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In his blog, Michael Barone, gives a short review of Douglas Feith’s book which he claims is an honest account of the move to war in W’s administration.
I haven’t finished reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, but I feel secure in saying that it is an extraordinarily frank and persuasive book. Feith, who served as under secretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005, has been criticized harshly and, I think, unfairly for somehow lying us into Iraq. In War and Decision he presents his view, fortified by generous quotes from government documents, reports, and memorandums. He should be saluted for getting many materials declassified so that we can have a clearer idea of what was actually going on at the top levels of government. I have long been struck by the contrast between what we can read today about the acts of leaders in World War II and what I gather was available to readers at the time. This book provides our first in-depth look at the inside of the Bush administration’s national security top leadership from one who was there. …
David Brooks on Obama’s fall to earth. (More like Brooks falling out of love. And since he’s stopped drinking the Kool-Aid, maybe he’ll be in Pickings more often.)
Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.
But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.
He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment. …
… When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them. Obama has to address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now. …
Speaking of drinking the Kool-Aid, the media gets manhandled by John Fund as he reviews their castigation of ABC for Gibson’s and Stephanopoulos’s effrontery towards Obama in the last debate.
George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson of ABC News weren’t just criticized for their tough questioning of Barack Obama during last week’s Democratic debate. They were flayed.
Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker called their approach “something akin to a federal crime.” Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, said the ABC duo turned in “shoddy and despicable performances.” Walter Shapiro of Salon magazine said the debate had “all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-head marathon.”
Most of the media mauling consisted of anger that the ABC moderators brought up a series of issues that had surrounded Mr. Obama since the last Democratic debate, a long seven weeks ago. They included his remarks that “bitter” Pennsylvania voters “cling” to religion, guns and “antipathy toward people who aren’t them” and his relationships with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres, an unrepentant former member of the bomb-planting Weather Underground group. Mrs. Clinton also came under some fire over her made-up story of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia.
According to liberal journalists, all these topics are irrelevant. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo said they were “frivolous items . . . that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items.” Mr. Obama agreed, dismissing the items brought up by ABC as “manufactured issues.” …
Camille Paglia wrote on Hillary for the Telegraph, UK.
… Though she would specialise in women’s and children’s issues, Hillary’s public statements have often betrayed an ambivalence about women who chose a non-feminist path. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” she sneered during Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign. Then, defending her husband against the claims of a 12-year affair by Gennifer Flowers, Hillary snapped: “I’m not sittin’ here like some little woman, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” – a sally that boomeranged when Hillary had to make an abject apology. The irony is that Hillary had offended the very group of stoical, put-upon, working-class women who are now proving to be her staunchest supporters.
Whatever her official feminist credo, Hillary’s public career has glaringly been a subset to her husband’s success. Despite her reputation for brilliance, she failed the Washington, DC bar exam. Thus her migration to Little Rock was not simply a selfless drama for love; she was fleeing the capital where she had hoped to make her mark.
In Little Rock, every role that Hillary played was obtained via her husband’s influence – from her position at the Rose Law Firm to her seat on the board of Wal-Mart to her advocacy for public education reform. In a pattern that would continue after Bill became president, Hillary would draw attention by expressing public “concern” for a problem, without ever being able to organise a programme for reform.
Hillary has always been a policy wonk, a functionary attuned to bureaucratic process, but she has never shown executive ability, which makes her quest for the presidency problematic. Hillary’s disastrous botching of national healthcare reform in 1993 (a project to which her husband rashly appointed her) will live in infamy. Obama may also have limited executive experience, but he has no comparable stain on his record.
The argument, therefore, that Hillary’s candidacy marks the zenith of modern feminism is specious. Feminism is not well served by her surrogates’ constant tactic of attributing all opposition to her as a function of entrenched sexism. Well into her second term as a US Senator, Hillary lacks a single example of major legislative achievement. Her career has consisted of fundraising, meet-and-greets and speeches around the world expressing support for women’s rights. …
WaPo editors on the “intellectual poverty” of the Dem opposition to the Colombia free trade pact.
HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the Bush administration’s free-trade agreement with Colombia may not be dead, even though she has postponed a vote on it indefinitely. If the White House doesn’t “jam it down the throat of Congress,” she said, she might negotiate. Ms. Pelosi wants an “economic agenda that gives some sense of security to American workers and businesses . . . that somebody is looking out for them” — though she was vague as to what that entails. Nor did she specify how anyone could “jam” through a measure on which the administration has already briefed Congress many, many times. …
Matthew Continetti in the Weekly Standard provides background for Pelosi’s nixing of the Colombia agreement.
…Why did Pelosi move to let the Colombia deal die? Politics. It’s an election year. The Democrats need union money, and the unions oppose free trade. Democratic presidential candidates go from coast to coast telling audiences that free trade has devastated our economy. This is nonsense. But it wouldn’t look too good if the Democratic Congress belied this irresponsible, hostile-to-foreigners, belligerent–one might say, unilateralist–rhetoric.
There’s another reason, too: President Bush. Congress has now rejected the White House’s two legislative priorities in 2008: a reform in the eavesdropping law that includes immunity for telecommunications firms and the CFTA. Congress’s top priority is to make sure voters perceive the Bush presidency as a failure. They may think they are well on their way to achieving this goal. That in both of these matters the Democrats’ hatred of Bush will redound to the benefit of enemies of the United States seems not to concern them in the least.
Kevin Hassett in Bloomberg News on deadly ethanol effects.
… Food riots have, by my count, now occurred in nine countries around the world. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in a recent report that Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal have also seen food-related violence in recent weeks.
To what extent is ethanol to blame for the high prices? A new study by economist Thomas E. Elam of the consulting firm FarmEcon LLC explored the question.
The study, to be sure, was commissioned by livestock farming interest groups, yet it appears to rely on widely accepted economic models. Elam used his model to simulate what the price of corn today would be if the U.S. hadn’t been subsidizing biofuels. He found that prices are about 50 percent higher than they would have been in a world without subsidies. …