TUESDAY,  OCTOBER 20,  2009

IF THIS HAD BEEN BUSH... - AT 9:57 P.M. ET:  There's trouble with the flu vaccine, as Washington Times reports:

The H1N1 vaccine will arrive too late to help most Americans who will be infected during this flu season, according to a study conducted by scholars at Purdue University.

Can you imagine the reaction to this study if BUSH (!!) had been president?  Why, why, it's a medical Katrina!  It's an influenza Iraq!  It's Florida 2000!

And yet, there's no real reaction to this major failure, despite disturbing predictions:

The study also estimates that the virus - commonly referred to as the swine flu bug - will infect about 60 percent of the U.S. population, although only about 25 percent of Americans will fall ill.

That's quite a chunk of humanity.  Obviously, this is Bush's fault.

However, it's predicted that most cases will be mild. 

One of the researchers cautions us, with a rare touch of scholarly humility:

Ms. Towers cautioned in a phone interview with The Washington Times that while enough of the U.S. population probably won't get enough of the vaccine before or during the peak of the pandemic, that is no reason not to get protection.

"Based on our study alone it would be bad to discourage people from getting the vaccine, because what if our study is wrong," she said.

COMMENT:  Wrong?  WRONG?  How can a scientist possibly be wrong?  Does this mean that some of the global warming stuff...?

Don't go there.  Just don't go there.  Al Gore gets very upset.

October 20,  2009   Permalink

WE'RE BRAIN FOOD, PASS IT ON! - AT 6:40 P.M. ET:  There is good news today about the therapeutic effects of the internet.  (Yes, you read that right.)  Some UCLA scientists have made us medically respectable:

Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.

But, of course, you have to go to the right sites.  I'm convinced that the left-wing sites have the reverse effect.  All right, that's my scientific opinion.

"We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function," Dr. Gary Small, study author and professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, said in a statement.

COMMENT:  This will scare the daylights out of the mainstream media, which is certain that those who surf the web are airheads and sickies, looking for simple-minded, flag-waving solutions. 

They're not, and now we have evidence that their brains get better all the time.

October 20,  2009   Permalink 

IT'S ABOUT TIME - AT 6:20 P.M. ET:  The New York Times today runs a remarkable op-ed piece by Robert L. Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch.  Showing great courage, Bernstein, with absolutely good cause, attacks the very group he founded.  (He stepped aside in 1998.) 

He has watched Human Rights Watch become a farce, and, like other "human rights" organizations, a tool of the political left: 

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Bernstein is particularly critical of HRW's regular assaults on Israel.  The organization now has a Middle East department staffed entirely by Arab rights activists.  No one neutral.  No one on the other side.  Very trendy.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

And...

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.

Finally...

Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.

COMMENT:  Yay!  It's time someone broke the silence about Human Rights Watch, and who better than its founder? 

There are many organizations that operate the way red fronts operated during the Cold War.  They give themselves noble names like "Women for World Peace, Justice, and Equality," when in fact they support the world's worst regimes.  The language is familiar...except to some in journalism and in the academic precincts, who prefer not to know, or not to see.

Bernstein will be viciously attacked for his column.  He should get a medal.

October 20,  2009   Permalink

WAKE UP, MR. PRESIDENT - AT 11:37 A.M. ET:  I don't know about you, but I see this as a mild rebuke to the president of the United States, from his own secretary of defense:

ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT (Reuters) - The United States cannot wait for problems surrounding the legitimacy of the Afghan government to be resolved before making a decision on troops, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said.

Gates, speaking to reporters on board a plane traveling to Tokyo, described the situation in Afghanistan as an evolutionary process that would not improve dramatically overnight, regardless of what course is taken following the country's flawed August election.

"I see this as a process, not something that's going to happen all of the sudden," Gates said.

"I believe that the president will have to make his decisions in the context of that evolutionary process."

COMMENT:  In other words, get off the dime and start doing the job for which you were elected.

October 20, 2009   Permalink

NO BREAK FOR OBAMA - AT 10:09 A.M. ET:  Rasmussen reports that the president continues to drop in public approval.  We like the Rasmussen survey here because he polls likely voters, not the general population.  People who don't vote don't decide elections.

For the fifth day in a row, Ras's presidential approval index - the gap between those who strongly approve and strongly disapprove - is in double digits.  Obama today is down 12, 28% to 40%. 

