respected generals, felt Berlin was indefensible and we should withdraw. One man disagreed. President Harry Truman, in one crucial meeting after another, said, We’re not leaving Berlin. …

David Warren thinks a free Canada will disappear, not with a bang, but with a whimper

George Will says civilization depends on beer.

… “The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body’s ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.” …

Jeff Jacoby points to the Dem hypocrisy of worshipping Kerry’s military service and then the systematic denigration of McCain’s.

… Given that effusive show of respect for military experience in 2004, you would think no Democrat this year could even contemplate disparaging John McCain’s far more extensive military career. The presumptive Republican nominee, after all, spent 22 years as a naval aviator; flew 23 combat missions over North Vietnam; earned numerous combat decorations, including the Silver Star and Legion of Merit; and demonstrated courage and self-sacrifice during five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

Yet in recent months, one Democrat after another has gone out of his way to diminish or criticize McCain’s war record. A partial list:

In April, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia denounced McCain as insensitive – pointing, as evidence, to his military service. “McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet,” Rockefeller told the Charleston Gazette. “He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Rockefeller later apologized, but a few days later, it was George McGovern’s turn. The former Democratic presidential nominee told an audience that he would like to say to McCain: “Neither of us is an expert on national defense. It’s true that you went to one of the service academies, but you were in the bottom of the class.” He added, tauntingly: “You were shot down early in the war and spent most of the time in prison. I flew 35 combat missions with a 10-man crew and brought them home safely every time.” …

Jim Geraghty at NRO’s Campaign Spot wonders why we’re not hearing about Obama’s June fundraising totals.

John Kass of ChiTrib says the left is squealing over Obama’s flips.

… Obama used them to crush the Clintons, but now the left is finally realizing it’s been betrayed, on issue after issue, with Obama changing his positions in order to defeat a tired and disillusioned Republican Party in November.

They’re at the dance now and he’s the one with the keys and he’s the only ride they’ve got. And they don’t like it.

He has flip-flopped again and again, on campaign finance, on government eavesdropping of overseas phone calls, on gun control and even Iraq. Future President Obama now says he’ll listen to his generals about when to withdraw. He didn’t say he’d listen to the commissars of the blogosphere.

And his cheerleaders are beginning to realize that Obama may not be the Arthurian knight in shining armor, that he may not be Mr. Tumnus, the gentle forest faun of our presidential politics. Months after his inauguration, after he makes Billy Daley the secretary of the treasury and Michael Daley the secretary of zoning and promotes Patrick Fitzgerald to become the attorney general of Mars, the political left may figure out that Obama is a Chicago politician.

“Only an idiot would think or hope that a politician going through the crucible of a presidential campaign could hold fast to every position, steer clear of the stumbling blocks of nuance and never make a mistake,” wrote Bob Herbert in The New York Times. “But Barack Obama went out of his way to create the impression that he was a new kind of political leader—more honest, less cynical and less relentlessly calculating than most. . . . Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash.”

This panic of the left—particularly among many political media types—is profoundly instructive to foreigners seeking to understand American character. The American media elite chose to portray Obama as some kind of knight in armor. They’re analysts. Yet they were desperate to believe in a political fairy tale from Chicago. …

Debra Saunders writes on Obama, McCain and the wiretapping bill.

Hey, it’s politics. In the primary, when Barack Obama wanted to connect with his party’s disaffected left, he said that he would support a filibuster to stop a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the federal government after the 9/11 attacks.

Now Obama has those voters in the bag. So he is reaching out to the majority of Americans who want aggressive international surveillance to prevent another terrorist attack.

And the average voter certainly isn’t going to lose sleep if the price of that security is that the ACLU does not have carte blanche to sue AT&T for cooperating with the government.

Wednesday, Obama was one of 69 senators who voted for the FISA bill that provided retroactive immunity to the telecoms. …

Abe Greenwald with a good take on this week’s New Yorker cover.

Obama doesn’t like the New Yorker cover. American Thinker thinks he ought to “man up.”

A long, yet unsatisfyingly incomplete article in the current issue of The New Yorker about Barack Obama’s Chicago roots, lauding him for many things that might be considered non-laudable, was a passing curiosity in the blogosphere yesterday. We here at AT blogged about it, pointing out that Mr. Lizza had actually uncovered some things that weren’t too flattering about the candidate.

But the piece went from a passing curiosity to a full blown campaign typhoon when the cover of the issue was released. It showed Obama in a turban doing the fist bump with his wife who is dressed up as some kind of revolutionary. An American flag burns in the fireplace of the Oval Ofice:

One look at this and the Obama campaign hit the roof. …

Now for a couple of less than flattering views of Jesse Helms. Juan Williams is first.

… To be sure, for Helms the essence of North Carolina values was keeping taxes low, and fighting against big government. That is a great message. It won him a base of support.

But that base was rural working-class voters and white suburban male voters. He rallied this base by letting everyone know he disliked Chapel Hill intellectuals — the kind of people who protested for equal rights for blacks and challenged U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He showed no compassion for gays coming out of the closet and women who wanted abortion rights; instead choosing to make them demons threatening family values. And he made blunt use of racial politics.

The most infamous example was in his 1990 Senate campaign against Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte and a black man. Helms ran an ad that showed white hands crumpling a rejection letter while a voice announced: “You needed that job. And you were best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority.” …

Hitchens is next with, “Farewell to a Provincial Redneck.”

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Some of our favorites have Tony Snow thoughts. From The Corner; Mark Steyn, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Yuval Levin, Byron York, and Shannen Coffin. From Contentions John Podhoretz.

Since the world is reaching a point of no return regarding the nukes in Iran, the story of the raid 27 years ago that destroyed Saddam’s nuclear program is germane. Jerusalem Post has the story.

It was late afternoon, Sunday, June 7, 1981, and Zeev Raz was leading his squadron of F-16s across Iraq toward the Osirak nuclear reactor. Anxiously, he scanned the terrain ahead for the last checkpoint of their hair-raising mission, a little island in the middle of the Bahr al-Mihl Lake, about 100 kilometers west of the target, from which the pilots would calculate their final assault on Saddam Hussein’s impending bomb factory.

