During the Bush-Gore recount melodrama, two things were striking 1) a lot of voters were too dumb to vote properly, which suggests their political views were equally dumb and 2) Democrats have no respect for rules when they work against them.

The Florida Supreme Court decision, which twisted Florida law into a pretzel to achieve the outcome the Democrats wanted, was overturned by the Supreme Court 7-2, ending Gore’s protracted tantrum. And we haven’t heard the end of the whining yet.

Now we watch a similar melodrama within the Democrat party as partisans of Hillary and Obama fight over the votes cast — against party rules — in Michigan and Florida. We’re hearing echoes of “let every vote count” all over again.

There was a tornado watch outside the Democratic National Committee’s Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting at the Marriot Wardman Park Hotel Saturday afternoon. And there was a brewing storm inside the hotel as well.

A group of public officials — allies of both Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, and Barack Obama — walked out of the hearing room to discuss their willingness to come together on a plan to seat all their delegates, each voting at half-delegate status, but representatives of the Clinton campaign from outside Florida interrupted their press conference to dispute the idea that the Clinton campaign agreed with the plan.

The “Florida unity” group, which included Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, a Clinton supporter, Rep. Bob Wexler, D-Florida, am Obama supporter, and Florida Democratic National Committee member Jon Ausman of Tallahassee, who filed a challenge to the DNC’s decision to not recognize any of Florida’s delegates.

They seemed to come around the idea that for now the DNC would agree to seat Florida’s entire 211-member delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August, though all the delegates — pledged and superdelegates — would have their vote count as half a delegate. The move would net Clinton 19 pledged delegates. Participants seemed to agree that the door was open to the eventual Democratic nominee seating them at full strength if he or she so chose.

Clinton campaign surrogate Lanny Davis stood outside the circle and interrupted, raising his voice in protest that the Clinton campaign had agreed to anything less than a 100% seating of the delegates at 100% of their strength.

This video was meant to tweak Hillary, but as far as I’m concerned, it applies to the whole Dem Cong.

A slightly strange piece in the UK Telegraph notes:

The United States played an important and positive global role in the 20th century, and continues to do so in this century.

Its willingness to dig into its pockets in the fight against terrorism, and to support liberal democracy in the Middle East, are important when too often other powers prefer to close their eyes.

America’s actions undoubtedly make the world a more peaceful and stable place. Its support for economic globalisation promotes global prosperity and encourages international co-operation.

Why, thank you…but wait!

And yet, as the results of a poll by Telegraph.co.uk show, its standing in Europe is low. In Britain, France, Germany and Russia, more people thought that the United States was a force for evil than for good.

So, what shall we do besides shoulder the burdens of freedom and help enrich the lives of people the world over?

…there will be a need to project a more positive light of the United States in Europe, but without ditching America’s vital global role.

Or maybe Europeans can get their heads out of their ass.

UPDATE: Ghost of a Flea writes:

I’m always slightly amused by these inane popularity polls. Anyone who knows just a bit of the history of this country knows that our forefathers thought very little of Europeans. Europeans were considered as corrupt and effeminate (little has changed in 232 years). America was by design the “anti-Europe.” The fact that Europeans hate us today means we are doing something right. John Adams must be smiling in heaven.

by Burt Prelutsky 

Ivy certainly looks nice, but you wouldn’t want to stroll through it. Here in Southern California, it’s common knowledge that most of our rodents hang out in the stuff. If bubonic plague ever breaks out in L.A., the source will be found lurking in the shrubbery.

What has me dwelling on ivy is my recent realization that much of what I don’t like about American politics — namely, American politicians — can be traced back to Ivy League schools. It can’t just be a coincidence that four or five universities keep spitting out presidential candidates and their spouses with the sort of regularity that Notre Dame used to turn out All American football players.

What’s more, it’s not a sudden development and it’s not limited to just one party. William Howard Taft, for crying out loud, went to Yale. Theodore Roosevelt went to Harvard, and so did his fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson graduated from Princeton.

George Herbert Walker Bush went to Yale. His son, not willing to leave bad enough alone, went to both Yale and Harvard. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, all went to Yale. Al Gore and Michael Dukakis went to Harvard. Ted Kennedy went to Harvard. Twice. The first time, they booted him out for cheating on a Spanish exam.

Barack Obama went to Columbia and his wife, Michelle, went to Princeton. With such a terrible football team it’s really no wonder she was never proud to be an American.

Considering the politicians the schools have let loose on us, perhaps they should rename it the Poison Ivy League.

It’s enough to make me wonder if the reason I liked Harry Truman was because he’s the only president since 1896 who didn’t have a college degree. Ronald Reagan had one, but it was from Eureka College, which probably didn’t even have ivy on its walls.