Overall approval is also poor.  Some 47% approve of presidential performance, whereas 52% disapprove.

Other polls show the president higher, but they are often taken among all voters, or all citizens, or anyone with a pulse.

October 20, 2009   Permalink

OUTRAGEOUS - AT 9:32 A.M. ET:  Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others.  Well, free enterprise is the worst economic system, except for all the others.

We're all for free enterprise here, but the system can be terribly abused, and misused, and we're seeing that in the outrageous, contemptible behavior of some people on Wall Street and some corporate CEOs, whose greed is limitless.  These people can truly destroy the goose that lays the golden egg by prompting demands for massive regulation and the heavy hand of government.  What is especially enraging is that some of the greediest creeps have also shown themselves to be among the most incompetent managers, protected by pals in country clubs and by obedient boards.

The Washington Post reports:

NEW YORK -- Even as the nation's biggest financial firms were struggling and the federal government was spending hundreds of billions of dollars to save many of them, the companies as a group were boosting the perks and benefits they pay their chief executives.

The firms, accounting for more $350 billion in federal bailout funds, increased these perks and benefits 4 percent on average last year, according to an analysis of corporate disclosures filed in recent months.

Some chief executives, such as Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America and Jeffrey M. Peek of CIT Group, the major small-business lender now on the brink of bankruptcy, each received about $100,000 more than a year earlier for personal use of corporate jets. Others saw an increase in the value of chauffeured services, parking or personal security.

This at a time when unemployment hovers at 10%, with millions of other Americans underemployed or taking large salary cuts.

And the perk racket pales in comparison to the tens of millions in "bonuses" paid on Wall Street to people who come up with innovative financial gimmicks that contribute nothing to the economy, but much to their own wallets.

There is nothing new in this legal stealing.  It's just gotten much worse over the years, and is no ornament to free enterprise.  What is unique is that the chicanery is going on in the very firms that we, the American taxpayer, bailed out. 

We've seen some real visionaries on Wall Street, and in the corporate world - innovators who make real contributions.  We've also seen mediocre jerks, who just grab.  I'm afraid the jerks have been winning. 

It's time for a shareholder revolt.

October 20, 2009   Permalink

NOTHING LIKE THE POLITICS OF FEAR - AT 8:56 A.M. ET:  The British prime minister, likely to be gone by next year, gives us a dose of the new-time religion in employing the scare tactics now expected from the global-warming crowd.  From BBC:

The UK faces a "catastrophe" of floods, droughts and killer heat waves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change, the prime minister has warned.

If a religious leader said anything like that, he'd be accused of being a right-wing fundamentalist.

Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the "impasse."

He told the Major Economies Forum in London, which brings together 17 of the world's biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries, there was "no plan B."

World delegations meet in Copenhagen in December for talks on a new treaty.

COMMENT:  This comes at a time when more and more scientists are questioning the "science" behind global warming, a science that seems to be making some people hawking "alternative technologies" awfully rich.

What is lacking is definitive science.  What is also lacking is an understanding of the impact on the world's population, especially in poor countries, if Western economies are badly damaged by reckless "environmental" regulation. 

Let us by all means protect the environment and improve our technology.  But carefully.  Real science, not political science.

October 20, 2009   Permalink

A MILITARY VERDICT - AT 8:39 A.M. ET:  This story should be troubling to anyone concerned about national security, the morale of our military, and the future of the country.  The New York Times reports this morning on a growing anger toward President Obama within our military ranks.  The implications are not good:

WASHINGTON — Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision.

But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military.

A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room.

This is chilling:

“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”

COMMENT:  We have civilian control of the military.  No one wants it any other way.  But the commander-in-chief must be conscious of the morale of the men and women he commands.  If a commander loses the respect of his soldiers, he is all but washed up. 

Obama is losing that respect.  True, there are some officers, as the story reports, who understand his method and praise it, but there is a lack of leadership style in this White House, something that has to frustrate men in the field.  Combine that with Obama's endless apologizing for the United States, and you have a very bad mix.

There has been speculation that some top commanders may resign if the president pursues a strategy they believe can't work.  That may not change the strategy, but it can surely dent the armor of "The One."

October 20, 2009   Permalink

A NAME IN THE NEWS - AT 8:05 A.M. ET:  Howard Unruh has died.  Now, most readers have never heard that name, or may confuse it with the prominent Unruh family of past California politics.

