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David Warren details how the bombings in India relate to the war we are in.
… Thanks to the leadership shown by Bush and Blair, thanks to the stamina the West has shown in Afghanistan and Iraq, thanks to special forces operations that continue unpublicized in remote locations, thanks to European governments that have gradually withdrawn toleration and even encouragement to the radical Wahabi subculture spawned among Europe’s Muslim youth, thanks to international police co-operation — outward progress has been made against the Islamist enemy.
The progress is in two forms, of which the physical destruction of Al Qaeda cells and related terror infrastructure is the necessary condition for the second and more important. The prestige of the Islamist ideology, within Islam, appears to be fading, as it fails to achieve its objectives.
Soon after 9/11, I made the hopeful analogy to the triumph of Nasserism in an earlier generation. The Arab socialist movement associated with the Egyptian dictator and ideologue enjoyed international prestige in its day, of a kind comparable to the later prestige of the Islamists. Nasserite socialism appealed in a similar way to an earlier generation of young men, frustrated by the failure of Arab and Muslim societies to master conditions in the late modern world.
The death of Nasserism was sharply portended in the Six-Day War of 1967, as the Israelis routed the soldiers of Egypt and all her allies. Nasserism began to be associated with humiliating defeat.
Our common enemy cannot be Islam — for that is too vague — but rather, a political ideology within Islam. Our task is to defeat its partisans wherever they show themselves. The end is to make it a movement that no one could want to join. From this, there must be no retreat.
John Fund says the GOP has to choose between Tom Coburn or Ted Stevens.
The Republican Party is facing what Ronald Reagan called “a time for choosing.” A real argument is raging over how much it should turn its back on the bad habits that cost it control of Congress in 2006.
Just after that debacle, Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens, the father of the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” encountered Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, the antipork crusader who had held up many of the projects so many members believe are the key to their re-election. Mr. Stevens said, “Well, Tom, I hope you’re satisfied for helping us lose the election.” Mr. Coburn replied, “No, Ted, you lost us this election.”
The data favored Mr. Coburn: 2006 exit polls revealed that corruption in government was second only to the Iraq war as the driving force behind the Democratic takeover. A major part of that corruption was earmarks — pork projects members often secure in secret. Earmarks were at the heart of the scandals that sent Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Calif. Rep. Duke Cunningham to jail. …
More on Stevens and the Senate from the Economist’s Lexington.
… Is Mr Stevens’s disgrace proof that people have had enough of all this? There are some encouraging signs. Alaskans once named Mr Stevens “Alaskan of the century”. Now they seem ashamed of what he stands for. Even before this week, he was stuck in a close re-election race against his Democratic rival, Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, and also facing a primary challenge from a disgruntled Republican. Sarah Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, has made her name campaigning against the state’s corruption and nepotism.
Mr Stevens has also become a national symbol of out-of-control spending. His voluble support for a $400m “bridge to nowhere”—in fact, to a sparsely populated island where his friends owned land—helped to create a huge backlash against “earmarks”, particularly among fiscal conservatives. Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, tried to divert the largesse from Alaska to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. John McCain is a long-standing campaigner against pork-barrel spending.
Mr Stevens managed to roll over the objections to his bridge in the Senate. “I will put the Senate on notice—and I don’t kid people—if the Senate decides to discriminate against our state, to take money from our state, I’ll resign from this body. This is not the Senate I came to.” It would be nice to think that Mr Stevens is right for once about his last point. But the Senate is pretty hard to shame. Mr Stevens’s successor as chairman of the Appropriations Committee is Robert Byrd, a 90-year-old Democrat from the pork-gobbling state of West Virginia.
Matthew Continetti tells the amazing story of McCain and the surge.
… Contrary to conventional wisdom, experience cannot be separated from judgment. Experience matters. It was a lifetime of service and involvement in national security issues that gave McCain the perspective and insight to urge a change in strategy as early as 2003. When it came to Iraq it was the old man, McCain, not the young, fresh, and cool Obama, who was flexible in judgment and willing to try a new approach. And Obama has been inflexible in his error. He continues to advocate a political timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and states that he still would have opposed the surge regardless of its clear success. But a precipitous and premature withdrawal would undermine all the gains made in the last year and a half, and a timeline would breathe new life into the enemies of a stable and democratic Iraq. Barack Obama not only lacks experience and judgment; he lacks the capacity to admit he made a mistake and is therefore willing to risk everything the surge has achieved. Obama got it wrong when the stakes were greatest, and on the central issue of our time. Why on earth would we choose to reward him for it?