It is worth noting that, although Harvard has been around since 1636, Yale since 1701 and Princeton since 1746, none of them can claim Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln, as an alumnus. George Washington was home-schooled. Thomas Jefferson attended William and Mary and graduated in two years. Abraham Lincoln was also home-schooled, but he was both teacher and student, a true autodidact who read the Bible, Shakespeare and his law books, by candlelight. 

Dwight Eisenhower attended West Point and John McCain graduated from the Naval Academy. So it’s no surprise that Ike was able to lead the fight against Nazi barbarians and that McCain was able to stand up to North Vietnamese sadism for five long years. Which, come to think of it, is longer than Barack Obama has spent garnering leadership experience listening to the likes of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd spewing forth on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The only thing that prevents me from giving whole-hearted endorsement to a military education is that one of our former presidents also graduated from the Naval Academy. And if ever there was a man who would have been equally at home at an Ivy League school or a patch of rodent-infested ivy, it was that Nobel Prize-winning friend of Arab terrorists everywhere, Jimmy Carter.

You be the photographer and direct that, uh, sexy model.

Just another normal night (last Friday) at the church where Obama sends his daughters.

But this time they featue a white, hyperventilating priest (Pfleger) telling the black congregants how much they’re screwed.

Michelle Malkin has a page with all of Obama’s “poison preachers” in one convenient place, brutha.

Best of the Web notes the financial connections between Obama and the black-talkin’ white priest:

Pfleger is white. Many Illinois taxpayers are black. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the latter have been forced to subsidize the former, through the good offices of one state Sen. Barack Obama:

Mr. Obama more eagerly met the demands for spending earmarks for churches and community groups in his district, said State Senator Donne E. Trotter, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I know this firsthand, because the community groups in his district stopped coming to me,” Mr. Trotter said.

Typical of Mr. Obama’s earmarks was a $100,000 grant for a youth center at a Catholic church run by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a controversial priest who was one of the few South Side clergymen to back Mr. Obama against [Rep. Bobby] Rush.

Father Pfleger has long worked with South Side political leaders to reduce crime and improve the community. But he has drawn fire from some quarters for defending the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and inviting him to speak at his church. Father Pfleger, who did not return calls for comment, is one of the religious leaders whose “faith testimonials” Mr. Obama has posted on his presidential campaign Web site.

Nothing demonstrates the bias of Big Baloney like the treatment of two books by two former members of the Bush administration.

Former press secretary Scott McClellan’s dirt dishing book is treated to a front page review in today’s LA Times. Douglas Feith, who wielded greater influence on policy as Undersecretary of Defense, wrote a heavily-sourced book that every historian of this period will own.

Feith’s book, as we’ve noted, has not been reviewed by any of Big Baloney’s big names — not the NYT, WaPo or LAT. That they’re ignoring a book by a man they demonized as a warmongering neocon speaks volumes.

But back to McClellan, one of his beefs was:

“In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage,” McClellan writes.

Oh, do tell. Why would that be? And how well did that work out?

When the New York Times and Washington Post decide that you’re the enemy, you have a second flank to defend, 24/7. (And when you’re golden, like Obama, you can rest easy.)

One anecdote from Feith’s book should give everyone pause, liberals and conservatives alike, because it demonstrates the sick interface between government and media that disserves us all.

Shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld and others inside the Pentagon decided that our war on Islamist fascism should be fought both militarily and ideologically. The latter should have been the province of the State Department, but, Feith writes, “neither [Colin] Powell or [Richard] Armitage saw the philosophical dimension of the war as particularly important.”

So with Rumsfeld’s blessing, Feith created the Office of Strategic Influence to fight jihadist ideology at the source. He assembled a staff and recruited Air Force General Simon Worden to run it. One of his original ideas was to create cheap, wireless-connected laptops and information kiosks that could be distributed in remote Pakistan where Madrassas were twisting young minds.

But OSI stepped on toes, both at State and inside the Pentagon, particularly with Victoria “Torie” Clark, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, who thought her department had authority over all “outreach” programs.

Just as OSI was getting going, on February 19, 2002, the New York Times ran a front page story citing unnamed “military officials” claiming that the…

“Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign news media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries.”

The story said others “inside the Pentagon” were worried that this could undermine credibility of their efforts. The NYT went on to suggest…

“General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from ‘black’ campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to ‘white’ public affairs that rely on truthful releases.”

The disinformation charge was untrue, but it spread quickly among a news media that distrusted and despised President Bush. Chris Matthews called OSI a plan “worthy of Joseph Goebbels.”