But Howard Unruh was a killer.  On one day in 1949, in Camden, New Jersey, he gunned down a group of his neighbors in a crime that stunned the nation.

For members of the profession of journalism, of a certain age, though, Howard Unruh gave his name to one of the great pieces of reporting in American history.  When I was a student at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, decades ago, we studied the report of the Unruh killings written by Meyer "Mike" Berger of The New York Times, a report that won a Pulitzer Prize:

CAMDEN, N.J., Sept.6--Howard B. Unruh, 28 years old, a mild, soft-spoken veteran of many armored artillery battles in Italy, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, killed twelve persons with a war souvenir Luger pistol in his home block in East Camden this morning. He wounded four others.

Unruh, a slender, hollow-cheeked six-footer paradoxically devoted to scripture reading and to constant practice with firearms, had no previous history of mental illness but specialists indicated tonight that there was no doubt that he was a psychiatric case, and that he had secretly nursed a persecution complex for two years or more.

Mike Berger was a reporter.  He wasn't a "journalist."  He became legendary for his ability to quickly, and quietly, gather the facts of a story and present them, in a neutral way, to the public.  I have no idea what his politics were.  As a reader, I wasn't supposed to know. 

Those of us who were on The New York Times were proud to be associated, in any way, with the name of Meyer Berger...even those of us who arrived too late to know him.

He left school at 13.  He was educated in the streets and in sweaty city rooms.  He proved that you don't have to wave an Ivy League diploma to be wise, erudite, and reflective.  He wrote beautifully, in that style of a great reporter who took himself out of the story, yet could make you feel it:

The first war dead from Europe came home yesterday. The harbor was steeped in Sabbath stillness as they came in on the morning tide in 6,248 coffins in the hold of the transport Joseph V. Connolly. One coffin, borne from the ship in a caisson, moved through the city's streets to muffled drumbeats and slow cadenced marches, and 400,000 New Yorkers along the route and at a memorial service in Central Park paid it the tribute of reverent silence and unhidden tears…

Mike Berger would answer his phone at The Times with "Balloon tires."  It infuriated the publisher, who had enough sense not to do anything about his annoyance with Berger's irreverence.

We need reporters like Meyer Berger today.  We don't have many of them.  Today we have "journalists," which is one reason why newspapers are in such trouble.  You can always tell when a profession is dying by the way it changes its labeling to puff itself up.  Reporters become journalists.  Movies become "film" or "cinema."  Newspapers are dying, and so is Hollywood.

So Howard Unruh finally passed on.  Mike Berger left us in 1959.  It is Mike Berger who'll be remembered.

October 20,  2009   Permalink

MONDAY,  OCTOBER 19,  2009

THE EYES AND EARS OF THE PUBLIC, IN ACTION - AT 7:41 P.M. ET:  Our careful, check-it-out mainstream media has had another glorious day, informing the American people.  The Politico reports with pride:

In a dramatic shift, the Chamber of Commerce announced Monday that it is throwing its support behind climate change legislation making its way through the U.S. Senate.

Only it didn’t.

An email press release announcing the change is a hoax, say Chamber officials.

Several media organizations fell for it.

A CNBC anchor interrupted herself mid-sentence Monday morning to announce that the network had “breaking news,” then cut away to reporter Hampton Pearson, who read from the fake press release.

Pearson quickly followed up with a second report saying the “so-called bulletin” was an “absolute hoax.” Smelling a rat, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow demanded to know whether the White House had been involved.

In a story posted Monday morning, Reuters declared: “The Chamber of Commerce said on Monday it will no longer opposes climate change legislation, but wants the bill to include a carbon tax.”

Reuters updated the story to acknowledge the hoax, but it was too late: The Washington Post and the New York Times had already posted the fake story on their Web sites.

COMMENT:  This, from a profession that recently was fact-checking a Saturday Night Live sketch critical of President Obama.

Now, the key question:  Would the press have run with this story had a left-wing organization suddenly endorsed a right-wing policy?  What do you think the answer is? 

October 19, 2009   Permalink

ANOTHER EMBARRASSMENT - AT 7:10 P.M. ET:  The mainstream media, which normally becomes hysterical at any perceived threat to its freedom, if the threat is from the domestic right, has been remarkably casual about a real threat, supported, to our embarrassment, by the Obama administration.  Law professor Jonathan Turley writes:

Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law. It came from the most unlikely of places: the United States.