Michael Barone says it’s an unstable presidential campaign.
Just when you think you’ve got the presidential race figured out, something comes along to upend your carefully wrought conclusions.
Mainstream media provided lavish coverage of Barack Obama’s trip abroad the week of July 21-25 and predicted he would get a bounce in the polls. Some of his supporters believe he has put the election away. Other observers employ the hackneyed and meaningless phrase, “It’s his to lose.”
The poll numbers tell a different and more nuanced story. The two national tracking polls showed Obama getting a bounce while he was in Europe, especially after his speech before 200,000 or so Berliners in the Tiergarten. Gallup showed him rising from a 46 percent-42 percent lead on July 22 to a 49 percent-40 percent lead on July 26. The Rasmussen tracking poll showed him rising from a 47 percent-45 percent lead on July 23 (reflecting the previous days’ polling) to 49 percent to 43 percent on July 26.
But over the next several days, Obama bounced back down. Gallup showed him leading by a statistically insignificant 45 percent to 44 percent as of July 31. That’s the closest the race has been in Gallup all that month. Rasmussen had him down to 48 percent to 46 percent on the same day. The world tour bounce has begun to look like a bubble. …
David Harsanyi calls one of Obama’s tactics a reverse Willie Horton.
… “Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama explained. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
We know this is just a prefabricated attack, because last month in Florida, Obama brandished a similar, less opaque, comment, saying, “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
It’s true; Obama is black. And the person who keeps mentioning that Barack Obama is black most often is Barack Obama.
In fact, Obama has preemptively accused the entire McCain campaign of racism and the entire electorate of being susceptible to racism.
So now, those of you who find Obama’s inexperience or his policy prescriptions — or even his personality — lacking, have fallen prey to bigoted politics. You are too frightened to see the light. The hope.
Yet, in reality, the typical American, according to a recent Gallup poll, is far more prone to spurn an elderly candidate (or gay, atheist, Hispanic, Jew, etc.) than they are to reject an African-American candidate.
One of the appealing aspects of Obama’s early run this year was that he transcended these stale tactics — even as his own party, mind you, was injecting race into the campaign.
Then again, with this much power at stake, it was bound to get ugly.
Change? Not exactly.
Same with Jennifer Rubin.
Jake Tapper started the day by lacing into Barack Obama for his unfounded and egregious claim that John McCain is fanning the flames of racism. Yesterday Obama claimed that McCain is saying, ” ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he’s… doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he’s got a, he’s got a funny name.’ ” Of course, McCain has done no such thing. Tapper writes:
There’s a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he’s condemned it. Back in February, McCain apologized for some questionable comments made by a local radio host. In April, he condemned the North Carolina Republican Party’s ad featuring images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. With one possible exception, I’ve never seen McCain or those under his control playing the race card or making fun of Obama’s name — or even mentioning Obama’s full name, for that matter! …
And Power Line.
It’s not even quite August yet and he’s still ahead in the polls, but Barack Obama has played the race card, claiming that he expects Republicans to inject race into the campaign. In Missouri, he told a crowd:
Nobody [ed: nobody?] thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
The Obama campaign denied that the comment about “presidents on the dollar bills” was a reference to race. It claimed that Obama was referring to the fact that “he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington.” But, of course, neither did the presidents on the dollar bills (Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant). Thus, the campaign’s spin does not pass the straight face test. …
About that Obama prayer note in the Western Wall, Melanie Phillips has words.
Business Insurance.com posts on Minnesota Blue Cross & Blue Shield waiving co-payments for use of retail health clinics. Carpe Diem says, “Another example of market-based, market-driven health care reform that didn’t require a government takeover of health care.”
Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. Pajamas Media on the socialist’s claim about infant mortality.
… According to the way statistics are calculated in Canada, Germany, and Austria, a premature baby weighing <500g is not considered a living child.
But in the U.S., such very low birth weight babies are considered live births. The mortality rate of such babies — considered “unsalvageable” outside of the U.S. and therefore never alive — is extraordinarily high; up to 869 per 1,000 in the first month of life alone. This skews U.S. infant mortality statistics.
When Canada briefly registered an increased number of low weight babies previously omitted from statistical reporting, the infant mortality rose from 6.1 per 1,000 to 6.4 per thousand in just one year.
According to research done by Canada’s Bureau of Reproductive and Child Health, “Comparisons of infant mortality rates by place and time should be adjusted for the proportion of such live births, especially if the comparisons involve recent years.”
Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. But when the main determinant of mortality — weight at birth — is factored in, Norway has no better survival rates than the United States. …