Such stories were readily retold and embellished by a hostile world media, always keen to promote anti-Americanism. Bush was traveling overseas and was badgered by questions about OSI.

OSI died in its cradle, on February 26, 2002. The State Department never picked up the initiative and it went undone, to the detriment of everyone in the western world. Feith writes of…

…the irony of an office formed to plan information operations had been blown away by a disinformation operation. Concentrating on foreign enemies, OSI hadn’t protected its back from other Pentagon officials. 

And from the New York Times.

The new movie Stuck” is about a woman who hits a man with her car. He becomes embedded in her windshield; instead of seeking medical help, she drives him home to die in her garage.

Bob Strauss, LA Daily News film critic, in his review writes:

…you can view the whole thing as a metaphorical comment on what a merciless economy drives otherwise good folks to do.

Lawd, have mercy!

by J.C. Phillips 

Every once in a while, politicians emerge from beneath the bright lights and focus groups to stand naked as it were before the cold stare of the public eye. Such was the case for Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) when during a grilling of oil executives last week, she unveiled her hidden socialist. To the prospect of rising gas prices, the congresswoman remarked, “And guess what this liberal will be all about. This liberal will be about socializing, uh, um…will be about basically taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”

Of course, new liberals have danced around such ambitions for years often feigning righteous indignation at any suggestion that they are closet socialists. To her credit, Waters is at least telling it like it is, though one wishes she had been so passionate an advocate when she voted for the recent farm bill. Congress’ recent $300 billion gift to America’s farmers will result in taxpayers paying still higher prices for their groceries.

But I digress.

Waters has, of course, like many new liberals, cast herself as a populist hero. Oil executives are making huge profits and are therefore evil. The common man suffers because of the increasing prices he pays for gasoline and other petroleum products. Only government can protect the little guy from the big bad corporate wolf. This might explain why her remark passed without so much as a peep from her colleagues in the Congress, major Democratic presidential candidates or the leftist supporters in the mainstream press. Their silence is tacit agreement that they, like Waters, are arrogant enough to insist that sellers of commodities ought not to adjust their prices upward to reflect a growing demand. Like Waters, they believe that only government – a new-liberal, Democratic controlled government – possesses the wisdom to determine how much profit is enough and the moral acuity to confiscate businesses when that standard is breeched. The script may be tired, but it still plays in Poughkeepsie. 

Unfortunately, Waters intends to keep the price of gasoline low, not through increasing supply – Waters and her fellow white knights have routinely rejected legislation permitting tapping new deposits or building new and more efficient refineries. No, Waters will control the price of gasoline through subsidization. The thing about subsidies, of course, is that they do not change the actual cost of a product, just the price the consumer pays. The subsidizer – in this case the government — pays the difference. Then, of course, in order to control increasing demand the subsidizer will resort to rationing. Remember gas lines in the ’70s? That is the Waters populist promise sans make-up. 

Or perhaps Waters shares the vision of our socialist neighbors to the south, Venezuela. Of course, you can’t find milk or eggs in Venezuela but they have the seventh largest oil reserves in the world and they actually drill their oil which is why they can keep the price of gasoline artificially low through subsidy. The people are happy to top off the tanks of their SUVs for what it costs to buy a liter of Coca Cola. The problem is that it has warped their economy. Inflation in Venezuela is 22%. The subsidy has also proven anything but a boon to the poor who are still forced to ride expensive public transportation while the wealthy buy more and more automobiles with which to clog up the streets and dirty the air. 

This vision of a government run America is an intoxicating one to be sure. No one will ever go hungry; no one will ever be sick, homeless, depressed, or lonely or pay more for any product than some bureaucrat in Washington thinks reasonable. Now, if we could just find someone other than the common man to pay for it.

See it here.

Not only does Russia suffer from a low birth rate, it has a high death rate from AIDS and a whole host of illnesses, many of which begin with vodka.

Russia needn’t have had an AIDS epidemic — it was free of the disease for ten years as the virus caught the west by surprise. But incompetent government let the threat grow.

Now there’s this from UPI on Russian hypermortality.

Mosul was the last stronghold of Al Qaeda in Iraq. That is no more.

Fear of unwittingly offending Al-Qaeda executioners hung for months over the residents of Iraq’s northern town of Mosul, where even an innocent cucumber could earn a street trader death.

The list of “sins” that could offend Al-Qaeda was long and, often enough, not explicit until the offender found himself a target for “execution”.

The jihadists had banned barbers from using electric shavers. Beauty parlours for women were bombed, while restaurants were not allowed to serve men and women in the same dining area, said hotel owners and residents.

Even the juxtaposition of tomatoes with cucumber on a vegetable stall offended one extreme jihadist who saw in it an attempt by the vendor to pass on a sublimal sexual message.