While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any "negative racial and religious stereotyping." The exception was made as part of a resolution supporting free speech that passed this month, but it is the exception, not the rule that worries civil libertarians.

And for good reason.  This is part of a campaign, normally waged by the left, to restrict any speech that favored parties don't like - simply by labeling it as "hate speech" or speech that creates "a hostile environment."  On college campuses, logic like this has been used to introduce speech codes that basically ban anything a particular group might find "offensive."  Thus, the listener becomes the censor, with the legal power to destroy.

In the resolution, the administration aligned itself with Egypt, which has long been criticized for prosecuting artists, activists and journalists for insulting Islam.

Hey, it's a different perspective, a different narrative, Jonathan.  Let's get with the program.

While not expressly endorsing blasphemy prosecutions, the administration departed from other Western allies in supporting efforts to balance free speech against the protecting of religious groups.

Unbelievable.  Incredible.  Again, the United States, under Obama, is softer than the Europeans.  And many reports say the Europeans are getting worried that American foreign policy is turning into pillow talk.

This is simply another signal that the Obama administration is taking the United States in unprecedented directions, directions that contradict our most basic values.

October 19, 2009   Permalink

AN ACTUAL DECIDER, AND HE LIVES IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD - AT 6:01 P.M. ET:  Silvio Canto Jr., on whose radio show I often appear, alerts us to the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, who's showing the president of the United States a thing or two about making decisions:

Can President Calderon give President Obama some lessons in leadership and decision-making?

Isn't it nice to have a president who makes decisions?

It's a clear contrast to having one who votes present!

At the very least, could President Calderon teach a lesson about the excesses of public sector labor unions?

Silvio quotes the Wall Street Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady:

"Eight days ago, just after midnight on a Sunday morning, Mexican President Felipe Calderón instructed federal police to take over the operations of the state-owned electricity monopoly, Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LyFC), which serves Mexico City and parts of surrounding states. The company's assets will stay in the hands of the government but will now be run by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), a national state-owned utility and the major supplier of LyFC's energy.

"The net effect of the move is to dethrone 42,000 members of the Mexican Union of Electricians, which had won benefits over the decades to make Big Three auto workers in Detroit blush. When the liquidation is complete, it is expected that the company will employ about 8,000. To appreciate the magnitude of Mr. Calderón's decision, think of Ronald Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers—only bigger. As one internationally renowned Mexican economist remarked on Sunday, it is 'the most important act of government in 20 years.'...

"...LyFC losses were mounting because the union's productivity is a fraction of that of CFE and because the company balance sheet has been hemorrhaging due to technical problems as well as electricity theft.  Its costs were twice its revenues..."

Silvio continues:

In other words, LyFC was not in the power business.

Instead, it was another failure looking for a subsidy from the people who pay taxes!

We congratulate President Calderon for being decisive!

Beyond Mexican domestic policy, the LyFC story is another little window into what happens when the state takes over something that should be private and operating in the free market.

Yes, take a good look at LyFC in Mexico.

Yes, this is what happens when the state runs something.

As Ms. O'Grady writes, "There's a lesson here somewhere for Mr. Obama."  The problem is, Mr. Obama hasn't learned many lessons very well.  And, as for his decisiveness, do we laugh now, or cry later?

October 19, 2009   Permalink

AS AN ANNIVERSARY APPROACHES - AT 10:24 A.M. ET:  We're approaching the first anniversary of President Obama's election victory.  (Okay, scream now.)  But the numbers of last year are not the numbers today.  Rasmussen reports that the president continues to be in trouble, and can't seem to get out of it:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 30% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -10. This is the fourth straight day the Approval Index has been in negative double digits (see trends).

Support for the health care plan proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats is down to 42%. Fifty-four percent (54%) are opposed.

COMMENT:  There doesn't seem to be anything on the horizon that can improve those numbers.  We will soon be starting the active campaign, leading up to the 2010 midterms.  It is possible, just possible, that Barack Obama, the anointed one just yesterday, could prove to be a drag on the Democratic ticket.

October 19, 2009    Permalink

THE IMPENDING CRISIS II - AT 10:01 A.M. ET:  It's been standard practice for the current administration to blame BUSH (!!) for every problem it encounters, including drafty windows in the White House.  Why, if it weren't for George W. Bush, Obama could simply go around cutting ribbons.

It's not a new gimmick.  For decades the Democratic Party ran against Herbert Hoover.   

