Cris-a-tunity

The recent Ted Stevens indictment reminds me of one of my favourite scenes in The Simpsons. After Homer gets kicked out of Moe's, he lies sulking on the couch:

Marge: What if you pretended that this couch were a bar? Then you could spend more nights at home with us. Huh?

Homer: I'm not going to dignify that with an answer.

Lisa: Look on the bright side, Dad. Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for "crisis" as they do for "opportunity"?

Homer: Yes! Cris-a-tunity!

John Avlon (from RCP) has been thinking on similar lines, that John McCain should switch to offense and go after the kind of things he's been campaigning against for years:

John McCain has been a constant critic of the unprecedented levels of pork barrel spending that took hold of the Republican Congress during the Bush Administration. And there is no better symbol of that excess then Senator Ted Stevens' infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," the $398 million dollar boondoggle to an island in Alaska where less than 10,000 people lived.

(...)

Luckily for the GOP, John McCain is the perfect antidote to the excesses of the former Republican Congress. He's taken heat for his criticism of fellow Senate club members before - shining light on absurd appropriations and bucking ideological litmus tests - but those principled stands of independence are precisely what made McCain one of the most widely admired political leaders in America. It's hard for some professional Republican partisans to understand, but John McCain is competitive in this election because of his independence, not in spite of it.

Ironically, now polls show that McCain is being hurt by his association with the damaged Republican brand. One of the best ways to create daylight between himself and the Bush administration would be to revive his profile as a fearless reformer with a forceful new condemnation of the culture of corruption in Washington. He should hold out the examples Ted Stevens, Monica Goodling, Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff as counter examples of the direction in which he wants to lead his party and his nation. He can harness the anger toward Bush-era Republican excesses while pointing the way to a new McCain brand of the Republican Party.

Absolutely, John McCain is the perfect candidate to go after this kind of thing. As much as he may not be the most popular guy with the base, he's who the party nominated and as much as I don't like a lot of his policies, he should be himself. The worse thing he could do now is to try to act like the establishment choice.

Obama's Iraq problem

Karl Rove must be just about the most notorious political advisor in the history of politics. Regardless, I always enjoy reading his thoughts on the campaign. His article in the WSJ on "Obama's Iraq Fumble" highlights a couple of things that BO should be aware of:

Mr. Obama's problem is he opposed the policy that created the progress that makes victory in Iraq possible. Mr. Obama's unbending opposition to the surge undermines his fundamental argument that he has better judgment on national security. Mr. McCain needs to use Mr. Obama's retrospective mistake to shape voters' prospective conclusion, convincing them that Mr. Obama's badly flawed judgment on the surge shows he cannot be trusted with major foreign-policy decisions.

Mr. Obama also created a problem by canceling a visit to U.S. soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and are now recuperating at Landstuhl hospital in Germany. His campaign has offered a welter of explanations. What's the real one? My rule is that when in doubt, see what a candidate said at the time and judge his candor. In a July 26 London news conference, Mr. Obama explained: "I was going to be accompanied by one of my advisers, a former military officer. And we got notice that he would be treated as a campaign person, and it would therefore be perceived as political because he had endorsed my candidacy, but he wasn't on the Senate staff."

The solution was obvious. Leave the campaign adviser behind and visit the wounded troops. Mr. Obama's decision to work out in the hotel gym instead adds to his growing reputation for arrogance.

Most importantly, Mr. Obama missed the opportunity to show he can admit a mistake. He could have said that what he saw on his visit to Iraq convinced him that the surge was right and its success now allows U.S. troops to be safely drawn down. Instead, he insisted he was right to say the surge wouldn't work.

That may give voters pause. If Mr. Obama can't admit the surge worked after the fact, how can voters count on him to keep his mind open to the facts on other important foreign-policy decisions?

Yeah, I don't know why Obama didn't just visit the soldiers on his own...that would've made a much better story anyway. It would've made him look like he actually cared more about the soldiers than he did his campaign. In fact, if he actually did, it wouldn't have even occurred to him to not visit the troops...he would've just gone alone. So even although McCain's been accused of mud-slinging for attacking Obama's decision, he's got a fair point.