Now, after two weeks of Iraqi security operations in the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Mosul, 370 kilometres (230 miles) north of the capital Baghdad, Al-Qaeda is on the run and residents say they are relieved.

In one quirk of the extremists, the use of ice was banned — apparently because it did not exist at the time of the Prophet Mohammed. Ice factories were put in cold storage and dozens of people lost jobs.

Ice factory owner Khalaf Abed Al-Hadidi said he was forced out of business by the Al-Qaeda.

“The criminals prevented people from using ice,” Hadidi said. “They prevented production and sale of ice in Mosul from last year. Last summer was tough for us, but we couldn’t use the ice factory.”

Smoking and alcohol was banned in Nineveh province which was known for its Arak, a favourite alcoholic spirit made from dates.

Some hair stylists were publicly killed by Al-Qaeda operatives, according to those who managed to keep their head down. Smoking became more dangerous for vendors than the smokers, with cigar sellers being targeted for attack.

Iraqi defence ministry spokesman Major General Mohammed al-Askari said that the continuing operations in the province had led to the detention of 1,030 suspects. He believed another 2,000 Al-Qaeda members may have fled.

“They are on the run. They can’t organise their work and we will not give them a chance,” Askari said.

How did AQ ge the boot? Largely by actions of the Iraqi government. Omar at Iraq the Model posted about this as the initiative began.

Ann Coulter: 

After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
 
While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. That’s the only world leader we’re not allowed to compare to Hitler.

President Bush’s speech at the Knesset two weeks ago was somewhat more nuanced than liberals’ Hitler arguments. He did not simply jump up and down chanting: “Ahmadinejad is Hitler!” Instead, Bush condemned a policy of appeasement toward madmen, citing Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated talks with Adolf Hitler.

Suspiciously, Bush’s speech was interpreted as a direct hit on B. Hussein Obama’s foreign policy — and that’s according to Obama’s supporters.

…There are reasons to meet with a tyrant, but none apply to Ahmadinejad. We’re not looking for an imperfect ally against some other dictatorship, as Nixon was with China. And we aren’t in a Mexican stand-off with a nuclear power, as Reagan was with the USSR. At least not yet.

Mutually Assured Destruction was bad enough with the Evil Empire, but something you definitely want to avoid with lunatics who are willing to commit suicide in order to destroy the enemies of Islam. As with the H-word, our sole objective with Ahmadinejad is to prevent him from becoming a military power.

What possible reason is there to meet with Ahmadinejad? To win a $20 bar bet as to whether or not the man actually owns a necktie?

We know his position and he knows ours. He wants nuclear arms, American troops out of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel. We don’t want that.

Environmentalism has become a substitute religion for many, and the worst of them are downright Puritanical about it. With CO2 now defined as a pollutant, the very act of breathing — of living — is a sin against earth.

We should all be ashamed. Be fruitful and multiply? Feh!

Now Australia’s ABC network has created a website for kids that measures their resource use and tells them when they should die.

No kidding. It says I should have died at age 16.3.

HT: Simon Bass

McCain-Clinton and Obama-Obama.

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
– The Sacred Book of Beatles

You’d love to see the plan? Okay, here’s mine. And, yes, I am a “sooper-genius” for coming up with it. If you think about it you’ll know it’s not only right, but that — with a little of that all-American hope for change — Americans will all say,”Yes, we can!”

Look, we all know where this campaign is going and it’s not good. It hasn’t been good for a long, long time and it gets worse by the day. But with a little creativity among the surviving candidates we can still snatch victory from the jaws of wingnuts and moonbats.

IBD:

Take a look at what happened in the global war on terror just over the Memorial Day weekend:

• Iraqi forces ran al-Qaida terrorists out of Mosul, the terror organization’s final urban stronghold. That victory reduces the killers to fringe areas with little public support, and a truncated capacity to recruit and strike terror in Iraq’s cities. Al-Qaida has “never been closer to defeat than they are now,” said Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Iraqi troops also cleaned out Basra and Sadr City, reducing any prospect for domestic insurgents to take power by force. Along with al-Qaida, these terrorists may try to continue, but the will is fading as the pressure is ratcheted up.

• In Colombia, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos announced that Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, founder of the FARC Marxist terror group, died a hunted man in the jungle on March 26 as bombs rained down on him. Better still, the government knew this because it penetrated FARC. Marulanda died knowing his chosen successor, Raul Reyes, had been blown away, too. Indeed, three of FARC’s seven top leaders have been killed since March, and the rest are headed “for the grave,” Santos said.

