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Milton Friedman passed away one year ago tomorrow. You will remember why he is missed if you click on his name and hear him answer a question about greed from Phil Donahue.
Victor Davis Hanson notes the lack of news out of Iraq.
There’s an old expression about war: “Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan.” But in the case of Iraq, it seems the other way around. We’ve blamed many for the ordeal of the last four years, but it is the American victory in Anbar province that now seems without parents.
Over the last few months, the U.S. military forced Sunni insurgents in Anbar to quit fighting. This enemy, in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, had been responsible for most American casualties in the war and was the main cause of unrest in Iraq. Even more unexpectedly, some of the defeated tribes then joined in an alliance of convenience with their American victors to chase al-Qaida from Iraq’s major cities.
As President Bush recently told U.S. troops about Anbar province: “It was once written off as lost. It is now one of the safest places in Iraq.”
But that dramatic turnabout in Iraq is rarely reported. We know as much about O.J.’s escapades in Vegas as we do about the Anbar awakening or the flight of al-Qaida from Baghdad. …
Max Boot says send the State Department to war.
THE State Department has announced that it will force 50 foreign service officers to go to Iraq, whether they want to or not. This is the biggest use of “directed assignments†since the Vietnam War, and it represents a long-overdue response to complaints that diplomats aren’t pulling their weight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient the department and the government as a whole for the global war on Islamic terrorism. Yes, this is a war, but it’s a very different war from conventional conflicts like World War II or the Civil War. It is, in essence, a global counterinsurgency, and few counterinsurgencies have ever been won by force alone. …
It’s Hillary’s bad luck her troubles coincided with Camille Paglia’s monthly Salon.com piece.
… Hillary’s stonewalling evasions and mercurial, soulless self-positionings have been going on since her first run for the U.S. Senate from New York, a state she had never lived in and knew virtually nothing about. The liberal Northeastern media were criminally complicit in enabling her queenlike, content-free “listening tour,” where she took no hard questions and where her staff and security people (including her government-supplied Secret Service detail) staged events stocked with vetted sympathizers, and where they ensured that no protesters would ever come within camera range.
That compulsive micromanagement, ultimately emanating from Hillary herself, has come back to haunt her in her dismaying inability to field complex unscripted questions in a public forum. The presidential sweepstakes are too harsh an arena for tenderfoot novices. Hillary’s much-vaunted “experience” has evidently not extended to the dynamic give-and-take of authentic debate. The mild challenges she has faced would be pitiful indeed by British standards, which favor a caustic style of witty put-downs that draw applause and gales of laughter in the House of Commons. Women had better toughen up if they aspire to be commander in chief. …
Which brings us to two Hillary posts from the Captain.
For a candidate whom everyone expected to march confidently to her party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton has begun stumbling and cannot seem to right herself. First came a disaster of an answer at the last presidential debate, and the breathtaking attack on Tim Russert for having the temerity to question her about an immigration issue in her home state. Next came the revelations of question planting at campaign events. Now Drudge reports that the Clinton campaign warned Wolf Blitzer not to get tough in this week’s debate, or else:
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer has been warned not to focus Thursday’s Dem debate on Hillary. ‘This campaign is about issues, not on who we can bring down and destroy,’ top Clinton insider explains. ‘Blitzer should not go down to the levels of character attack and pull ‘a Russert.” Blitzer is set to moderate debate from Vegas, with questions also being posed by Suzanne Malveaux…
The Clinton team has forgotten the First Rule of Holes: stop digging. No one except the most ardent of the netroots bought the explanation that Tim Russert was a right-wing plant at MS-NBC. If the Clintons expect that anyone will believe them when they hang the same jacket on Blitzer, they’re not just mistaken, they’re delusional.
Today, CNN also notes that the explanation given for the Grinnell University incident doesn’t quite wash, either: …
John Podoretz explores the reasons the Clinton folks are unhappy with Tim Russert.
… There is a history here. Tim Russert moderated the only debate in 2000 between Senate candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival, Rick Lazio. While most remember that debate because Lazio crossed the stage to hand a piece of paper to Mrs. Clinton and was upbraided, preposterously but effectively, for somehow “violating her personal space,†Hillary and her people were enraged at Russert for what they took to be an extraordinarily hostile approach to her. …
Neal Boortz has a couple of shots.
Mickey Kaus says John Edwards’ tough talk is a “pathetic bluff.”
But Mark Steyn likes it.
Debra Saunders on how Diane Feinstein is being punished by the netroots for her rare votes supporting Bush nominees.
The new Democratic-led Congress has a 16 percent approval rating — no better than the rating of the Republican-led Congress a year ago — no doubt because voters see members clamoring to score points in the never-ending game of partisan gotcha, instead of working to do what is best for the country. When a politician does try to do what is right, there is too often more downside than upside.
Consider the cheap shots that have come the way of Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Chuck Schumer of New York because they voted to confirm the nomination of now-Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey last week. New York Times columnist Frank Rich compared the Feinstein and Schumer vote to Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf’s arrests of judges, lawyers and human-rights activists. A group of Democrats from the left wing of the party is trying to get the California Democratic Party’s executive board to censure Feinstein for the Mukasey vote, as well as her vote to confirm federal judge Leslie Southwick in October. …
Carpe Diem posts on income inequality and mobility.
… almost everything we hear in the media about increasing income inequality, the disappearing middle class, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and the lack of income mobility is either flawed, deficient, incorrect, incomplete or wrong. …
New York Observer on the return of Imus.
“I think I’ve had some history of defending friends of mine that have been in uncomfortable circumstances,†said James Carville. “I defend the speaker, not the speech. If there’s no redemption, what are we here for?â€
Mr. Carville, speaking by phone to The Observer on Monday, was referring to his former boss, President Clinton, but also to another public figure undone by his own indiscipline: Don Imus, the irreverent, sensitive, occasionally boorish, and strangely compelling radio talker who in April was fired from CBS for referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as–remember 2007?–“nappy-headed ho’s.â€
Redemption! Since the dark days of April, Mr. Imus, 67–a denizen of Central Park West, and one of the paradigmatic radio heroes of the 90’s–has accomplished the beginnings of a media resurrection. Last month, he signed a 5-year deal with Citadel Broadcasting, through which he’ll return to the radio on December 3rd, as the host of a morning drive time show on the company’s WABC, the top-ranked AM radio station in New York City. The agreement, which will end Mr. Imus’ six-month sabbatical, is reportedly worth between $5 and 8 million annually—a pay-cut from Mr. Imus’ $10 million annual salary at CBS.
Still, his freedom will be curtailed: CBS kept him on only a five-second tape delay, which it rarely used, according to Martin Garbus, Mr. Imus’ lawyer. But a wary WABC told The Observer they’ll have him on a 21-second delay, giving them ample time to bleep out anything…troublesome. It may not be pure democracy, but at least he hasn’t abandoned the wide-open spaces of AM radio for the paywall of XM. …