Turdblossom also pointed out how unreliable polls were, especially on Iraq:

Mr. Obama should not be misled by polls showing support for a timetable. Opinion surveys are notoriously unreliable in gauging public opinion on a complicated question like Iraq.

Americans can simultaneously support a withdrawal timetable and also insist that the withdrawal occur only when conditions justify it and military leaders recommend it. For instance, Gallup polls have shown that 69% of Americans think we should set a timetable for withdrawal, but 65% also want to establish stability and security before withdrawing. Like Messrs. McCain and Maliki, Americans are for an aspirational and conditional timetable. They want to win.

I've always said how dangerous it is for politicians to be too concerned with polling data on this kind of thing. There's no way the average person can comprehend the complexity of the situation on the ground and what it means for national and regional security.

PS Sooner or later, I'll get round to putting up a book list. But in the mean time, if you're looking for a fun little read about Karl Rove and Texas politics, "Boy Genius" (by Dubois et al) is an entertaining place to start.

McCain's true patriotism

I stumbled upon a defining distinction between Obama and McCain whilst reading David Ignatius' piece in the Washington Post (via RCP) about "McCain's True Voice".  The article was about how McCain should try to recapture his true personality, something which has lost its focus in recent weeks.  I'm not so sure I agree that it's lost focus--I think it might be more a case of the media and pundits being a little bleary eyed after staring at Obama's awesome glow for so long without those special solar eclipse glasses.

Anyway, the point Ignatius drives at is that McCain is a hero who cares more about his country than he does himself, which I don't think Obama does:

Certainly all those heroic details are present in McCain's memoir, and in his political appeal this year. The Vietnam legacy of steadfastness motivated him to resist American failure in Iraq and to agitate, sometimes almost alone, for what came to be called the "surge" of U.S. troops. When he says he preferred political defeat for himself to military defeat for his country, he is telling the truth. With an ex-POW's stubbornness, he could not abide the notion of failure and dishonor for U.S. forces.

The sentence in bold really speaks volumes about McCain. He knows this because he experienced it. He has lived it. Can you imagine Obama having such a steadfast commitment to, well, anything? No, me neither.  This is what really gets my goat when people say that Obama's patriotism shouldn't be questioned. Sure, he a patriot, but let's not pretend that it's some sort of a blanket term...it is possible to be more (or indeed less) patriotic than someone else. In the same way that I wouldn't call Obama unintelligent, but if he was running against Einstein then, yeah, maybe there's a point to be made that he's not the smartest guy in the race. Is that really so offensive? 

Kerry's (lack of) intelligence

The Beatty campaign compares Jeff with Swiftboat Kerry on issues of national security:

Jeff Beatty on Terrorism / National Security

• 1983 – As a member of the Army’s Delta Force participated in the rescue of American medical students held captive in Grenada.
• 1984 – As a Special Agent advising the FBI National Hostage Rescue Team at the Los Angeles Olympics ready to plan the rescue of Olympic Athletes and civilians.
• 1985 -1992 – Conducted successful counterterrorism operations as a CIA operative in Europe and Middle East.
• 1990 – Recalled to active duty in support of Operation Desert Storm.
• 1996 – Warned and predicted the use of a package bomb at the Olympic Park months before  the Atlanta Olympics.
• 2000 – Warned all US major airlines about cockpit intrusion in apparent hijacking where the aircraft would be used as the weapon.
• 2003 – Discussed his reservations with Defense Department officials in Rumsfeld’s Conference room about the reliability of intelligence on WMD in Iraq.
• Over 300 national appearances on FOX, MSNBC, CNN, etc. as expert on terrorism and security issues.

John Kerry on Terrorism / National Security

• 1993 – 2000 Missed 80% of the public meetings of the US Select Committee on Senate Intelligence Committee (missed 38 of 49 sessions).
• Proposed bills to cut $1.5 billion from the intelligence budget during the 1990s. ($300 million per year in each of the fiscal years 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000.
• In 1997, Kerry questioned the growth of the Intelligence Community after the Cold War.
• 2002 – Voted for the Iraq War in order to look presidential for ’04 election.

Someone tell me why Kerry keeps getting re-elected?