Hundreds of FARC foot soldiers are now furtively phoning the government to beg for a deal. Along with fears of their own men turning them in for cash, FARC leaders now work in a poisoned atmosphere, knowing spies are in their midst. They won’t win.

• British forces for the first time drove the Taliban from a southern stronghold in a 96-hour battle this month. It was their first combat operation since new troops arrived in March. The New York Times reported a “palpable” sense of relief among villagers, with the district chief and exiles returning to rebuild. “There has been huge optimism from the people,” an officer was quoted as saying.

• In the south Philippines, Marxist and Muslim terrorists are desperate. A big arsenal belonging to al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf was unearthed in Sulu Saturday, taking 283 sacks of bomb components out of circulation. Meanwhile, Nur Misuari, the top terrorist of the Moro National Liberation Front, on parole in Davao, pleaded with other terrorists to drop arms and sue for peace at a rally Saturday.

• In Egypt’s al-Qaida inner circle, a leading jihad ideologue, using the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl, has now openly questioned terrorism as a tactic, given al-Qaida’s mounting losses. He threatened to renounce violence — a new blow to the jihadists.

Jules Crittenden is ticked.

I didn’t really expect Obama to go for a walk with McCain in Baghdad. The fact is, he’ll never walk in McCain’s shoes, there or elsewhere, but who would expect a political rival to accept a rhetorical challenge of that sort? 

The fact is, if Obama does decide it serves his interest to show the American public how clued in he is, and maybe also that he has balls — as much as a United States senator needs them for a shielded stroll through an Iraqi marketplace and a frontup with the troops whose mission and sacrifices he wants to throw away — the likelihood is he will only end up showing exactly how small a shadow he casts in the arena of foreign policy. For that matter, in anything related to our nation’s most pressing current concern, which is not energy policy or global warming or health care or race relations or even the economy, but war. Here’s an Obama spokesman, not even Obama himself, responding to McCain’s challenge: 

“John McCain’s proposal is nothing more than a political stunt, and we don’t need any more ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge. The American people don’t want any more false promises of progress, they deserve a real debate about a war that has overstretched our military, and cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars without making us safer.”

I’m sorry, but that sounds like sniveling chickenshit for president. Maybe that’s being uncharitable. Maybe, for someone who claims to care so much about the troops but can’t be bothered spending any time with them or finding out firsthand what they are doing, it sounds more like don’t give a shit for president.

New York Times: 

On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes.

In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair. The only adornment is a pair of powder-blue slippers monogrammed in gold with the letters SEXY.

But it is on the Internet where Ms. El Aroud has distinguished herself. Writing in French under the name “Oum Obeyda,” she has transformed herself into one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe.

She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, she bullies Muslim men to go and fight and rallies women to join the cause.

“It’s not my role to set off bombs — that’s ridiculous,” she said in a rare interview. “I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb.”

Getting others to set off bombs? Not ridiculous, it seems.

Ms. El Aroud has not only made a name for herself among devotees of radical forums where she broadcasts her message of hatred toward the West. She also is well known to intelligence officials throughout Europe as simply “Malika” — an Islamist who is at the forefront of the movement by women to take a larger role in the male-dominated global jihad.

The authorities have noted an increase in suicide bombings carried out by women — the American military reports that 18 women have conducted suicide missions in Iraq so far this year, compared with 8 all of last year — but they say there is also a less violent yet potentially more insidious army of women organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators and fund-raisers, who either join their husbands in the fight or step into the breach as men are jailed or killed.

“Women are coming of age in jihad and are entering a world once reserved for men,” said Claude Moniquet, president of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. “Malika is a role model, an icon who is bold enough to identify herself. She plays a very important strategic role as a source of inspiration. She’s very clever — and extremely dangerous.”

Ms. El Aroud began her rise to prominence because of a man in her life. Two days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, her husband carried out a bombing in Afghanistan that killed the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud at the behest of Osama bin Laden. Her husband was killed, and she took to the Internet as the widow of a martyr.

Oh, how proud she must be. Read on.

There wasn’t much coverage of General Petraeus when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday. Even C-SPAN didn’t show it live. Petraeus reported that violence is at a 4-year low and that he will likely reduce troop levels this September after the 45-day pause.

His comments were more upbeat than six weeks ago, when the Basra offensive was in full flux, but he is still cautionary about the political situation. Here is what he said about al-Sadr and Basra.

Go here for video.

Oy, the gaffe’s keep on coming.

CBS: Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz. He said the family legend is that, upon returning from war, his uncle spent six months in an attic. “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” Obama said. “That’s why this idea of making sure that every single veteran, when they are discharged, are screened for post-traumatic stress disorder and given the mental health services that they need – that’s why it’s so important.”

Sorry, no.