Reader Jean Spik alerts us to a column by David Shribman, in the normally pro-Obama Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, signaling that the old excuses simply don't stand up any longer.  It is now the Obama administration, and maybe Rahm Emanuel should slip a note to the boss alerting him to that unpleasant fact:

There is a moment...in every administration, when the burdens of the predecessor are transferred to the present occupant of the White House. For a while the upheaval in Cuba was Dwight D. Eisenhower's problem. The day in April 1961 when the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed in confusion it became John F. Kennedy's problem (and part of his presidential identity), even though he was reading from the Eisenhower playbook. For weeks, even months, Vietnam was a problem to be blamed on Kennedy, or Eisenhower, or the French, but eventually it became Lyndon Johnson's war and, following that, Richard Nixon's.

Mr. Obama's...moment came in the last week or so, though it is impossible to specify the precise moment it arrived.

And...

Now, as the Obama era unfolds, there increasingly is less patience for the familiar arguments that the war in Iraq started in obfuscation, that the conflict in Afghanistan was ignored for too long, that a lethal combination of lax regulation and laissez-faire fever pushed the economy to the brink, and that Iran spun out of control while Americans focused on lesser threats in the region. All that might be true, but it can no longer be part of the Obama repertoire.

And...

For now that the Bush era is in the past and we are clearly in the Obama years, the president faces new tests, offering us new opportunities for reaping new insights about the man who occupies the Oval Office. Indeed, moments like this are unusually revelatory. At the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy admitted a mistake and changed course. At the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson hunkered down and continued the direction the Kennedy administration had set out. At those moments, we learned something important about both men.

This is the context in which to view President Obama's much-maligned decision to change the nation's anti-missile strategy by abandoning missiles and radar in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of a sea-based defense.

Now the president faces similar questions about Afghanistan and Iraq -- and about the American economy at home.

Finally...

With unemployment at 9.8 percent, the highest in a quarter-century, it no longer is enough to blame President Bush. It's Mr. Obama's problem now.

COMMENT:  But will he see it as his problem?  This is  president whose main weapon is his mouth.  He seems to feel that he can talk his way out of anything, and talk his way into the presidency, which he's done.  He does not, unlike Kennedy, admit mistakes.  His vendetta against Fox News indicates that he's running, as several commentators have charged, the most thin-skinned administration in recent memory. 

It may be Obama's moment.  But he has a tendency to turn the clock ahead.

October 19, 2009   Permalink

THE IMPENDING CRISIS - AT 8:28 A.M. ET:  I get the sense, in surveying news and commentary around the internet, that even liberal writers sense that there's an impending crisis in the Obama administration.  The president's obvious lack of leadership can no longer be hidden.  His inability to sense the difference between campaigning and governing is a public embarrassment.  These things are bad enough.  But, increasingly, we get the feeling of a growing fear - not annoyance, or frustration, or disappointment - but fear.  The president may well, through his dithering, and his adolescent view of the world, be putting us in danger. 

Reader Bart Rogers reminds us that some of the most perceptive work on Obama is being done by British writers.  Toby Harnden of London's Telegraph reports on something that should scare anyone with a knowledge of recent American history - Obama's dependence on Joe Biden, whose track record on foreign policy is something only a mother could admire.  Harnden's piece is delightfully called, "Joe Biden: the worrying rise of Barack Obama’s Mr Wrong":

Want to know how to deal with a momentous issue of war or grand strategy? You could do a lot worse than check out what Vice-President Joe Biden thinks – and plump for the opposite.

Mr Biden was chosen as Barack Obama's running mate last August because he was old, white and supposedly knew a lot about foreign policy. I say "supposedly" because really Mr Biden's overseas expertise amounted to having spent a long time as chairman of the Senate foreign affairs committee, knowing the names of lots of world leaders, and being able to josh around amiably with them during congressional junkets across the globe.

Feeling safer?

The real difficulty with Mr Biden, however, is his judgment.

On all the big questions, he has been – to put it politely – on the wrong side of history. In 1990, he voted against American forces expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. He voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and advocated splitting it into three states along ethnic lines. He opposed the Iraq troop surge of 2007 that pacified the country and rescued the US from the jaws of defeat.

That's only the start.  Going back to the 1970s, Biden's judgment on foreign policy has been consistently wrong. 

Now, Mr Biden is pushing a policy of what he terms "counter-terrorism plus" – a scheme which involves a much smaller military presence in Afghanistan, with al-Qaeda elements being targeted at long range by military drones and smart missiles.