At 5.34 p.m., bang on schedule, Raz spotted the lake. Or at least he thought he did. Except that it looked rather larger than it had in the satellite photos they’d pored over. And that little island – the crucial last reference point – was nowhere to be seen.

Flashing through Iraqi air space at 10 kilometers a minute, Raz was second-guessing himself. Had he miscalculated? Had he strayed from the meticulously planned route? Was he leading his colleagues to disaster? What had gone wrong?

Too late, Raz realized what had happened. The previous winter’s heavy rains had swollen the lake and submerged the island. The satellite image was out of date. He had been in the right place, and should have trusted himself. Quickly, he reset his computer, inputting his new position, obtaining the adjusted parameters for the bombing run.

But minutes later, when Raz closed in on his target, it became appallingly clear that the miscalculation at the sunken island had profoundly distracted him. This expert airman, leading the pride of the Israel Air Force across vast swathes of hostile terrain on a mission deemed by prime minister Begin to be critical to Israel’s very existence – a mission that the chief of the General Staff, Raful Eitan, had told them that day “must be successful, or we as a people are doomed” – found to his horror that he had, almost amateurishly, overflown the target. He had begun his bombing dive too late.

Israel’s legendary destruction of Osirak – a near-impossible operation, pushing the F-16s further than they had been built to fly, evading enemy radar for hundreds of miles, to precision bomb a heavily protected nuclear target – has entered the pantheon of acts of extraordinary Zionist daring as a clinical example of pre-emptive devastation, executed with breathtaking, ruthless accuracy.

But as detailed in American journalist Rodger Claire’s overlooked study of the mission, 2004′s Raid on the Sun – in which he spoke, uniquely, to all the pilots, their commanders, and key players on the Iraqi side of the raid as well – the bombing of Osirak was far from error-free. It was an astonishing, envelope-pushing assault all right. It succeeded, utterly, in destroying Saddam’s nuclear program – a blow from which he would never recover. It safeguarded Israel from the Iraqi dictator’s genocidal ambitions. But Raz’s mistake on the final approach was only one of several foul-ups that could so easily have doomed it.

Recognizing that Raz, the lead bomber, was not going to be able to hit the target, the No. 2 pilot in the squadron, Amos Yadlin, streaking along behind him, made the incredibly risky split-second decision to depart from the bombing sequence, cut in beneath Raz’s plane, and try to drop his two 2,000-pound bombs first. As he would later tell author Claire, Yadlin thought to himself: “I’m not going to end up being hanged in some square in Baghdad because of a screwup.”

Yadlin did indeed get his bombs away, and saw them pierce the Osirak dome and disappear inside as he peeled off.

Simultaneously, Raz was executing an astoundingly ambitious “loop-de-loop” in the skies above the reactor, and was able to come back over Osirak, at the correct angle this time, and hit the target.

The potential consequences of these radical departures from the intended bombing process – the potential for misunderstanding, for collision, for disaster – can hardly be overstated. …

John Fund enumerates the left’s electoral efforts. They think it’s their techniques that need work. When they lose this time will the face up to the fact their ideas suck?

… In 2005, billionaire investor George Soros convened a group of 70 super-rich liberal donors in Phoenix to evaluate why their efforts to defeat President Bush had failed. One conclusion was that they needed to step up their long-term efforts to dominate key battleground states. The donors formed a group called Democracy Alliance to make grants in four areas: media, ideas, leadership and civic engagement. Since then, Democracy Alliance partners have donated over $100 million to key progressive organizations.

Take Colorado, which has voted Republican for president in nine of the last 10 presidential elections. But in 2006, Colorado elected a Democratic governor and legislature for the first time in over 30 years. Denver will be the site for the party’s 2008 presidential convention. Polls show Barack Obama would carry the state today. This hasn’t happened by chance. The Democracy Alliance poured money into Colorado to make it a proving ground for how progressives can take over a state.

Offshoots of leading liberal national groups were set up including Colorado Media Matters in 2006, to correct “conservative misinformation” in the media. Ethics Watch, a group modeled after Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was started and proceeded to file a flurry of complaints over alleged campaign finance violations — while refusing to name its own donors.

Western Progress, a think tank to advance “progressive solutions,” opened its doors as did the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, one of 29 such groups around the country. Then there’s Colorado Confidential, a project of The Center for Independent Media, which subsidized liberal bloggers. CIM has set up similar ventures in Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan, with funding from groups such as the Service Employees International Union, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. …

John Fund has a couple of good shorts. The first has a Scalia look.

… Mr. Scalia has some idea for avoiding public anger at the courts in future: Use them less. He thinks the United States is “over-lawed” and has too many lawyers. “I don’t think our legal system should be that complex. I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex,” he says. “If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.” …

Jack Kelly on the campaign so far.

WHEN your approval rating is only 14 percent, there’s nowhere to go but up. Unless you’re the Democrat-led Congress. A Rasmussen poll released Tuesday indicated the approval rating for Congress has declined by 36 percentage points from last year’s “high.” Just 9 percent of respondents said Congress was doing a “good” or “excellent” job, while 52 percent of us think it’s doing a “poor” one. That’s the lowest rating ever.

Much of the dissatisfaction with Congress is due to its unwillingness to do anything about the soaring price of gasoline. “Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’•” a Democratic congressional aide told The Hill newspaper.

“So why are the Republicans running scared, and why aren’t they going after the ‘new Democratic Congress’ hammer and tongs?” wondered Web logger Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. “Beats me. Because they’re idiots, I guess.”

I disagree. Some Republicans in Congress are crooks, and many are cowards. But few are idiots. For idiocy, you have to look to the campaign of Sen. John McCain. …

Slate’s Undercover Economist defends speculators.