Auschwitz of course is in Poland. It was liberated by the Red Army on Jan 27 1945. Poland, on most maps is usually placed to the east of Germany, although we may need to investigate the geography textbooks the Messiah used as a child…

The Allies were wrapping up the battle of the bulge in late January of 1945 — the Rhine crossings were still well into the future when Auschwitz was liberated.

Obama is beginning to resemble a cross between Jimmy Carter (weak and naive) and Al Gore (an artless fibber.)

Soon after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the Bush administration won promises from various nations to help Afghanistan get back on it’s feet. Italy promised to establish a judicial system. Germany promised to train a police force. Japan, with the UN, worked to defang the warlords.

Only Japan followed through. Many of the nations who later whined about unilateralism and Bush as “cowboy” proved themselves to be all talk.

Now, it seems if you want something done right, you do it yourself.

The New York Times writes:

For two years British troops staked out a presence in this small district center in southern Afghanistan and fended off attacks from the Taliban. The constant firefights left it a ghost town, its bazaar broken and empty but for one baker, its houses and orchards reduced to rubble and weeds.

But it took the Marines, specifically the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, about 96 hours to clear out the Taliban in a fierce battle in the past month and push them back about 6 miles.

It was their first major combat operation since landing in March, and it stood in stark contrast to the events of a year earlier, when a Marine unit was removed in disgrace within weeks of arriving because its members shot and killed 19 civilians after a suicide bombing attack.

This time, the performance of the latest unit of marines, here in Afghanistan for seven months to help bolster NATO forces, will be under particular scrutiny. The NATO-led campaign against the Taliban has not only come under increasing pressure for its slow progress in curbing the insurgency, but it has also been widely criticized for the high numbers of civilian casualties in the fighting.

The marines’ drive against the Taliban in this large farming region is certainly not finished, and the Taliban have often been pushed out of areas in Afghanistan only to return in force later. But for the British forces and Afghan residents here, the result of the recent operation has been palpable.

I regularly receive emails with collections of Bush misstatements (“Is our children learning?” etc. )that purport to prove him an idiot.

Much of Obama’s appeal is that, unlike Bush, Obama can talk smart. Talking smart doesn’t mean you act smart or are well informed, but it comforts people to hear a smooth talking president. You don’t need to be a leader, just play one convincingly on TV.

Still, when Obama gets off-script, he sounds very Bush like. 

Not long ago he referred to visiting “all 57 states.” Then he seemed surprised to learn that his home state of Illinois shared a border with Kentucky.

Powerline noticed this gem from yesterday:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

What? Dead soldiers in the audience? (And what’s an “unbroken” line of fallen heroes?)

But the gaffe is a trifle compared with the mindset he displayed in the Q&A that followed. Read the Powerline post for more on that.

Sharon Stone, best known for crossing her legs on camera, is a friend of the Dali Lama (or so she claims).

When asked abut the recent horrific earth quake in China, which has caused upwards of 50,000 dead and 5 million homeless, Stone smilingly described the event as ” karma” – payback for the Chinese not being nice to the Tibetans.

Former Defense undersecretary Douglas Feith, author of War and Decision (which the WaPo, New York Times, LA Times etc. will not review) writes in the today’s WSJ how the Bush administration fumbled its message, post Saddam.

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.

President Bush no longer stressed Saddam’s record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president’s credibility that had already been caused by the CIA’s errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power.

This change can be quantified: In the year beginning with his first major speech about Iraq – the Sept. 12, 2002 address to the U.N. General Assembly – Mr. Bush delivered nine major talks about Iraq. There were, on average, approximately 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam’s record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and danger, with only three paragraphs on promoting democracy. In the next year – from September 2003 to September 2004 – Mr. Bush delivered 15 major talks about Iraq. The average number of paragraphs devoted to the record of threats from Saddam was one, and the number devoted to democracy promotion was approximately 11.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics’ argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That’s a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

In the spring of 2004, with the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis imminent, the president was scheduled to give a major speech about Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld received an advance draft and he gave it to me for review. In keeping with the new trend, the drafted speech focused on the prospects for Iraqi democracy.

White House officials understandably preferred to declare affirmative messages about Iraq’s future, rather than rehash the government’s intelligence embarrassments. Even so, I thought it was a strategic error for the president to make no effort to defend the arguments that had motivated him before the war. Mr. Bush’s political opponents were intent on magnifying the administration’s mistakes regarding WMD. On television and radio, in print and on the Internet, day after day they repeated the claim that the undiscovered stockpiles were the sum and substance of why the U.S. went to war against Saddam.