This runs entirely against the counter-insurgency doctrine convincingly outlined by Gen Stanley McChrystal, who wants an extra 40,000 troops to enable NATO forces to protect and influence the people while mentoring the Afghan army and police, and gathering intelligence on the ground.

The problem is that Mr Obama may now be listening to Mr Biden.

You'd think he'd know Biden's record.  But maybe he agrees with it.

Mr Obama's inclination on troop levels seems to be to seek a middle way – a "splitting the baby" option that could be the worst of all possible worlds.

The usual vultures are circling:

The Left, sensing that Mr Obama is wavering and beginning to rethink his campaign contention that Afghanistan was the "good war" as opposed to Mr Bush's evil Iraq adventure, is throwing its lot in with Mr Biden. There's a solidifying conventional wisdom in Washington that Mr Biden's star is in the ascendant.

And that should worry all of us.  I think Harnden gets it right.  Hamlet is listening to the wrong court jester.

October 19, 2009   Permalink

WAIT A SECOND, DON'T THEY KNOW THAT "THE ONE" HAS BEEN ELECTED? - AT 8:12 A.M. ET:  The Washington Post runs an extremely disturbing story, and warning, about an increase in terrorist recruitment, coinciding almost precisely with the coming of the Age of Obama. 

I'm confused.  I thought everyone was laying down their weapons and singing "Kumbaya."  I must have been watching MSNBC. 

The report:

BERLIN -- Midway through a propaganda video released last month by a group calling itself the German Taliban, a surprise guest made an appearance: a cleanshaven, muscular gunman sporting the alias Abu Ibrahim the American.

The gunman did not speak but wore military fatigues and waved his rifle as subtitles identified him as an American. The video contained a stream of threats against Germany if it did not withdraw its troops from the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. Although the American's part in the film lasted only a few seconds, it has alarmed German and U.S. intelligence officials, who are still puzzling over his background, his real identity and how he became involved with the terrorist group.

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits -- including Americans -- are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

COMMENT:  The Western recruits can then return and fade into society, indistinguishable from other citizens.  They pose a severe danger because they're virtually impossible to detect.

Apparently, neither these recruits, nor the people who train them, have been influenced by the "new atmosphere" brought to Washington by Barack Obama.  Shock

October 19, 2009   Permalink

ANOTHER GREAT BENEFIT OF OBAMA'S "OUTREACH" - AT 7:58 A.M. ET:  Iran appears to be bothered by a weekend attack that killed leading members of its Revolutionary Guard, the real power in the country.  From Fox News:

The chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard on Monday accused the United States, Britain and Pakistan of having links with the Sunni militants responsible for a homicide bombing that killed five senior Guard commanders and 37 others.

"Behind this scene are the American and British intelligence apparatus and there will have to be retaliatory measures to punish them," Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said, vowing a "crushing" response.

Could be rhetoric, but with Iran you never know.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said those behind Sunday's bombing are hiding across the border in Pakistan, and in a phone call with his Pakistani counterpart on Monday he demanded their arrest.

Iran also made clear its nuclear intentions, for the 101st time, so Obama might finally understand.  From Reuters:

Iran will further enrich uranium itself if nuclear talks fail with the UN watchdog, Russia, France and the United States in Vienna on Monday, an Iranian official said.

"If the talks do not bring about Iran's desired result ... we will start to further enrich uranium ourselves," Ali Shirzadian, spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told Iran's official IRNA news agency a few hours before the talks start.

The UN nuclear watchdog will host the meeting to discuss details of sending Iran's low enriched uranium abroad for further processing and return to Tehran.

The issue was agreed "in principle" between Iran and world powers in Geneva on Oct. 1. But Iranian authorities have so far shown no public hints of flexibility over Iran's nuclear row with the West.

The UN Security Council has imposed three rounds of sanctions on Iran for refusing to stop its sensitive enrichment work.

Shirzadian said Iran had no intention of suspending its enrichment.

"Buying nuclear fuel from abroad does not mean Iran will stop its uranium enrichment activities inside the country," Shirzadian said.

COMMENT:  Another famous victory for the student government president in the White House. 

We are going nowhere fast, but Mr. Obama's eye seems to be on his Nobel acceptance speech in December, not on the real world the rest of us must live in.

October 19,  2009   Permalink