When the economy is in turmoil, no one is demonized more than the speculator. First, we are told, speculators have driven up the price of oil, condemning us to expensive heating and driving. Then, they have driven down the price of bank shares, dealing vicious blows to the nation’s noblest banks. All of this, we are supposed to believe, is immensely profitable and highly destabilizing. …

Silly Telegraph, UK cow flatulence story is here just for the picture of the cow.

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Manchester Guardian says Tehran is leaving no doubt about their intentions.

… The Iranian response has been to underline its deterrent with events like today’s missile test and heightened rhetoric. Ali Shirazi, an aide to Iran’s Supreme Leader, said Tel Aviv would “burn” if Iran was attacked.

It would not be a limited war. Iranian officials have said that they would automatically presume an Israeli strike was western-backed and retaliate accordingly. Shirazi said the US fleet in the Persian Gulf would also be hit. In the past the Iranians have threatened asymmetric warfare using small boats and suicide bombers against much larger ships. It is a fair bet that shipping in the Straits of Hormuz – through which 40% of the world’s oil passes – would either be blocked or seriously squeezed. Attacks on US and British troops could also be stepped up through proxies and allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. US military intervention would be unavoidable.

The sabres being rattled across the Persian Gulf right now are very real and very dangerous.

For those who miss Mark Steyn, here he is from the 2004 campaign.

And by the way, Mark will be guest host on Limbaugh’s show tomorrow.

… If I were a mad scientist hired by Bush svengali Karl Rove to construct the most unelectable Democratic presidential candidate possible, I’d start with a load of big-government one-size-fits-all dependency-culture domestic policies. Next I’d throw in a consistent two-decade voting-record aversion to American military power. Then make him the kind of fellow whose stump speeches are always butt-numbingly ponderous and go on way too long because someone told him that if you intone a platitude slowly and sonorously enough it sounds like the Kennedy inaugural address.

He’d probably be a senator because, in a business that attracts pompous blowhards, senators are the crème de la crème. A senator from Massachusetts, because that’s as near as you can get to running Jacques Chirac while still meeting the citizenship eligibility requirements. He’d have to be an aristocratic Massachusetts senator, because there don’t seem to be any other kinds, but he wouldn’t be glamorously high-class, like Jack and Camelot, just aloof and condescending and affected. And every time he tries to talk a little guy talk, a little hunting or baseball, it doesn’t come out quite right. And he’s so nuanced he’s running not only as America’s most famous war hero but also as America’s most famous anti-war protester.

No, scrub that last bit. No one would believe it.

But what do I know? My ne plus ultra of unelectability was chosen by Democratic primary voters this spring mainly because he was perceived to be “electable”. I don’t know where they got that idea from. Probably from the American media, who seem barely to recognise Kerry’s principal defect – his boring self-righteousness – perhaps because it’s also theirs. Nevertheless, if this week the senator gives the kind of speech he’s given for the last year, Americans will flee in horror from the prospect of spending four years listening to this guy. …

Daily Telegraph, UK has a weekly feature “Holy Cow” (which in our language translates to “Sacred Cow”). They pose this question, “Are there any Holy Cows left? “Every week iconoclast and ex-investment banker Sameh El-Shahat goes out on a limb to challenge conventional wisdom around stories in the news.” This week Mr. El-Shahat offers his off-beat opinion of George Bush.

So, the hot news now is Barack Obama.

Obama this, Obama that… Naturally, it is very laudable that the United States may have chosen to look beyond the issue of race and opted for a person purely on the merit of his character. But what will they find?

The usual hot air that Washington politicians seem to have made their own. Mr Obama is no different. We’re just too politically correct to say that the only thing refreshing about him is his colour. So we say he’s “bipartisan”, or he’s a “uniter”.

Whatever happened to leadership and honesty as presidential traits? I happen to believe that the only leader in the West to have these two admirable qualities in droves is the leader of the free world: George W Bush. …

Karl Rove says there’s much to admire in the Obama campaign.

For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.

For starters, Barack Obama’s manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an “army of persuasion” modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor “Victory Committee” of ’00 and ’04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.

Sen. Obama’s organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille’s plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros’s 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran “virtual precincts,” using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today. …

Rove did suggest Obama’s moves to the center might endanger him and Victor Davis Hanson is now calling him “Barack W. Bush.”

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama’s flip-flops, as the Senate’s most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger.

But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts.

Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court’s overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns.

The senator, also like Bush, supports the death penalty. He recently objected to the court’s rejection of a state law that allowed for the execution of child rapists.

And although Obama is still pro-choice, he now, like the president, thinks “mental distress” should not justify late-term abortion. …

Tony Blankley comments on Obama’s shifts.

… His Iraq position is currently in the process of glissading from anti to pro, so we will have to wait for a while before saying he actually has changed it. To be precise, to stay in my dance metaphor, Obama’s move may not be a glissade so much as a fouette . Centralhome.com’s “Dance Dictionary” defines a fouette as “a turning step, usually done in a series, in which the working leg whips out to the side in and then into the knee as the dancer turns on the supporting leg, rising onto the point at each revolution.” I like to be precise in describing Sen. Obama because, while informal, he is a stickler when it comes to such matters.

As a conservative, of course, I like all his changed views except for the fact that he doesn’t believe his current iteration of principle any more than he believed his previous iteration. Which brings us, as it always does in such circumstances, to America’s greatest fraud sniffer, H.L. Mencken. He defined a demagogue as “one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” It is not surprising that the youth is particularly enchanted by the senator from Illinois. Being young, they are inexperienced in the ways of the world.

I offer to our youth the cautionary tale of Ludwig van Beethoven when he was in his early 30s. He originally called his “Eroica” symphony the “Bonaparte” symphony as a tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte, then the heroic French consul who had begun to reform Europe radically after gaining military victories over various monarchically ruled countries. But Beethoven became disillusioned when, in 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Beethoven then renamed the symphony the “Eroica” because he refused to dedicate one of his great compositions to the man he now considered a “tyrant.” …

In Contentions, Peter Wehner thinks Obama’s move to the right demonstrates the essentially conservative nature of the American electorate.