Electoral politics aside, I thought it was important for national security reasons that the president refute his critics’ misstatements. The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president’s speechwriters. I proposed that the speech “should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place.” It would be useful to “make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism” in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime “had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions.”

In light of 9/11, the “danger that Saddam’s regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great” to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven “unsustainable or inadequate.” I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: “A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism.”

Some of the speech’s rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: “The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there,” I noted. But that implication “is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve ‘democracy.’”

No matter, Bush’s speeches repeatedly failed to stress the strategic reasons for ridding Iraq of Saddam.

I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq’s people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way.

The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq’s future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam’s record, the administration’s record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration’s prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.

But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president’s shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president’s words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Who becomes a general — and why — tells us a lot about whether our military is on the right or wrong track. The annual spring list of Army colonels promoted to brigadier generals will be shortly released. Already, rumors suggest that this year, unlike in the recent past, a number of maverick officers who have distinguished themselves fighting — and usually defeating — insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq will be chosen.

For example, scholar-soldier Col. H.R. McMaster, Special Forces Col. Ken Tovo and Col. Sean MacFarland — all of whom helped turn Sunni insurgents into allies — could, and should, make the cut.

These three colonels have had decorated careers in Iraq mastering the complexities of working with Iraqi forces in hunting down terrorists and insurgents. And they, like David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in the past did not always reflect the Army establishment in Washington. Their unconventional views about counterinsurgency warfare do not hinge on high-tech weaponry, tanks, artillery and rapid massed advance.

But most wars are rarely fought as they were planned. During the fighting, those who adjust most quickly to the unexpected tend to be successful. And in almost all of America’s past conflicts, our top commanders on the eve of war were not those who finished it.

Few in 1861 anticipated the carnage that would ensue in the American Civil War, in which massive armies collided with lethal new weapons — and depended on industrial production, electronic communications and railroads.

Before the war broke out in 1861, the obscure U.S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman had failed at almost everything they had tried. But after the Union army was nearly wrecked by establishment generals like Ambrose Burnside, Henry Halleck, Joseph Hooker, George McClellan, John Pope and William Rosecrans (who were all wedded to the set style of Napoleonic warfare), President Lincoln turned to his two generals who best understood modern warfare.

On the eve of World War II, Gen. George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, promoted a series of junior officers — Omar Bradley, J. Lawton Collins, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor — while retiring senior generals he felt had little idea of the new warfare of armored vehicles, rapid mobility and close air support.

The Iraqi war is no exception. The brilliant and rapid invasion of Iraq in March and April 2003 required accomplished artillery and armor commanders — quite unlike the subsequent insurgency.

The terrorist bands that sprung up during the occupation were at first dealt with through conventional tactics and weapons. Only as American and Iraqi losses mounted did a few gifted officers begin to work with the Iraqis, learn the elements of successful counterinsurgency doctrine and slowly win back the hearts and minds of the civilian population.

Now we will see whether the former mavericks can become incorporated into the military establishment. Will this wartime change in Pentagon thinking be enough — and in time? It depends on how many of the forward-thinking colonels get promoted and how much influence they wield.

Iowahawk, with more hilarious relationship advice from Dear Barry.

Dear Barry:

I try to get along with the people in my neighborhood, but sometimes it can be difficult. Take for example my neighbor “Mahmoud.” Last weekend while I was seeding my lawn, he drove back and forth slowly in front of my house “flipping the bird” from his minivan, which is painted with pictures of bloody corpses and mushroom clouds and “welcome 12th Imam.”  Normally I wouldn’t have given it a second thought (I get “fingered” by a lot of the neighbors), but lately I’ve noticed he has been working on some kind of secret project in his garage with really stinky chemicals. Also, I’ve been getting these constant annoying 3 AM phone calls threatening to kill my kids.

Frankly, I’m sort of worried about the situation, but even the neighbors I get along with tell me I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, and not to make a big deal of it. I don’t want to make waves, but I also don’t want to end up like the Goldbergs who had their house burned down last week. Am I being too much of a “worry wart”? Please help!

Concerned in Northbrook

Dear Concerned:

Misunderstanding and mistrust is a two-way street, and it’s important to ask yourself: what did I do to create this situation? Without thinking, sometimes the things we do can understandably trigger homicidal rage in our friends and neighbors. Put the shoe on the other foot — how would you like it if you had a neighbor who was always showing you up with his big gas-guzzling SUV and manicured hedges?

Before things escalate further, you should take the initiative and invite Mahmoud over for coffee and chit chat.  No preconditions, and maybe you could bring a pie from Bakers Square. While he is enjoying a delicious slice of Boston Cream, let Mahmoud know that you understand his feelings, and you will do whatever it takes to repair your tattered reputation in the neighborhood. As a show of good faith, why not offer him a few bags of fertilizer and fuel for his lawn mower?

