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Melanie Phillips highlights a Bret Stephens question.
In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens asks a very simple and very obvious question. Observing the fact that while some 6000 Palestinians (many if not most of them terrorists) have been killed by Israeli fire since the beginning of their Second Intifada against Israel compared with between 25,000 and 200,000 Chechen civilians (in a population about one third or one quarter the size of the Palestinians) who have been killed by the Russians during that period, he wonders why the world merely shrugs in indifference at the brutalities in Chechnya while dwelling incessantly and obsessively upon Israel. …
Bill Kristol says we’re throwing to the wolves those who guard us.
“We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Obama said when he ordered the release of the Justice Department interrogation memos. Actually, no. Not at all. We were attacked on 9/11. We responded to that attack with remarkable restraint in the use of force, respect for civil liberties, and even solicitude for those who might inadvertently be offended, let alone harmed, by our policies. We’ve fought a war on jihadist terror in a civilized, even legalized, way. Those who have been on the front and rear lines of that war–in the military and the intelligence agencies, at the Justice Department and, yes, in the White House–have much to be proud of. The rest of us, who’ve been asked to do little, should be grateful.
The dark and painful chapter we have to fear is rather the one President Obama may be ushering in. This would be a chapter in which politicians preen moralistically as they throw patriotic officials, who helped keep this country safe, to the wolves, and in which national leaders posture politically while endangering the nation’s security. …
Stuart Taylor takes up the subject.
“A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals,” President Obama said on April 16, “and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.”
But is it really a false choice? It’s certainly tempting to think so. The fashionable assumption that coercive interrogation (up to and including torture) never saved a single life makes it easy to resolve what otherwise would be an agonizing moral quandary.
The same assumption makes it even easier for congressional Democrats, human-rights activists, and George W. Bush-hating avengers to call for prosecuting and imprisoning the former president and his entire national security team, including their lawyers. The charge: approving brutal methods — seen by many as illegal torture — that were also blessed, at least implicitly, by Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker, and other Intelligence Committee members in and after 2002.
But there is a body of evidence suggesting that brutal interrogation methods may indeed have saved lives, perhaps a great many lives — and that renouncing those methods may someday end up costing many, many more. …
Noemie Emery says let’s have a truth commission.
Some Democrats, from the White House on down, are pushing the idea of a “truth commission,” à la South Africa, to deal with the “harsh measures” used by the Bush administration in interrogating al Qaeda detainees. Good. Let’s have lots of truthtelling. Please bring it on.
Let’s tell the truth about Bush’s conduct of the war on terror, which is that it’s been a success. His ultimate legacy hasn’t been written–Iraq is improved, but not out of danger–but the one thing that can be said without reservation is that the country was kept safe. He delivered on the main charge of his office in time of emergency, in a crisis without guidelines or precedent. Attacks took place in Spain, and in London, in Indonesia and India, but not on American soil, which was the obvious target of choice. Bush couldn’t say this before he left office, for obvious reasons, and after he left, attention switched to the new president. This little fact dropped down the memory hole, but with all this discussion, it will rise to the surface. Let the hearings begin! …
More on the apology tour from Karl Rove.
… Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the U.S. had “used a nuclear weapon.” In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not “pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors” because we “failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”
By confessing our nation’s sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has “changed the image of America around the world” and made the U.S. “safer and stronger.” As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.
That’s now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president’s wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War. …
WaPo article laughs at the expense cuts.
These tough times call for sacrifice. So the Obama administration has embarked on a belt-tightening plan that sounds, to some veteran federal budget watchers, like fodder for a Jay Leno monologue.
The Education Department will eliminate a Bush-era “education policy attaché” based in Paris — the one in France — whose annual salary, housing allowance and business expenses exceed $630,000. Employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs will forgo their training junkets to hot spots such as Nashville and satisfy themselves with videoconferencing.
The Department of Homeland Security has started buying its supplies in bulk and — to the surprise and delight of bureaucrats — discovered it’s much cheaper that way.
This is not exactly the revolution in government efficiency that President Obama has promised. Nonetheless, he and the agencies trumpeted the changes, staples of any money-conscious organization, this week as examples of how they intend to cut $100 million over the next 90 days to try to trim a budget deficit projected to reach $1.4 trillion next year.
Experts said the cost-cutting measures will do little to restore fiscal responsibility and are at best a symbolic early move. At worst, they said, the savings, which amount to a fraction of 1 percent of Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget, are so obvious and picayune that by making them a major focus of his first Cabinet meeting, the president may have given the impression that he is not serious about controlling spending. …
Jennifer Rubin agrees.
… this is what the Obama team is forced to resort to — silly symbolic efforts because of the trap they find themselves in, or rather, have put themselves in. They have created a massively irresponsible budget that will, over time, eat up more and more of the GDP and strain our ability to finance our debt. And the public, independent voters especially, are very nervous about it. Figuring that the public isn’t paying much attention to the number of zeroes, Obama throws out a number that used to sound like a lot of money — $100M. But the public is perhaps smarter than Obama reckons, and the administration’s critics aren’t playing along with the charade.
The result: everyone got a reminder of just how irresponsible the Obama fiscal policy is. Good thing for whomever thought this up that the news was swamped by the interrogation memo fiasco. Otherwise someone might be in trouble.
Mark Steyn posts on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s anti-tax screed.
To mark his first 100 days the kid scheduled another prime time presser. Linda Chavez thinks maybe the Obamas should have a reality show.
Teleprompter is back.
News Biscuit writes about a dog that took a year off traveling to “find himself.”
… The early signs were that Shandy was making concessions to his principled approach to his gap year. Despite promising to find employment on his travels and immerse himself in new cultures, by late afternoon on the first day he had already made two reverse-charge calls to the Lucases asking for money, and Mr Lucas’s credit card company had reported a suspicious transaction at a tattoo parlour and a hefty bill for room service and ‘extras’ at a mixed 5-star kennels just outside Sidcup.
However, Shandy did finally make it to Asia, and was last reported to be delighted to have found a restaurant in South Korea that had a picture of a dog on the outside. He said he was just going in to ‘check out the scene’.
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