On Sunday Fred Barnes posted an analysis on the Weekly Standard website arguing that Barack Obama’s tack to the center is “quite clever.” One of the three reasons Fred put forward to substantiate his case is that Obama is “better off being attacked by John McCain as a flip-flopper than as an unrepentant liberal.”

I agree with Barnes, and simply want to underscore an important point we ought to take from it: Obama’s dizzying shifts on a range of issues — including Iraq, meeting with Iran’s Ahamdinejad, terrorist surveillance programs, free trade, abortion, guns, public financing, and the America flag lapel pin, among others — reminds us that America remains a center-right, basically conservative leaning nation. …

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line thinks Wehner it too optimistic and that Obama will remain a leftist.

Peter Wehner argues that Barack Obama’s tack to the center is probably a wise move and, as such, underscores that “America remains a center-right, basically conservative leaning nation.” According to Peter, “the fact that Obama understands this and is doing everything he can do inoculate himself against the charge of liberalism ought to be welcomed news to conservatives.”

This view strikes me as too sanguine. …

Wehner answers.

Paul Mirengoff, one of the troika who writes for the outstanding blog Powerline, posted a piece taking issue, in a respectful way, with what I wrote here.

According to Paul, my claim that Barack Obama’s tack to the center is probably a wise move and, as such, underscores that “America remains a center-right, basically conservative leaning nation” is not quite right. In addition, my statement that “the fact that Obama understands this and is doing everything he can do inoculate himself against the charge of liberalism ought to be welcomed news to conservatives” is “too sanguine.” Paul points out that Obama isn’t even tacking significantly away from the left on most key domestic issues, e.g., health care, energy policy, and taxes. “Overall,” Paul writes, “Obama’s moves show only that America remains a centrist nation.”

I’m not sure Paul and I differ on all that much. But whether we do or not, I’ll take this as an opportunity to elaborate my views. My point, as I stated in my original post, is that conservatism, despite the challenges it faces today, is still the most appealing and popular political philosophy in America. Moreover, liberalism remains a lethal charge in a presidential campaign (if the charge sticks). It tells us something important that Obama will fight hard against the claim that he is a liberal, arguing that such labels are part of the “old politics” that he has magically transcended. McCain, on the other hand, is happy to be labeled a conservative. …

Want a preview of how wacky Dems would run our country? WSJ has their plans for the convention.

As the Mile High City gears up to host a Democratic bash for 50,000, organizers are discovering the perils of trying to stage a political spectacle that’s also politically correct.

Consider the fanny packs.

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: “That just doesn’t exist.”

Ditto for the baseball caps. “We have a union cap or an organic cap,” Mr. DeMasse says. “But we don’t have a union-organic offering.”

Much of the hand-wringing can be blamed on Denver’s Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper, who challenged his party and his city to “make this the greenest convention in the history of the planet.”

Convention organizers hired the first-ever Director of Greening, longtime environmental activist Andrea Robinson. Her response to the mayor’s challenge: “That terrifies me!”

After all, the last time Democrats met in Denver — to nominate William Jennings Bryan in 1908 — they dispatched horse-drawn wagons to bring snow from the Rocky Mountains to cool the meeting hall. Ms. Robinson suspected modern-day delegates would prefer air conditioning. So she quickly modified the mayor’s goal: She’d supervise “the most sustainable political convention in modern American history.” …

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David Warren on the G8 summit.

… There is little, even in the wonderland of international power politics, quite as fatuous as the G8, when the world’s leaders meet, as they have been doing since 1973, to solve everyone’s domestic problems in an informal, results-oriented atmosphere. Thirty-five years later, they’re still dealing with the oil crisis.

They can create problems, they can compound problems, they can expand problems, and they can, through the extraordinary “outreach” of their bureaucracies, systematically undermine the people’s efforts to cope with these problems — but they cannot solve anything. The fault lies in an “imperfect” nature, which does not respond to the fairy-weave of the politician’s wand, or to the incantations of the tribal shaman for that matter. By toil alone is the harvest realized; by toil, the bread is baked; by toil is it bought and sold.

Governments can appropriate wealth, but the notion that they can somehow create it, or even reapportion it with any degree of foresight, is one of the great stupid ideas.

Journalists — attracted to power as the moth to the flame — are especially susceptible to the illusion that politicians have the ability to fix things; and to the converse, equally superstitious idea, that their failure to fix connotes a bad will.

Should there be drought, the shaman commands rain. …

Gordon Chang says forget the G8, there is only the G1. And Claudia Rosett blogs on the G8.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes on the FARC hostage rescue and why some NGO’s are NFG.

As we learn more about the Colombian military’s daring hostage rescue last week, one detail stands out: In tricking FARC rebels into putting the hostages aboard a helicopter, undercover special forces simply told the comandantes that the aircraft was being loaned to them by a fictitious nongovernmental organization sympathetic to their cause called the International Humanitarian Mission.

It may have taken years for army intelligence to infiltrate the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and it may have been tough to convincingly impersonate rebels. But what seems to have been a walk in the park was getting the FARC to believe that an NGO was providing resources to help it in the dirty work of ferrying captives to a new location.

<!–
com.dowjones.video.articlePlayer.draw(“1646108104″,”320″,”290″,”left”,”452319854″, “The Colombian military tricked the FARC into releasing their most valuable hostages. Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who writes the "Americas" column, talks with Kelsey Hubbard about how the once-powerful guerrilla group was duped. (July 7)”)
//–>
I am reminded of President Álvaro Uribe’s 2003 statement that some “human rights” organizations in his country were fronts for terrorists. Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd got his back up over Mr. Uribe’s statement, and piously lectured the Colombian president about “the importance of democratic values.”

But as the helicopter story suggests, Mr. Uribe seems to have been right. How else to explain the fact that the FARC swallowed the line without batting an eye? …

O’Grady’s piece raised a question about Nancy Pelosi’s conduct. Power Line has details.

