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WSJ Editors take an important lesson form Woodward’s new book.
… The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.
Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed — something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.
Pickerhead’s favorite media line on Sarah Palin was from the incredulous Roger Ebert, “And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe?” Speaking of Europe, Bret Stephens reports on Obama’s popularity there.
Told he had the support of “every thinking person” for his second presidential bid in 1956, Democrat Adlai Stevenson famously replied: “That’s not enough, madam. We need a majority!” It’s a line that springs to mind in this presidential season, amid polls and reports that the current Democratic contender from Illinois has the support of just about every non-American interested in our politics.
The latest data come courtesy of the BBC, which commissioned a survey of 23,531 people in 22 countries for their views about the U.S. election. The not-so-astounding result: Barack Obama is the favorite in all 22 countries. The Illinois Democrat’s numbers are especially striking in Britain (where he leads Republican John McCain by a 59% to 9% margin, with the rest not expressing a preference) and Canada (66% to 14%). They also hold up in China (35% to 15%), Egypt (26% to 13%), Brazil (51% to 8%) and, of course, France (69% to 6%). Broad majorities in most countries also believe an Obama administration would do more than a McCain one to heal America’s relations with the wider world.
But here’s a question: Should we — that is, voting-age Americans — care? …
… More recently, the British columnist Jonathan Freedland has written in the Guardian that “if Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger.” … Works for Pickerhead
Free speech is important because it makes it easier to spot the idiots. Canada has one. David Warren has the story.
… Typical “conservatives,” my outraged correspondents were, to a man (and woman), careful to say they don’t want Ms. Mallick censored or prosecuted for writing such things, that she has “a right” to say what she pleases. They only contest her right to be paid by the Canadian taxpayer, through her gig at the CBC. Now, if I were the Generalissimo of Canada, the CBC would be the first billion dollars I’d save, but until that happy hour arrives, I only wish they’d publish Ms. Mallick’s scribblings more prominently.
Several reasons for this. The first, of course, is that by doing so, they will bring the day nearer when the CBC will be, ahem, “privatized.”
But my second reason is more generous. I think Ms. Mallick expresses openly what many, quite possibly most, of her MSM colleagues are actually thinking, and in my experience, actually saying in social gatherings and while working away from the microphones — though seldom with such ebullience. Ms. Mallick is rare in being so refreshingly candid, on the record.
Where such prejudices as hers exist, it is an advantage to everyone to have them expressed openly, discussed openly, demolished openly. Far worse is the poison in people who think like Ms. Mallick, but contain themselves within the shallow literary conventions of “journalistic objectivity.” …
Charles on Charles; Krauthammer on Gibson, that is.
… There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.
He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”
She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”
Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”
Wrong.
I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. …
Dick Morris on the reasons Sarah scares the Dems.
… Why do Democrats feel so threatened? They’ve even stopped attacking McCain and President Bush to launch a vicious and sexist barrage at her that would normally make a feminist angry and a Democrat blush.
Basically, it’s this: John McCain only endangers Democratic chances of victory this November, but Sarah Palin is an existential threat to the Democratic Party.
She threatens a core element of the party’s base – women
When an African-American like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or Condi Rice rises to prominence as a Republican, he or she endangers the Democratic coalition. So would a Republican labor leader.
And so, above all, does the woman Republican running for vice president.
Democrats can’t stomach seeing the feminist movement’s impetus for greater female political participation and empowerment “hijacked” by a pro-life woman who espouses traditional values. They must obliterate her, lest her popularity eat away at their party’s core. …
Peter Wehner on the sudden interest of the press in accuracy in the campaign.
… My own view is that the debate about “lipstick on a pig” was silly and will soon be forgotten. Yet it’s not as if it broke any barriers in that regard. To take just one arguably more serious example: Recall that in February, Barack Obama said, “We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years.”
It’s a charge Obama repeated, even though he knew it was untrue. (The Annenberg Political Fact Check said, “It’s a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage ‘endless war’ based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea.”) The fact that the accusation was false didn’t seem to matter; one Obama aide told the Politico, “It’s seldom you get such a clear shot.” But for some reason, the press didn’t go into a tizzy on this matter. Puzzling. …
Melanie Phillips blogs on the “Stasi” tactics of Obama’s fans.
… Apparently Camp Obama has parachuted dozens of operatives into Alaska to find the skeletons in the Palin closet that it just knows must exist. Unable to process the fact that the left might not come into its rightful inheritance of power, which as we all know is the natural order of the universe, it is behaving like an American Stasi.
And the more it behaves in this grotesque manner, the more counter-productive it all is. Palin is a kind of barium meal for the US body politic: as she is ingested deeper into the system, the nastiness and sheer malevolence of the Democratic party and its bullying cheerleaders in the media are being sickeningly illuminated all around her. As a result, the media and the Democrats are merely doing untold damage to themselves, particularly since the blogosphere is shredding the smears being hurled at Palin as fast as they are being produced. …
Another view of the media firestorm from Tod Lindberg of the Weekly Standard.
… Now, you might think it hypocritical to criticize the inexperience of a vice presidential nominee who has similar experience to your presidential nominee, but that’s just a failure of the imagination. Indeed, hypocrisy was the strange charge Democrats decided to make against McCain and Palin: Having run against Obama all summer for his lack of experience and accomplishment, how dare John McCain pick as his running mate someone with (ahem) experience comparable to that of the Democratic candidate for president McCain had been criticizing?
Well, maybe because it is not a sign of the strength of a candidate at the top of a ticket to need the experience of Joe Biden (or Dick Cheney) in order to allay concerns that he’s not quite up to some aspects of the job. And, contrariwise, it is a sign of strength at the top when the nominee can look to the future and make a priority of party-building. Does anybody think that if Obama loses, he will have left his party in a stronger position by advancing the prospects of Joe Biden? Fortunately for Democrats, at least they’ve got Hillary in the wings.
But these weren’t the only hypocrisies in the air. Remember reading the discussions of Vice President Al Gore’s parenting skills in all the papers the day after his teenage son got busted for dope at high school? No? That would be because Gore called around to all the papers (including the Washington Times, where I was editorial page editor at the time) and asked us not to publish it, kids being kids and being owed some privacy. The newspapers didn’t. That was then: Given a preposterous Internet rumor that Sarah Palin was never pregnant with her four-month-old baby but faked it to cover up for her daughter, Bristol was fair game. This was a judgment shared among Democrats and, coincidentally, the media (the same ones who were also all over the John Edwards love-child story, remember?). …
NY Post has the story of photographer who blindsided McCain for creepy shots.
Controversial celebrity photographer Jill Greenberg, a self-professed “hard-core Dem,” deliberately took a series of unflattering shots of Republican nominee John McCain for the current cover of The Atlantic – and then bragged about it on a blog.
Greenberg, known for her heavily retouched pics of apes and babies, boasted to Photo District News that she submitted photos of the Arizona senator to the mag while barely airbrushing them.
“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she boasted. …
On one level this Economist story on traffic research would seem to say it’s hopeless. But it also shows the sophistication of the effort. In itself, that shows promise.