Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
Gerard Baker of the London Times says, “Cheer up. We’re winning this War on Terror.”
“My centre is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack!”
If only our political leaders and opinion-formers displayed even a hint of the defiant resilience that carried Marshal Foch to victory at the Battle of the Marne. But these days timorous defeatism is on the march. In Britain setbacks in the Afghan war are greeted as harbingers of inevitable defeat. In America, large swaths of the political class continues to insist Iraq is a lost cause. The consensus in much of the West is that the War on Terror is unwinnable.
And yet the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat. The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier’s dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let’s retreat!”
Since it is remarkable how pervasive this pessimism is, it’s worth recapping what has been achieved in the past few years. …
Fouad Ajami on establishing the protocol for a continued American presence in Iraq.
From the time America struck into Iraq in 2003, Iraqis have exhibited this great, persistent contradiction: the need for the foreign power’s help and protection and an overweening pride that has made them bristle at their dependence. The debate now taking place about a “status of forces” agreement and a security arrangement with the United States puts this Iraqi ambivalence into sharp focus. More than 80 countries have such arrangements with the United States, but Iraq has never been a “normal” country. It has a history of brittle nationalism, and such an accord will have to be reached against the background of the country’s factionalism and of its place in its neighborhood.
As it stands, the American occupation now rests on a United Nations mandate under Chapter 7 of its charter that sanctions Iraq as a threat to peace and abridges its sovereignty. That mandate expires by the end of the year, and the Bush administration is keen to give the American presence the status of a bilateral security arrangement. In the American scheme, this would be done by the end of July, but the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has its own rhythm and challenges.
This is no small development, the extension of the Pax Americana to Baghdad. …
David Warren reports on some possibilities of sanity in the Canadian human rights commissions.
… The people are still sleeping, but some “blowback” has finally begun to occur. Given its very eccentric inquisitorial practices, which have been documented and publicized on the Internet, the CHRC is now under an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation, and there is a Parliamentary investigation pending. (As a public relations exercise, the CHRC has also hand-picked its own “independent” investigator to do what we can only assume will be a defensive whitewash, as usual at taxpayer expense.) It is against this background the CHRC decided that the better part of valour is discretion, and that it truly did not need to be prosecuting such high-profile targets as the bestselling author Mark Steyn and the mainstream newsweekly Maclean’s, at the present time. The CHRC can retrench, and return to its bread-and-butter business of destroying little people who command no publicity — biding their time until circumstances are propitious to “extend their mandate” again.
Vigilance is the price of liberty, and it is crucially important that we not take the heat off Canada’s HRCs when they retreat. Canadians need to know the whole truth about what these vile “human rights” investigators have been doing, and their past victims should be exonerated.
Given what has already occurred, it is not enough simply to fire the people responsible for specific abuses. The Human Rights Code must be rewritten to eliminate future challenges to free speech and press, and the HRCs themselves taken down. The very notion that “your freedom ends when I begin to feel offended” must be shown for what it is: totalitarian flotsam in the fetid swamp of politically correct thought.
The American version of human rights commissions might be called the fairness doctrine. David Harsanyi with details.
Nearly as loathsome as government trying to dictate what we can’t say is government trying to dictate what we have to say.
Some of you, apparently, are too stupid to be free. Worse, your obtuse opinions are reinforced three hours daily by unsanctioned, fanatical talk-radio troglodytes.
This, I’m afraid, is a sin against fairness. Now, if only you had some more information. Because God knows, you’re being deprived of media choices now. So it’s time for re-education, or so sayeth Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. …
… As far as practical politics go, Pelosi may not realize how offensive the Fairness Doctrine is to millions of Americans. Barack Obama has said he would not support it. (Though someone should ask him if he would veto a bill.)
Perhaps Obama understands that government abuse is historically a bipartisan pastime. Setting this precedent now may mean the tables will be turned soon enough.
As for me, I’d rather live in a free country than a fair one. Even if that world includes talk show hosts and an ineffective Madam Speaker with an ugly totalitarian impulse.
John Fund says, “McCain isn’t doomed.”
… Republicans shouldn’t panic, but they should be worried. The McCain campaign reflects the candidate’s impulsive nature and hasn’t articulated a consistent reform agenda. President Bush’s job rating has collapsed. One recent survey found only 53% of Republicans now approve of his performance. Sen. Obama will have so much money to spend he can microtarget millions of his supporters early and deliver absentee ballots – which are prone to abuse – to them.
