Download Full-Content, Printable Pickings
Once again we see the Dems heading down the primrose path with their friends in the main stream media. The mutual admiration society never alerts Reid, Pelosi, et al to trouble ahead.
The first to break ranks from the MSM was David Broder whose piece was in last Thursday’s Pickings. Now Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic has a piece subtitled; Congressional leaders are illiterate on Iraq.
… What is going on here? There are two possibilities: First, Reid and Pelosi could be purposefully minimizing the stakes in Iraq. Or, second, they don’t know what they’re talking about. My guess is some combination of the two. Political maneuvering certainly contributes to the everyday pollution of Iraq discourse. But a lot of the pollution derives from legislators being functionally illiterate about the war over which Congress now intends to preside. …
Ed Morrissey, the proprietor of Captain’s Quarters has a number of illustrative posts.
First off, “Good News In Anbar.”
Just as the Democrats have raised the white flag on Iraq, the New York Times reports that the surge strategy has started paying off in Anbar. …
Then a post on Broder.
… David Broder took Democrats to task for allowing an incompetent like Harry Reid to rise to party leadership, pointing out several of the Senator’s foolish foibles as examples. This column sent the netroots into a tizzy, with many of them declaring Broder as irrelevant and past his expiration date. The Senate Democratic caucus even sent him a letter, signed by all 50 members, extolling the virtues of Reid and lauding his “straight talk” — apparently all endorsing the notion that we have lost the war in Iraq. …
Next a post on the possibility Sunni’s have killed the al Qaeda leader in Iraq.
The last is “Dude, Where’s My Bill?” Seems Bush wants to veto the appropriation bill, but he hasn’t got it yet. Why’s that? Because Nancy hasn’t read it. You can’t make it up!
Rich Lowry at NR writes about all this.
WSJ thinks there’s a chance we wouldn’t have beat the Japanese if Murtha had been around.
Mr. Murtha has good intentions, but he’s got it exactly wrong. If U.S. forces lack the equipment or training they need, it’s his job, as the chairman of the one subcommittee specifically responsible for originating defense appropriations, to make sure they get it.
If legislators really don’t believe we should continue in Iraq, they need to come clean, shut down the war–and accept the risks, and take responsibility for the consequences. Otherwise, they need to provide U.S. forces the means to carry out their missions.
Marty Peretz reacts to the NY Times Sunday piece on Anbar province.
… The kissing and dancing of the Democrats when they won their date-certain resolution was simply disgusting. Do they really want to have the terrorists win a free and murderous hand in Iraq?
NY Times with an Op Ed claiming congress should support the surge.
Ilya Somin at Volokh notes we might be ignoring the drug war in order to succeed in an Afghan operation.
He then posts on a May Day that would memorialize the millions of victims of communism.
Two years ago Pickings took the month to honor communism’s victims. We repeat one of our first posts. It is about Walter Duranty, Pulitzer Prize winning liar, who was the NY Times man in Moscow in the 1930′s.
Bret Stephens of WSJ has more on Wolfowitz.
A Corner post on same.
Power Line posts on a NY Sun story of a jobless conservative academic.
Mark Moyar doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.
Yet over five years, this conservative military and diplomatic historian applied for more than 150 tenure-track academic jobs, and most declined him a preliminary interview. During a search at University of Texas at El Paso in 2005, Mr. Moyar did not receive an interview for a job in American diplomatic history, but one scholar who did wrote her dissertation on “The American Film Industry and the Spanish-Speaking Market During the Transition to Sound, 1929-1936.” At Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004, Mr. Moyar lost out to a candidate who had given a presentation on “promiscuous bathing” and “attire, hygiene and discourses of civilization in Early American-Japanese Relations.” …
Another environmental legend bites the dust. No longer is a Galapagos tortoise the last of his species. John Tierney who communed with the beast has the details.