Hope for Iraq

Victor Davis Hanson with another interesting piece on Iraq and what victory will mean. Also, I like how he tackles the now common argument about how our focus on Iraq has led to trouble elsewhere:

For over four years, war critics insisted that we took our eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran, allowed other rogue nations to run amuck and soured our allies while we were mired in an unnecessary war. But how true is all that?

The continuing violence in Afghanistan can be largely attributed to Pakistan, whose tribal wild lands serve as a safe haven for Taliban operations across the border. To the extent the war in Iraq has affected Afghanistan, it may well prove to have been positive for the U.S.: Many Afghan and Pakistani jihadists have been killed in Iraq, the war has discredited al-Qaida, and the U.S. military has gained crucial expertise on tribal counterinsurgency.

Iran in the short-term may have been strengthened by a weakened Iraq, U.S. losses and acrimony over the war. Yet a constitutional Iraq of free Sunnis and Shiites may soon prove as destabilizing to Iran as Iranian subversion once was to Iraq. Nearby American troops, freed from daily fighting in Iraq, should appear to Iran as seasoned rather than exhausted. If Iraq is deemed successful rather than a quagmire, it is also likely that our allies in Europe and the surrounding region will be more likely to pressure Iran.

These shifting realities may explain both the shrill pronouncements emanating from a worried Iran and its desire for diplomatic talks with American representatives.

Other rogue nations -- North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba (not to mention al-Qaida itself) -- also do not, for all their bluster, think that or act like an impotent U.S military is mired in defeat in Iraq.

Very true...it's funny (more sad, actually) how people get so consumed with trying to blame the war in Iraq for the problems of the entire world.

And what about the future of Iraq:

Meanwhile, surrounding Arab countries may soon strengthen ties with Iraq. After all, military success creates friends as much as defeat loses them. In the past, Iraq's neighbors worried either about Saddam Hussein's aggression or subsequent Shiite/Sunni sectarianism. Now a constitutional Iraq offers them some reassurance that neither Iraqi conventional nor terrorist forces will attack.

None of this means that a secure future for Iraq is certain. After all, there are no constitutional oil-producing states in the Middle East. Instead, we usually see two pathologies: either a state like Iran where petrodollars are recycled to fund terrorist groups and centrifuges, or the Gulf autocracies where vast profits result in artificial islands, indoor ski runs and radical Islamic propaganda.

Iraq could still degenerate into one of those models. But for now, Iraq -- with an elected government and free press -- is not investing its wealth in subsidizing terrorists outside its borders, spreading abroad fundamentalist madrassas, building centrifuges or allowing a few thousand royal first cousins to squander its oil profits.

Iraq for the last 20 years was the worst place in the Middle East. The irony is that it may now have the most promising future in the entire region.

Yeah, I wish we could start looking at Iraq with some hope and optimism. President Hope and Change ought to be the champion of that cause...no?

Incidentally, for a good example of 'royal cousins' wasting precious petrodollars then look no further. This is from The Sun:

A RICH Arab sent his Lamborghini on a 6,500-mile round trip to Britain for a service.

The £190,000 supercar was put on a scheduled flight from Qatar to Heathrow – then flown BACK after the oil check.

The overall cost of sending the Lamborghini to London for the oil change would have cost more than £23,000.

His black-and-gold supercar costs £3,552 to service at an approved dealer – on top of the £20,000 to freight from Qatar to Britain.

The Murciélago LP640 – driven by Batman in movie The Dark Knight – arrived from the Middle Eastern country on Friday.

It cleared customs and was trucked to specialist mechanics in London for the service.

On Monday it was flown back 3,250 miles to the oil-rich state where it was collected by the owner.

Crazy, sure, but it's a pretty sweet car.

Obama the Law Professor

The NY Times article on Obama as the law Professor at the University of Chicago has now done the rounds of the numerous legally-informed blogs on the web (Check out Instapundit for some links). I still can't quite believe the trajectory of his career. If it were in a film, you'd laugh at how ludicrously unbelievable the plot was. So let's start at the beginning:

The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.

Wait a second, an academic who hasn't published one single scholarly article, and this is supposed to be a good thing? That's like ignoring a third of your job responsibilities. Still, I guess he started as he meant to go on:

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The HarvardLaw Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

This kills me. As someone nearing the end of their PhD and looking (possibly) for an academic position, the thought of getting a fellowship and then using it to write my memoirs is almost unfathomable...but perhaps more amazing is that the Law School were happy to go along with this.