This election reminds some of the 1980 race, when voters were clearly looking for a reason to vote the incumbent party out of the White House. Even so, Jimmy Carter kept even with Ronald Reagan well into October by painting him as risky and out of the mainstream. Then, in the home stretch, Reagan finally convinced voters he was sensible and trustworthy, and wound up winning by double digits.
Barack Obama is roughly in the same position as Reagan was back then. He is untested in foreign policy. His record in office clearly leans left, with the nonpartisan National Journal rating him the most liberal U.S. senator. When asked this month by ABC News when he had ever broken with liberal orthodoxy and taken risks with his base – as Bill Clinton did on trade, culture and welfare – Mr. Obama had little to say. At a meeting of Obama voters I attended this week, some bemoaned the fact that many of their friends backed him solely because of his cool “name brand” and vague message of change. …
The “ever malleable” Obama by Charles Krauthammer.
… The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. “He does what politicians do,” explained Jeremiah Wright.
When it’s time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.
Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia — only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama’s fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.
Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he’s finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.
Which brought a Peter Wehner Contentions post.
Charles Krauthammer has a typically insightful column today on “the ever-malleable Mr. Obama.” The earth’s landscape is now littered with former Obama commitments, and his embrace of the conservative court’s views on the child rape and second amendment cases this week is head-snapping. Obama sounds like the president of the Federalist Society. …
Howard Kurtz notes both Obama’s flip-flop on gun control and the media’s lack of interest.
… Here’s how the Illinois senator handled the issue with the Chicago Tribune just last November:
“The campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said that he ‘ . . . believes that we can recognize and respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners and the right of local communities to enact common sense laws to combat violence and save lives. Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.’ “
Kind of a flat statement.
And here’s what ABC reported yesterday: ” ‘That statement was obviously an inartful attempt to explain the Senator’s consistent position,’ Obama spokesman Bill Burton tells ABC News.”
Inartful indeed.
But even though the earlier Obama quote and the “inartful” comment have been bouncing around the Net for 24 hours, I’m not seeing any reference to them in the morning papers. Most do what the New York Times did: “Mr. Obama, who like Mr. McCain has been on record as supporting the individual-rights view, said the ruling would ‘provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.’ “
Supporting the individual-rights view? Not in November.
Even the Tribune–the very paper that the Obama camp told he supported the gun ban–makes no reference to the November interview. Instead: “Democrat Barack Obama offered a guarded response Thursday to the Supreme Court ruling striking down the District of Columbia’s prohibition on handguns and sidestepped providing a view on the 32-year-old local gun ban. Republican rival John McCain’s campaign accused him of an ‘incredible flip-flop’ on gun control.”
So McCain accuses Obama of a flip-flop, and the Trib can’t check the clips to tell readers whether there’s some basis in fact for the charge? …
Karl Rove on the arrogant candidate.
Many candidates have measured the Oval Office drapes prematurely. But Barack Obama is the first to redesign the presidential seal before the election.
His seal featured an eagle emblazoned with his logo, and included a Latin version of his campaign slogan. This was an attempt by Sen. Obama to make himself appear more presidential. But most people saw in the seal something else – chutzpah – and he’s stopped using it. Such arrogance – even self-centeredness – have featured often in the Obama campaign.
Consider his treatment of Jeremiah Wright. After Rev. Wright repeated his anti-American slurs at the National Press Club, Mr. Obama said their relationship was forever changed – but not because of what he’d said about America. Instead, Mr. Obama complained, “I don’t think he showed much concern for me.”
Translation: Rev. Wright is an impediment to my ambitions. So, as it turns out, are some of Mr. Obama’s previous pledges. ..
Rich Lowry reviews a new book that suggests how the GOP can become a “Grand New Party.”
White working-class voters typically aren’t in vogue, with the political chatter tending to revolve around “soccer moms,” the “youth vote” or other boutique demographic groups of the moment. But the late charge of Hillary Clinton’s doomed presidential campaign made white working-class voters surprisingly fashionable.
They’ll stay that way if the important new book “Grand New Party,” by two young writers for The Atlantic, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, has the impact on the political debate that it should. In an incisive analysis of the past 30 years of our politics, Douthat and Salam puncture self-comforting delusions of both the right and the left, and persuasively advocate a reorientation of the GOP to address working-class concerns.
They define working-class voters — “Sam’s Club” voters, in the phrase they borrow from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — as that half of the electorate that lacks a college education. …
Under the title of “You Can’t Make it Up,” Instapundit reports the federal government is halting solar projects because of environmental fears.