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Bureaucrats at the Dept. of State continue to try to frustrate the Bush aims in Iraq. NY Post OpEd shows how they do this stiffing Iraqi’s who have helped our forces.
AS a Marine, I was taught never to leave a comrade-in-arms behind on the battlefield. But that’s exactly what the State Department is doing to men and women who’ve sacrificed everything to help our troops – our Iraqi interpreters.
When I last left Iraq 12 months ago, I promised to save two “terps” marked for assassination. Last month, I received a desperate e-mail from one of them: “Sir my situatione is so bad naw please save my life. Please help me sir.”
A year after making my promise, I’m deeply ashamed that I haven’t completed the mission. And I’m not alone: To help “their” terps, Marines and soldiers across the country are battling a bureaucracy that is at times more maddening than the Iraqi insurgency.
Shunning those who risk death to help us deliver freedom is un-American. …
Jeff Greenfield says the Dem race is easy to understand. Bugs Bunny always wins.
How did we reach the point at which Sen. Clinton, the clear Democratic front-runner six months ago, needs clear wins in Texas and Ohio to mute the calls for her to end her campaign?
There’s no unified field theory that answers this question: You can give more or less weight to Obama’s political magnetism, the tactical and strategic miscalculations of the Clinton campaign, the delegate-allocation rules that weakened the punch of Clinton’s big-state wins, the crucial difficulty of a former first lady who embodies Restoration competing in an election in which change is the watchword. And here’s another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. …
Byron York reviews Obama’s NAFTAGate problems.
For the last several months, the tone of the Democratic presidential debate on the issue of trade has worried government officials in Canada and Mexico. Would a President Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton actually pull the U.S. out of the North American Free Trade Agreement? It’s a nightmare scenario in Ottawa and Mexico City — not to mention Washington — and Canadian and Mexican officials have tried as best they can to gauge just how sincere the criticisms of NAFTA coming from Obama and Clinton really are.
Those criticisms have been particularly intense in the run-up to today’s primary in economically struggling Ohio. At last week’s debate in Cleveland, Obama and Clinton dueled to see who could be more anti-NAFTA; Obama won, at least rhetorically, by promising to “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage†to renegotiate NAFTA on his own terms.
Did he mean it? Or was he just telling steelworkers in Ohio what they wanted to hear? That is the question behind the first real scandal of the Obama campaign. And while the campaign has made several statements on the issue, there are growing indications that officials there are not telling the whole story. …
Dana Milbank nicely captures the mood just before Tuesday’s voting.
It took many months and the mockery of “Saturday Night Live” to make it happen, but the lumbering beast that is the press corps finally roused itself from its slumber Monday and greeted Barack Obama with a menacing growl.
The day before primaries in Ohio and Texas that could effectively seal the Democratic presidential nomination for him, a smiling Obama strode out to a news conference at a veterans facility here. But the grin was quickly replaced by the surprised look of a man bitten by his own dog.
Reporters from the Associated Press and Reuters went after him for his false denial that a campaign aide had held a secret meeting with Canadian officials over Obama’s trade policy. A trio of Chicago reporters pummeled him with questions about the corruption trial this week of a friend and supporter. The New York Post piled on with a question about him losing the Jewish vote.
Obama responded with the classic phrases of a politician in trouble. “That was the information that I had at the time. . . . Those charges are completely unrelated to me. . . . I have said that that was a mistake. . . . The fact pattern remains unchanged.”
When those failed, Obama tried another approach. “We’re running late,” the candidate said, and then he disappeared behind a curtain. …
More of the mood of the day, with Corner posts from some of our favorites. Jonah Goldberg felt the need to explain his description of Mark Steyn as a “weird cat.”
… As for me calling Steyn a “weird cat” I hope Mark understands I meant it in the best possible way. But a guy with an accent that is part James Bond villain, part Thurston Howell III and Part William F. Buckley, who dresses like Beau Brummel except when he’s in his New Hampshire lair — where he dresses like one of the Darryls from the Newhart show — who seems like an immortal from the Highlander series in that he’s been everywhere and met everyone over the last three centuries and yet always looks like he’s 34, and who seems to know everything about everything when he’s writing for every English language publication in Christendom is, in my book, something of a weird cat. Would that I could be remotely as weird as he.
Power Line posts on yesterday’s vote.
The Captain, now at Hot Air posts on the results.
… Her triumph last night had little to do with numbers and everything to do with appearances, however. Obama has begun looking invincible, but Hillary managed to stop him, even after she slid out of the lead in Texas. Thanks to the twin gifts of the Rezko trial and the NAFTA dance, Obama not only started facing a few tough questions from the media, he blew up when they asked them of him. Hillary went negative to keep the pressure on him, and Obama displayed a glass jaw.
That will have the superdelegates — the party establishment — wondering whether Obama is ready for prime time. And now that question will occur not in the context of an overwhelming, unstoppable movement, but in the context of Hillary victories that indicate the party wants this race to continue. Hillary’s team will sell this as a vote of non-confidence; Texas and Ohio had the opportunity to climb on the Obama bandwagon and rejected it. …
John Stossel says of course we have influence peddling.
… “Good government” types rightly abhor this influence-peddling, but they propose pointless reforms like bans on lobbyist-sponsored gifts, junkets and rides on corporate jets. They also back a vicious assault on free speech: campaign-finance restrictions designed to reduce the influence of lobbyists in political campaigns. Despite all these “reforms,” influence-peddling goes on.
For good reason. None of the reforms gets near root of the problem.
The root is government power. When government is free to meddle in every corner of our lives and regulate the economy through taxes, regulation and subsidies, then “special interests” have every incentive to work on the politicians to preserve their turf or gain an advantage.
A tax, regulation or subsidy can make the difference between an industry’s success and failure. If the government were not giving preferential tax treatment to ethanol, the corn farmers and ethanol processors would have to find something else to do because their product can’t compete against regular gasoline on a level playing field.
In a real free market, a company succeeds only by making things consumers want to buy and keeping costs low enough that the market price yields a profit. Sadly, in our mixed economy, success can be achieved another way: by lobbying the government for advantages over one’s competitors. The prospect of favorable government intervention creates incentives for producers and their lobbyists to strive to satisfy legislators and bureaucrats instead of consumers. The resulting competition for privileges sets the stage for the improper relationships that reformers fret about. …
NY Sun editors note more Pinch Sulzberger hypocrisy