… some Americans seem remarkably oblivious to the evil that FARC, Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leftists represent. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mary O’Grady writes about the fact that some “human rights” organizations are in fact allies of, and fronts for, terrorist groups. That’s a fair point, but I want to focus on the latter part of her column, in which she describes efforts by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to turn the hostages into “a public-relations coup that would give him and the FARC ‘continental and world renown.’”

O’Grady’s account is based on documents that were captured from a FARC laptop in a raid by the Colombian military that we wrote about here. Based on those documents, it appears that Chavez had a couple of schemes to set up prisoner exchanges involving the FARC hostages. This is the most interesting one: …

Maybe Pelosi’s shenanigans are some of the reason for the approval rating of Congress falling to 9%. Ed Morrissey has the story.

When Democrats won majorities in both chambers of Congress, they pointed to the falling approval ratings of the legislature as a mandate for change.  They have certainly provided it — albeit in the wrong direction.  Rasmussen’s latest polling shows the approval ratings for Congress have reached a new low, and a new achievement … single digits:

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category. …

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. …

Ed Morrissey also posts on the Dem energy policy.

Democrats in Congress promised to make energy policy a high priority when they returned after the Independence Day break.  Instead, they have quietly scrubbed the schedule of any votes on their energy bill, afraid Republicans will make them vote on increased domestic oil production and force them to choose between popular sentiment for drilling and their environmentalist allies.  Their strategy?  Well, the Hill chooses a good quote:

“Right now, our strategy on gas prices is ‘Drive small cars and wait for the wind,’ ” said a Democratic aide. …

John Stossel likes the Supreme gun ruling.

… But there is something else that many analysts of the decision have missed.

The Bill of Rights did not create rights. It acknowledged them. Right before the July 4 holiday, it shouldn’t have been necessary to remind the four Supreme Court dissenters of what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. … “

The Framers of the Second Amendment did not say, “The people shall have the right to keep and bear arms.” They wrote, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” …

Walter Williams hearts speculators.

Despite Congress’ periodic hauling of weak-kneed oil executives before their committees to charge them with collusion and price-gouging, subsequent federal investigations turn up no evidence to support the charges. Right now oil company executives are getting a bit of a respite as Congress has turned its attention to crude oil speculators, blaming them for high oil prices and calling for tighter control over commodity futures trading.

Let’s look at the futures market and for simplicity use corn futures discussed in my May 28th column titled “Futures Market.” While corn is different from oil, both obey the laws of supply and demand, just as humans are very different from bricks but both obey the laws of gravity. …

Sacré bleu! French winemakers say, “Screw You!” Daily Telegraph has the story of the cork’s demise.

While New World wines have adopted the screw top for years – with up to 90 per cent of New Zealand wines and 60 per cent of Australian bottles using them – giving up the time-honoured cork has met with much stiffer resistance in France beyond the cheaper end of the market.

But according to one wine expert, two of the world’s top names – Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy, whose bottles can sell for tens of thousands of pounds, and Bordeaux’s legendary Chateau Margaux – are now looking into screw tops.

Romanée-Conti would not comment on the sensitive issue, with tops still viewed as heresy by many purists. But the director general of Chateau Margaux, Paul Pontallier, confirmed that the Bordeaux domaine was trying them out. …

The Onion reports Bill Clinton has put his inaugural gown away.

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Dilbert’s Blog leads us off since he declined to pick a candidate, but did post on the subject of hard work.

There were two types of interesting reactions to my last post. A number of readers think that I’m a closet Obama supporter who would never support a Republican candidate. For the record, I think neither Obama nor McCain come anywhere near the minimum requirement I would like to see in a president. For example, I’d like a president who preferred science over superstition, just to name one thing. So if you think my writing suggests that one of the candidates is slightly less unsuitable than the other, that’s unintentional.

I’ve only once donated money to a politician, and it was McCain. But that’s because I made the mistake of telling one of his fundraisers, a friend of mine, that I’d donate money if the surge “worked.” Admittedly that was more like paying off a bet than supporting a candidate. But time does seem to be vindicating the surge strategy, no matter what you think of how we got into the mess in the first place. …

The UN high commissioner for human rights is retiring. Marty Peretz has thoughts.

Onions again. This time from WSJ Editors.

Congress is back in session and oil prices are still through the roof, so pointless or destructive energy legislation is all but guaranteed. Most likely is stiffer regulation of the futures market, since Democrats and even many Republicans have so much invested in blaming “speculators” for $4 gas.

Congress always needs a political villain, but few are more undeserving. Futures trading merely allows market participants to determine the best estimate – based on available information like supply and demand and the rate of inflation – of what the real price of oil will be on the delivery date of the contracts. Such a basic price discovery mechanism lets major energy consumers hedge against volatility. Still, “speculators” always end up tied to the whipping post when people get upset about price swings.

As it happens, though, there’s a useful case-study in the relationship between futures markets and commodity prices: onions. Congress might want to brush up on the results of its prior antispeculation mania before it causes more trouble.

In 1958, Congress officially banned all futures trading in the fresh onion market. Growers blamed “moneyed interests” …

Bill Kristol has ideas for McCain’s staff.

From the gun clubs of Northern Virginia to the sports bars of Capitol Hill — wherever D.C.-area Republicans gather — you hear the question:

“Where’s Murphy?”

“Murphy” is Mike Murphy, the 46-year-old G.O.P. strategist who masterminded John McCain’s 2000 primary race against George Bush, helping McCain come close to pulling off an amazing upset. Murphy was then chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s successful Massachusetts governor run in 2002.

Murphy remained close to both men, and as a result sat out the G.O.P. nominating contest this past year, not wishing to work against either of them. It was widely assumed, though, that if either McCain or Romney won the nomination, the winner would bring Murphy on board for the general election. So far it hasn’t happened. I believe it soon will.

I hasten to disclose that Murphy is a friend. I should also disclose that when I called to say I had heard he might well be signing on with McCain, he went Sergeant Schultz on me, saying nothing.

But here’s what I gather from acquaintances and sources in and around the McCain campaign.