Read on.

Powerline:

On the stump, Barack Obama usually concludes his comments on Iraq by saying, “and it hasn’t made us safer.” It is an article of faith on the left that nothing the Bush administration has done has enhanced our security, and, on the contrary, its various alleged blunders have only contributed to the number of jihadists who want to attack us.

Empirically, however, it seems beyond dispute that something has made us safer since 2001. Over the course of the Bush administration, successful attacks on the United States and its interests overseas have dwindled to virtually nothing.

Some perspective here is required. While most Americans may not have been paying attention, a considerable number of terrorist attacks on America and American interests abroad were launched from the 1980s forward, too many of which were successful. What follows is a partial history:

1988
February: Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Higgens, Chief of the U.N. Truce Force, was kidnapped and murdered by Hezbollah.

December: Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York was blown up over Scotland, killing 270 people, including 35 from Syracuse University and a number of American military personnel.

1991
November: American University in Beirut bombed.

1993
January: A Pakistani terrorist opened fire outside CIA headquarters, killing two agents and wounding three.

February: World Trade Center bombed, killing six and injuring more than 1,000.

1995
January: Operation Bojinka, Osama bin Laden’s plan to blow up 12 airliners over the Pacific Ocean, discovered.

November: Five Americans killed in attack on a U.S. Army office in Saudi Arabia.

1996
June: Truck bomb at Khobar Towers kills 19 American servicemen and injures 240.

June: Terrorist opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one.

1997
February: Palestinian opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one and wounding more than a dozen.

November: Terrorists murder four American oil company employees in Pakistan.

1998
January: U.S. Embassy in Peru bombed.

August: Simultaneous bomb attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed more than 300 people and injured over 5,000.

1999
October: Egypt Air flight 990 crashed off the coast of Massachusetts, killing 100 Americans among the more than 200 on board; the pilot yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he steered the airplane into the ocean.

2000
October: A suicide boat exploded next to the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 American sailors and injuring 39.

2001
September: Terrorists with four hijacked airplanes kill around 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

December: Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” tries to blow up a transatlantic flight, but is stopped by passengers.

The September 11 attack was a propaganda triumph for al Qaeda, celebrated by a dismaying number of Muslims around the world. Everyone expected that it would draw more Muslims to bin Laden’s cause and that more such attacks would follow. In fact, though, what happened was quite different: the pace of successful jihadist attacks against the United States slowed, decelerated further after the onset of the Iraq war, and has now dwindled to essentially zero. Here is the record:

2002
October: Diplomat Laurence Foley murdered in Jordan, in an operation planned, directed and financed by Zarqawi in Iraq, perhaps with the complicity of Saddam’s government.

Keep reading.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. For those who dismiss the sacrifice of our troops as being “for nothing,” two stories of note.

After two years in office, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has managed only in the past two months to achieve a semblance of authority in this unwieldy nation with crackdowns on Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents in Baghdad, Basra and the north.

The progress has helped rehabilitate the prime minister politically, quieting critics at home who have long seen him as ineffective, indifferent to corruption or biased toward his fellow Shiites.

It has also won him praise from U.S. officials and the military, months after some in the United States were calling for him to be replaced for failing to achieve political benchmarks.

His political resurgence has resulted in part from an overall drop of violence. The U.S. military said the number of attacks it recorded last week was the lowest since April 2004.

Basra sings again as Iraqi army patrols streets.

For the past three years, Ahmed Aboud and Moustapha Dawood stowed away their colorful drums, keyboards and golden trumpets in their tiny music shop and considered giving up their love of music.

Shiite Islamist groups enforced their version of morality in this southern port city with grenades, guns and closed fists. Music was among the sins they refused to tolerate. Just two months ago, they threw grenades into wedding parties that played music, beat unmarried men and women who sat together, and intimidated women into covering their hair. Some women were killed.

The number of professional singers dropped from 70 to fewer than 10, and musicians like Aboud and Dawood took precautions. They hung a picture of the revered Shiite figure Ali, the cousin of the Prophet Mohammed, in their tiny shop in Saymar, Basra’s music district, and took down the drums that had hung outside the store.

Now, however, Aboud’s eyes sparkle as he moves his fingers across the keys of a keyboard in the middle of his shop as two friends sing about love and another, Mohammed Shia, beats a drum whose rhythms waft into the streets.

Aboud’s filled with praise for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who two months ago dispatched thousands of Iraqi soldiers to take control of this city from the Shiite Islamist groups who’d ruled for so long.

“I will kiss Maliki,” Aboud said. “I think he’s a rose. We’re not afraid anymore.”