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Tony Blankley continues to advocate exiting Afghanistan.
I concluded in November 2009:
“If the Taliban and al Qaeda retake Afghanistan, the world (and America) will have hell to pay for the consequences. But this president and this White House do not have it in them to lead our troops to victory in Afghanistan. So they shouldn’t try. The price will be high for whatever foreign policy failures we will endure in the next three years. Let’s not add to that price the pointless murder of our finest young troops in a war their leader does not believe in. Bring them home. We’ll need them later.”
…if we need a credible “local partner,” our local partner needs a reliable, supportive “large brother” (to wit: the United States). But by first hesitating to support Mr. Karzai, then saying we will support him – but only for 18 months, then publicly admonishing him to end the endemic corruption, then leaking the fact that his own brother is a major drug smuggler, we have undermined and infuriated him, without whom we cannot succeed in Afghanistan.
Great nations often find themselves in alliance with undesirable local chieftains. Usually in such circumstances, the great nation either tries quietly to strengthen and improve the local boss or it gets rid of him and finds a better puppet. If neither method works – then the great nation eventually gets out. …
In Power Line, Scott Johnson writes that Obama’s views on nuclear policy have not changed.
…The Times article reported on Obama’s March 1983 article “Breaking the war mentality.” The Times noted that in the article Obama railed against discussions of “first-versus second-strike capabilities” that “suit the military-industrial interests” with their “billion-dollar erector sets,” and agitated for the elimination of global arsenals holding tens of thousands of deadly warheads.
…The Times chose to portray Obama’s 1983 article as the early expression of his continuing pursuit of “a nuclear free world.” That’s one way to put it. While others may hope that Obama has outgrown his youthful radicalism, the Times suggested that he is fulfilling it. The Times unfortunately appears to have gotten that right.
George Will summarizes and comments on the current news in state pension reforms.
…A recent debate on “Fox News Sunday” illustrated the differences between the few politicians who are, and the many who are not, willing to face facts. Marco Rubio, the former speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives who is challenging Gov. Charles Crist for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, made news by stating the obvious.
Asked how the nation might address the projected $17.5 trillion in unfunded Social Security liabilities, Rubio said that we should consider two changes for people 10 or more years from retirement. One would raise the retirement age. The other would alter the calculation of benefits: Indexing them to inflation rather than wage increases would substantially reduce the system’s unfunded liabilities.
…By the time the baby boomers have retired in 2030, the median age of the American population will be close to that of today’s population of Florida, the retirees’ haven that is Heaven’s antechamber. The 38-year-old Rubio’s responsible answer to a serious question gives the nation a glimpse of a rarity — a brave approach to the welfare state’s inevitable politics of gerontocracy.
The New Editor links to a Chicago Tribune editorial on the decline of Illinois.
… Illinois needs a new paradigm.
Illinois needs leaders who unwind the terrible indebtedness that lawmakers past and present have bequeathed to taxpayers and their grandchildren.
Illinois needs an end to the mutual admiration society of public officials and public employees coddling one another.
Illinois needs fewer governments and, in Springfield, one government scared straight by so much lost employment.
Most of all, Illinois needs leaders who see that, across this nation, concerns about the public sector’s size, cost and reach is the domestic issue that most rivets Americans. …
Robert Samuelson feels we should be more optimistic about the economy.
When things were going well, it was said that the United States enjoyed a Goldilocks Economy. Growth was fast enough to produce jobs and higher incomes but not so fast as to generate inflation. In the same vein, it might be said that today we have an Oscar-the-Grouch Economy. Good news is discounted. Pessimism is trendy. Growth is considered too feeble to help real people. But there is some genuine good news — and it deserves attention.
It’s most obvious in the labor market. The increase of 162,000 payroll jobs in March was the largest in three years. Layoffs have subsided to pre-recession levels. Job openings have ended their precipitous decline. Surveys suggest more gains. A poll of the corporate chief executives in the Business Roundtable found that 29 percent expect to increase jobs over the next six months, and only 21 percent expect to cut; not since the fall of 2008 have more CEOs expected to hire than fire. In March, the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group for small firms, found no net job cuts — the first time that’s happened since April 2008. …
Abby Thernstrom shares some of her insights on the census, race, and political culture.
The president has officially declared himself to be black—having checked the “black” box on his census form. Barack Obama rejected the option of identifying himself as biracial, which of course he is. His declaration is hardly a surprise. His search for a black identity was the focus of his autobiography, “Dreams of My Father,” and surely that search partly explains his long membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church, which described itself as “Afrocentric”—an “instrument of Black self-determination.” …
…At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the then-Sen. Obama spoke of “one American family.” He said: “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America.” And yet in filling out the census form as he did, the president unequivocally declared himself part of “black America.” In effect, he disowned his white mother and, by extension, his maternal grandparents who acted as surrogate parents for much of his boyhood. Mr. Obama had hardly ever laid eyes on his father, but that absent parent shaped his own sense of identity. …
Christopher Hitchens comments on liberal political satire.
…If you chance to like this sort of thing, then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke. What you will not find, in any of this output, is anything remotely “satirical” about the pulpit of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or any straight-faced, eyebrow-raising (and studio-audience-thigh-slap-triggering) mention of, say, The New York Times’s routine practice of captioning Al Sharpton as “the civil rights activist.” Baudelaire wrote that the devil’s greatest achievement was to have persuaded so many people that he doesn’t exist: liberal platitudinousness must be a bit like that to those who suffer from it without quite acknowledging that there is such a syndrome to begin with. …
…See, there’s your problem. A sense of irony is to be carefully, indeed strictly, distinguished from the possession of a funny bone. Irony is not air-quote finger-marks, as if to say “Just kidding” when in fact one is not quite kidding. (Does anyone ever say “Just kidding” when in fact only kidding?) Bathos is not irony, though Franken and Stewart and Colbert seem unaware of this. Irony usually partakes of some element of the unintended consequence. How might I give an illustration of the laws of unintended consequences? Let us imagine that Senator Franken composed a chapter about government lying and cover-up, which involved the use of the irresistibly hilarious instance of Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s former national security adviser, being caught red-handed as he stuffed his pants with classified papers from the National Archives. In a capital city that witnesses quite frequent alternations of power between the two main parties, what will be the chances that fiasco and corruption occur at the expense of only one of them? Yet meticulous care is taken by the senator to make sure that no such “fair and balanced” laughter is ever evoked, which is quite a sacrifice for a comedian. Consistency of this kind allows no spontaneity, let alone irony. It might even go some way to explaining the howling success of the “Air America” network, the collapsing-scenery rival to the right-wing dictatorship exerted over the rest of the ether. …