McCain is frustrated. He thinks he can beat Obama (politicians are pretty confident in their own abilities). But he isn’t convinced his campaign can beat Obama’s campaign. He knows that his three-month general election head start was largely frittered away. He understands that his campaign has failed to develop an overarching message. Above all, McCain is painfully aware that he is being diminished by his own campaign. …

David Harsanyi says as for as the GOP goes, “It’s the leadership stupid”.

… So a conservative might ask: Do the vagaries of the market and history, or an incompetent Republican president who abandoned fiscal conservatism, reveal a fundamental problem with ideology?

After all, a couple of election losses didn’t push the Democratic Party dramatically toward the right. It didn’t ignite mass doubt among the grass roots. It did the opposite. With each loss, the left found a stronger commitment to progressive ideas. All of which manifested when a decidedly left-wing Obama knocked off the allegedly moderate Hillary Clinton.

Republicans have won five of the last seven presidential terms with a conservative economic message. Come to think of it, Democrats won two presidential terms in the ’90s with a conservative economic message.

Should one of the most successful coalitions in the history of American politics be abandoned after a single midterm election loss — and a probable loss this November?

Maybe Republican leadership, rather than conservative principles, is in need of an overhaul. You wouldn’t believe what a charismatic, articulate politician can do with a set of old ideas.

Just ask the Democrats.

Caucus Blog says Hillary’s Howard Wolfson has signed with FOX News.

Howard Wolfson, who was a top strategist for the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is going where some Democrats were unwilling to go during the early days of the election season: the Fox News Channel.

The network is expected to announce as early as Tuesday that it has signed Mr. Wolfson as a contributor who will appear regularly on its programs.

Mr. Wolfson is joining a network that Democrats shunned for a time, complaining that its coverage was unfair. But aides to Mrs. Clinton came to view Fox News as distinctly fair to her in a news media climate that they believed favored Senator Barack Obama.

“I thought that Fox’s coverage during the primary was comprehensive and fair and evenhanded,” Mr. Wolfson said Monday in a telephone interview from Liverpool, England, where he was vacationing. “It’s a huge audience, and it is important to have a strong, progressive voice on the network.” …

A NY Times Profile of Rush Limbaugh continues.

… If McCain wins, Limbaugh will spend the next four years tugging him to the right. If he loses, it will not be, in Limbaugh’s estimation, Limbaugh’s fault, and it won’t be the end of his world either. A secret of Limbaugh’s success is that his uncompromising, often harsh ideas are offset by a basically friendly temperament. He is less like his angry father than his mature role models, Buckley and Reagan, for whom sociability and fun were integral to their conservative world view.

And increasingly, he has other interests. He’s been spending more time with his extended family in Cape Girardeau, where he’s so popular that the municipality runs a Rush Limbaugh tour for visitors. He toys with the idea of buying an N.F.L. franchise. His friend Joel Surnow says that if there were a Rush Limbaugh movie, it would be something along the lines of “Citizen Kane” meets Howard Stern.

As for politics, Rush has already picked his candidate for the Conservative Restoration: Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 37-year-old prodigy whom Limbaugh considers to be a genuine movement conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold — “fresh, energetic and optimistic in his view of America.” In the meantime, though, there’s the Democratic convention in Denver to muck around in, and then the main event in November. Operation Chaos is over, but Rush will come up with something new to delight his fans and infuriate his foes. Presidents rise and presidents fall, but “The Rush Limbaugh Show” will go on, weekdays at 12:06, Eastern Time.

Talk about “bringing coals to Newcastle,” Der Spiegel says Arab states are investigating coal-fired generating plants.

For Alfred Tacke, CEO of the Essen energy giant Evonik Steag, it’s the yellowish-brown pall below that tells him the plane he’s on is approaching the Persian Gulf. Beneath the haze, he knows, is Kuwait, which has five large-scale gas- and oil-fired power plants in operation. The power they generate provide around-the-clock electricity for Kuwait’s gigantic seawater desalination plants and the country’s enormous air-conditioning needs.

“Here, you only need to stick your finger in the sand and you’re likely to strike oil or gas,” says Tacke, whose energy group ranks fifth among Germany’s electricity producers. But Tacke has his own ideas about how to make money in the region. And they center on a different kind of black gold: coal-fired power plants. “We’re currently in the process of discussing the conditions for projects of this kind,” he says.

As odd as the idea may seem, coal power in the gulf is just one more outcome of skyrocketing oil prices. In a world with dramatically disparate ideas on how or even whether to address the risks of global warming, demand for coal plants across the globe is growing rapidly to the detriment of efforts to increase the production of renewable energies such as solar, hydro and wind. …

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Contentions’ Abe Greenwald did some research to show how silly the NY Times can be.

Since Pickings is for grown-ups, the dénouement no matter how distant, is important. WSJ editors have one for the Spitzer/Grasso/Langone moment in New York.

This week’s dismissal of the case against Dick Grasso is sweet vindication for the former New York Stock Exchange CEO. But beyond the debate over his $190 million pay package, there are lessons here about prosecutorial discretion, pack journalism and business courage under political pressure.

These columns defended Mr. Grasso from the beginning, not because we cared a whit about his pay but because it looked like one more case of overreach by Lord High Executioner Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Grasso wasn’t accused of corruption; his sin was making a bundle in a political season when that was déclassé. Moreover, Mr. Grasso hadn’t set his own pay. The NYSE board had signed off on it, and it seemed bizarre to punish a CEO for accepting what his own bosses had legally agreed to pay him. …

Speaking of dénouements, perhaps the end is near for Mugabe. Roger Bate in WSJ has the inflation story in Zimbabwe.

Amid Zimbabwe’s political violence is an economic lesson for anyone who doesn’t keep an eye on inflation. The country’s dictator, Robert Mugabe, who was sworn in on June 29 to his sixth term as president, has killed a few hundred of his opponents in the past few months, but his country’s inflation is killing far more than that. With food aid only trickling back into the country and hundreds of thousands without enough cash to buy food, it was clear during a trip there last month that the crisis is deepening.