Then there's this:

In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

If a white guy imitated 'clueless black people' in a lecture how long would it be before he got fired: three seconds...maybe four?

Seems like nothing has really changed either:

In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation. Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the post.

“I think he thought they were good and worth trying,” said David Franklin, who now teaches law at DePaul University in Chicago.

But whether out of professorial reserve or budding political caution, Mr. Obama would not say so directly. “He surfaced all the competing points of view on Guinier’s proposals with total neutrality and equanimity,” Mr. Franklin said. “He just let the class debate the merits of them back and forth.”

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

Typically of Obama, he avoids the difficult questions which could come back to haunt him (think back to all the 'present' votes or the 'I pressed the wrong button' votes in the Illinois legislature). It's almost impossible to know what he actually thinks about these issues, and it's not like he publishes either, remember:

Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.

The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town.

Of course, God forbid he discuss important social and legal issues with the best legal minds in the country...Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers are much better sounding boards.

You know, I can't make any judgement about how a law school professor should live or write or teach but from reading this article it becomes glaringly obvious that Barack Obama is, and probably always has been, a politician at heart (and, no, not the kind that wants to make things better for their constituents). He's charted his career very carefully (almost cynically), making sure his fingerprints are nowhere to be found. The poor guy's been running for President for about 20 years.

Britney, Paris, Barack...yeah, they're all the same!

The new video from the McCain campaign targets Obama's celebrity appeal, putting him in the same box as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. I was really skeptical about this but I actually think it's quite smart: the celebrity aspect draws you in but the real message--that Obama is for higher taxes and more foreign oil--comes at the end of the video:

At this point, McCain should try anything...it's not like the press can turn on him anymore than they already have. Besides, he's kinda got a point.

Too much of a good thing...

...or simply the average voter tiring of lectures from the holier than thou, Barack Obama? Tom Bevan at RCP Blog is reporting that the bounce in the polls experienced by Obama during and after his Global tour has disappeared faster than he can say "Now is the time...".

Obama's lead extended to 5.0% in the RCP Average over the weekend as Gallup's track went from 6 points on Friday to 7 points on Saturday and 9 points on Sunday, while Rasmussen ticked up to 6 on Saturday and back down to 5 on Sunday.

What a difference 48 hours makes. With the release of the Gallup/USA Today shocker yesterday afternoon showing McCain leading by 4 points among likely voters, coupled with Rasmussen tightening down to just a 1-point Obama lead today and Gallup's tracking poll falling back to 6-points, Obama's lead in the RCP National Average is back down to 2.5% - the tightest it's been since June 7.

Few things are as frustrating as being lectured to by the least qualified guy in the room. Hopefully the rest of this week's polls will show similar movement.

I'll take an honest anything at this point!

Can Obama utter one word of truth? Jake Tapper at Political Punch is one of the few journalists who checks up on what the Obama campaign actually says. Sadly, it has become common for the Obama camp to say X and for the media to just nod and go along with it...like it must be true, it's from "The One". But thankfully Tapper likes to do the digging, and of course, BO has misrepresented himself and his positions again (...and still hardly anybody seems to care).

He's claiming that although he was against the surge (see the video), he did say that it would cause a temporary decrease in violence...even though he actually didn't, not while it counted anyway.

Here's the video:

Ad here's what Tapper had to say:

Asked about these predictions on Sunday's Meet the Press, Obama told NBC's Tom Brokaw that "I know that there's that little snippet that you ran," referring to the MSNBC clip, "but there were also statements made during the course of this debate in which I said there's no doubt that additional U.S. troops could temporarily quell the violence. But unless we saw an underlying change in the politics of the country, unless Sunni, Shia, Kurd made different decisions, then we were going to have a civil war and we could not stop a civil war simply with more troops."

This has become an Obama meme -- that during the debate over the surge he acknowledged that more US troops would mean a temporary reduction in violence.

But is it true?

I asked the Obama campaign to provide me with any information of Sen. Obama saying the surge would reduce violence "during the course of this debate" over the surge.

The earliest quote they provided from Obama suggesting the surge might reduce violence came in March 2007...

