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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. …
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.” …