Consumer prices have more than doubled every month this year, in some cases doubling every week. A conservative estimate provided by Robertson Economic Information Services, a Southern African consultancy, says that prices are now three billion fold greater than seven years ago. That’s right, billion. The exchange rate is currently an astronomical 90 billion Zimbabwe dollars to one U.S. dollar. …

And Ed Morrissey has good news from Iraq.

Did you know that the US and Iraq will shortly conclude “one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror”?  You wouldn’t if you read American newspapers or watched American television.  The Times of London reports on the approaching end of al-Qaeda in Iraq as the forces of Nouri al-Maliki and the US close the trap on 1,200 AQ terrorists in Mosul: …

The candidates’ calls for universal service got David Harsanyi going with some libertarian thoughts.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson writes that individuals are endowed with unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

There is nothing in there about state-sponsored “public” service and nothing about having to listen to politicians lecture us about what we “must” do to satisfy patriotic obligation. I checked.

Yet, a hobbyhorse of presidential hopefuls is government service. The duo is under the impression that public service trumps your own selfish existence. After all, you only make a living, give to charities of your choice, take care of your own children, buy your own junk and, hopefully, mind your own business.

“Loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July,” Barack Obama explained to a crowd in Colorado Springs this week. “Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it.”

Yes. He said must.

Ironically, in most places, Americans are prohibited from lighting fireworks on Independence Day — naturally, we “must” not hurt ourselves. And there are increasingly more “musts” being handed down. (Reason Magazine recently named Chicago, Obama’s hometown, the city with the least amount of individual freedom in the nation.) …

Corner post by VD Hanson introduces the NY Times look at Rush Limbaugh.

While reading the mostly balanced Zev Chafets Rush Limbaugh story in the New York Times Magazine, I was struck by how long so many people have vastly underestimated Limbaugh’s talents. For two decades his critics kept sneering, “His gets millions for mouthing off three hours day.”  …

A profile of Rush Limbaugh appeared in Sunday’s Times Magazine. It was an interesting and long account, and will appear in parts, today and tomorrow.

… Limbaugh has been a factor in every national election of the past 20 years, but not since the mid-1990s has he been so prominent. Democrats have blamed him for everything from invading their primaries to starting scurrilous rumors about Michelle Obama. Limbaugh denies the latter accusation, but he happily embraces the former. His vehicle was so-called Operation Chaos, a radio campaign designed to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton and prolong internecine fighting among liberals.

Nobody quite knows how effective Operation Chaos was. Karl Rove said he thinks it helped tilt Texas for Clinton. She herself gave this some credence on the day after the vote by jauntily saying, “Be careful what you wish for, Rush.” Howard Dean implored primary voters in Indiana and North Carolina to ignore Limbaugh. The Obama supporter Arianna Huffington called Limbaugh and other conservative hosts “toxic curiosities.” After Clinton won in Indiana, where 10 percent of Democratic primary voters admitted to exit pollsters that they were really Republicans, Senator John Kerry accused Limbaugh of “tampering with the primary” and causing Obama’s defeat.

Limbaugh was delighted. He deemed Operation Chaos to have “exceeded all expectations” (his customary self-evaluation) and explained once again that he wasn’t supporting Clinton but merely trying to bloody Obama because John McCain was too chicken to do it and because he believed that Obama would then be easier to beat in November.

Probably both the Democrats and Limbaugh overstated his actual impact. But Operation Chaos was a triumph of interactive political performance art. Limbaugh appointed himself Supreme Commander, deputized his listeners and turned them into merry pranksters. “Rush is a master at framing an issue and creating a community around it,” says Susan Estrich, who ran Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign and has since become a talk-show host herself. Operation Chaos drew a crowd, which is what Limbaugh does for a living. It got people laughing at the Democrats, which is what he lives for. And, ever the devout capitalist, he turned an extra buck by peddling Operation Chaos gear. The stuff flew off the cybershelves of the E.I.B. store, the biggest seller since his Club Gitmo collection (“my mullah went to Club Gitmo and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”).

None of these high jinks would have mattered if Limbaugh were a regular radio personality. But he isn’t. Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade publication, puts Limbaugh’s weekly audience at 14 million. Limbaugh himself says it is closer to 20 million. Either way, nobody else is close. He has been the top-rated radio talk-show host in America since the magazine started the ranking 17 years ago.

Such massive and consistent popularity makes Limbaugh a singular political force. “Rush has completely remade American politics by offering an alternative to the networks and CNN,” Rove told me. “For 20 years he has been the leader of his own parade.” …

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Douglas Feith, who was at the Pentagon in the run-up to the Iraq War, puts some things in context.

A lot of poor commentary has framed the Iraq war as a conflict of “choice” rather than of “necessity.” In fact, President George W. Bush chose to remove Saddam Hussein from power because he concluded that doing so was necessary.

President Bush inherited a worrisome Iraq problem from Bill Clinton and from his own father. Saddam had systematically undermined the measures the U.N. Security Council put in place after the Gulf War to contain his regime. In the first months of the Bush presidency, officials debated what to do next.

As a participant in the confidential, top-level administration meetings about Iraq, it was clear to me at the time that, had there been a realistic alternative to war to counter the threat from Saddam, Mr. Bush would have chosen it.

In the months before the 9/11 attack, Secretary of State Colin Powell advocated diluting the multinational economic sanctions, in the hope that a weaker set of sanctions could win stronger and more sustained international support. Central Intelligence Agency officials floated the possibility of a coup, though the 1990s showed that Saddam was far better at undoing coup plots than the CIA was at engineering them. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz asked if the U.S. might create an autonomous area in southern Iraq similar to the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, with the goal of making Saddam little more than the “mayor of Baghdad.” U.S. officials also discussed whether a popular uprising in Iraq should be encouraged, and how we could best work with free Iraqi groups that opposed the Saddam regime.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worried particularly about the U.S. and British pilots enforcing the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Iraqi forces were shooting at the U.S. and British aircraft virtually every day; if a plane went down, the pilot would likely be killed or captured. What then? Mr. Rumsfeld asked. Were the missions worth the risk? How might U.S. and British responses be intensified to deter Saddam from shooting at our planes? Would the intensification trigger a war? What would be the consequences of cutting back on the missions, or ending them?