***

The first official Senate debate over the surge came in January and February 2007.

The surge of 21,500 US troops was officially announced by the President on Jan. 10, 2007.

The first surge brigade was the 2nd brigade of the 82nd Airborne that moved up to Iraq from Kuwait in mid-January.

On February 16, 2007, the House passed legislation disapproving of the surge, 246-182.

One day later the Senate failed to do so. The resolution needed 60 votes; it got 55, with 34 voting against it.

Of course, the larger debate over the surge did not end in February; it continues through today.

But it seems, well, debatable for Obama to say "there were also statements made during the course of this debate in which I said there's no doubt that additional U.S. troops could temporarily quell the violence."

He said it, but not until March 2007. So the accuracy of this claim depends on when you consider the "debate" over the surge to have taken place.

All I ask for is a little consistency, and the courage and humility to say, "yeah, I was wrong". It's not like he'd be the first guy in history to make a mistake. I'd have so much more respect for him if he did...it's almost reminiscent of the way that McCain wouldn't drop his thing about Romney wanting a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq, even though it wasn't at all true. God, how annoying was that? That's actually the kind of stuff that makes me think McCain will never pick Romney--the dems would have endless footage to laugh over.

Politics & War

Victor Davis Hanson has a great article at Pajamas. It's sort of a summary of Europe's obsession with BO and a little tour through the past year in Iraq. He makes a couple of excellent points about how Obama will allow Europe to play a thinking-man's Athens to America's muscular Rome, and how Obama uses the illusion of sophistication that Bush could never (nor would ever want to) pull off. For example, Obama wants America to be more multilingual like Europe, even although he only speaks English and Bush is fluent in Spanish.

VDH also touches on a point that I mentioned yesterday. That disdain for Bush, the Texas yokel in the eyes of the world, is really the source of Europe's love for Obama. But that such a fleeting moment of infatuation will pass as easily as the irony of Bush-hate is lost on us all:

The final irony?

The hated George Bush is still around; Chirac, Schroeder, Villapin et al. are history. Iraq is secure. Iran is becoming isolated. North Korea supposedly is denuked. And America is reassuring a jittery Europe that we will stick by them in a world of bullying Russians and Chinese.

A Modest Prediction

In 5 years, Europeans will prefer George Bush to a “We are right behind you” Obama.

Totally agree.

His commentary on Iraq is also a welcome reminder of how things have changed, about how Iraq was won, then lost, and now again on the brink of victory (although perhaps we should heed our own advice and be cautious about celebrating a victory that is still some way off).

He refers to two major reasons why the war is going well:

Don’t Forget…

Two critical developments are relatively unappreciated, but likewise proved critical. The first was the continual growth and improvement in the Iraqi security forces that now include many veteran units that have learned to confront and defeat terrorists.

Second, between 2003-7 American forces took an enormous toll on jihadists. We have heard mostly how many Americans have been lost, rarely how many of the enemy they have killed or wounded—but the aggregate number is in the tens of thousands. Even in postmodern wars, there are finite numbers of skilled combatants—and many of them simply did not survive their encounter with American troops.

The second paragraph is something that we never hear about, which I think is ridiculously symptomatic of this era. Sure, the softly-softly position of the modern world seems to mourn the loss of all life (except that of an unborn child), but these guys are terrorists and murderers whose crimes are so horrific they're almost unbelievable--read Michael Yon's book, especially the story about how al-Qaeda served (that's right, served) a disapproving local family their own 10 year old boy, whom they had baked, for lunch. Why shouldn't we be hearing that US forces killed 150 members of AQI in a firefight in Anbar?

Anyway, Hanson concludes with a reminder that history remembers people like Washington, Grant, Sherman, Ridgeway and (hopefully) Petraeus ahead of the Sheehan's and Reids and MoveOns, and all the others who said it couldn't be done. Thank God! Also, how great does President Petraeus sound?

Obama's "private" message to God

So the release of Obama's "private" note at the Western wall was staged and approved by the campaign (via The Corner):

What initially seemed to be a journalistic scoop of dubious moral propriety now seems to be a case of an Israeli paper being played by the Barack Obama campaign. Maariv, the second most popular newspaper in Israel, was roundly criticized for publishing the note Obam