On July 27, 2001, Mr. Rumsfeld sent a memo to Mr. Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney that reviewed U.S. options: …

Michael Moynihan, an editor of Reason has a good analysis of the Colombian success, and compares it to the brutal suppression of Tupac Amaru in Peru.

In December 1996, the Peruvian Marxist guerrilla group Tupac Amaru (MRTA) occupied the Japanese embassy in Lima, taking hostage a group assembled to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Akihito. Four months later, Peru’s strongman president, the now-imprisoned Alberto Fujimori, ordered a team of elite Peruvian soldiers to retake the building. The handful of rebels who managed to survive the initial assault, witnesses later reported, were bound, dragged into a courtyard, and executed by members of the Peruvian army. Not a single member of the MRTA made it out alive.

A rather different tactic was employed by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose special forces freed 15 hostages held by the Marxist terror group FARC on Wednesday. The hostages included three American contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Dressed like a group of slightly menacing Berkeley baristas, the army infiltrators disguised themselves in Che Guevara t-shirts (seriously) and camouflaged uniforms, easily convincing the FARC that they too were fist-clenching, Lenin-reading members of the jungle politburo. It was an elaborate, cleverly plotted ruse—one that was guaranteed to fool a platoon of knuckle-dragging, forest-dwelling communist revolutionaries. …

Michael Barone wonders why the Dems are treating Colombia so poorly.

… House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rejection of the Colombia free-trade agreement, by changing House rules in a way that may have destroyed the fast track procedure by which the United States has secured free-trade agreements for more than four decades, seems to me to be the one truly shameful act of this Congress. This rejection of an ally, the third largest country in Latin America, a nation that is threatened by authoritarian and terrorist opponents, and has nonetheless succeeded in strengthening human rights and stimulating economic growth, is as disgusting as anything I’ve seen Congress do. John McCain hailed Colombia’s action; Barack Obama, an opponent of the Colombia trade agreement, unblushingly chimed in a bit later. I wonder how he reconciles this with his message on the Colombia trade pact, summed up aptly in the title of a Washington Post editorial, “Drop Dead, Colombia.”

Investor’s Business Daily editors have a Colombia opinion.

… The best way to express our appreciation would be to correct another U.S. blunder by ending Congress’ shutout of Colombia’s free trade treaty. It was put on hold in April, after a rules change engineered by Reps. Jim McGovern and Louise Slaughter and executed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

On Monday, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, will try to get them to make amends. “Colombia is our strongest ally in the region, and it is critical that we support Plan Colombia and a free-trade agreement with Colombia,” he said.

In the wake of the rescue, Pelosi’s continued refusal to even permit a vote on the pact now stands out as the pinnacle of ingratitude. …

Charles Krauthammer has predicted Obama would climb down from his Iraq withdrawal pledge should he be elected. Now, Charles says he underestimated his slickness.

… Obama’s seasonally adjusted principles are beginning to pile up: NAFTA, campaign finance reform, warrantless wiretaps, flag pins, gun control. What’s left?

Iraq. The reversal is coming, and soon.

Two weeks ago, I predicted that by Election Day Obama will have erased all meaningful differences with McCain on withdrawal from Iraq. I underestimated Obama’s cynicism. He will make the move much sooner. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to finally acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to formally abandon his primary season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.

The shift has already begun. Yesterday, he said that his “original position” on withdrawal has always been that “we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.” And that “when I go to Iraq . . . I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.”

He hasn’t even gone to Iraq and the flip is almost complete. All that’s left to say is that the 16-month time frame remains his goal but that he will, of course, take into account the situation on the ground and the recommendation of his generals in deciding whether the withdrawal is to occur later or even sooner.

Done. …

Jennifer Rubin reports the NY Times is peeved at Obama’s flips.

Andy McCarthy in the Corner wonders just what gives with the Times and Obama.

Peter Wehner performed a service giving us a concise review of C. Hitchens’ Vanity Fair piece on waterboarding.

Christopher Hitchens has written a quintessentially Hitchens article in Vanity Fair. He decided he wanted to learn about the issue of waterboarding – so Hitchens, now 59 years old, traveled to North Carolina in order to be waterboarded. There are not many of us who take our research that seriously.

The result is a fascinating piece that describes waterboarding in a vivid and unforgettable manner.

It isn’t a pretty or happy experience.

Hitchens ultimately comes out against waterboarding and judges it to be torture, and he offers, as is his wont, some very persuasive reasons for his conclusion. There are certainly strong moral and utilitarian reasons to oppose waterboarding. But in the course of his piece, Hitchens does us the service of stating the strongest case for each side. …

John Fund tells us why we should remember Jesse Helms.

… Two events early in his Senate career showcased Helms’s unflinching nature and his political skills. In 1975, he engineered a visit to the U.S. by Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn over the objections of the State Department, which forbade its own employees from attending a major Solzhenitsyn speech in Washington. State also blocked a proposed visit to the White House, leading Helms to accuse President Gerald Ford of “cowering timidly for fear of offending Communists.”

That incident helped spur Reagan to challenge Ford for the GOP nomination the next year. Reagan lost the first five primaries, and he entered the North Carolina contest broke and under pressure to pull out. But Helms and his chief strategist Tom Ellis refused to give up. They employed Helms’s huge, direct-mail list to build a grass-roots army of volunteers and raise money to air 30-minute speeches by Reagan across the state.

Emphasizing the Panama Canal “giveaway” and smaller government, Reagan won an upset victory and was able to battle Ford all the way to the GOP convention. He showed such strength at the convention that Ford invited him to deliver off-the-cuff remarks to the delegates. Reagan was so inspiring that some of Ford’s own delegates exclaimed, “We just nominated the wrong candidate.” Reagan later acknowledged how Helms’s intervention rescued his political career. …