Thank goodness for professional journalists
I’ve noted before the habit the media has of using “supposedly” to cast doubt on terror charges in situations where the neutral “allegedly” is called for. Another obvious gambit is to use the word “claimed,” rather than “said” or “stated,” to cast doubt on a speaker’s assertion.
In this case, it’s a military report that violence has fallen dramatically off in Iraq since the surge began:
Violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level for 18 months, the deputy American commander claimed today.
The authors can’t really find a substantive objection to the numbers, so they just kind of randomly throw this out:
But US Democrats point out that much of this analysis is contradicted by independent studies, while the anti-war group Moveon.org branded Gen Petraeus as “General Betray Us” in a full page newspaper advertisement which accused him of “cooking the books” for the White House.
… again confirming the sneaking suspicion that Democrats see themselves as the enemy in this war, and randomly repeating the baseless slander on General Patreaus from MoveOn.org.
Thank goodness for professional journalists. Who else would take a press release from the military and frame it in hostile, mindless drivel for our reading pleasure?
Hillary’s slander pander
Clinton voted against a symbolic Senate measure condemning MoveOn.org’s slander of General Patreaus. More pandering to the Hard Left fringe.
MoveOn’s “General Betray Us” ad, the resolution states, “impugns the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all the members of the United States Armed Forces.”
Clinton and Dodd voted against it, and can prepare for some Netroots love. Also, at this point there’s nobody stirring on the right in the primary, though you can expect to hear about this piece of symbolic politics in the general, if Hillary’s the nominee.
Biden and Obama were absent.
A Sister Souljah moment that wasn’t
Richard Cohen, a reliable but generally thoughtful liberal, is disappointed at Hillary’s caving on the MoveOn.org slam on General Patraeus. Hillary of all people — whose husband Bill made a defining break with his Sister Souljah moment in 1992, in which he repudiated that grotesque racist comments of a hip hop queen, and thereby solidified his credentials at the center — should have known better.
Here’s what Cohen has to say:
The MoveOn.org ad was the moment for Clinton to rise above hackdom. It was a moment for her to insist that the business of politics, not to mention governing, is made even uglier and more difficult when people who merely differ with one another resort to insult. It was a moment for her to say that an Army general, under orders and attempting to fulfill a mission, should not be so casually trashed - especially since she herself has been on the other side of the Iraq war issue and said things she must now regret. And it was a moment for her to trot out her favorite phrase and use it, not in her own defense for once, but in defense of someone else. That moment is gone now - maybe because for Hillary Clinton it never arrived in the first place.
Intriguingly, the MoveOn add was less a challenge to the Republicans or the General than it was to the Democratic candidates. It was a gauntlet thrown down by the Hard Left to the Democratic field, and none but Joe Biden had the guts to brush it aside.
Syria knocks off another one
It ain’t easy being an anti-Syrian politician in Lebanon. Not advisable. That’s the message Syria is sending, rather emphatically:
An anti-Syrian lawmaker who had just returned to Lebanon two days ago from refuge abroad was killed today along with six other people by a bomb that rocked a Christian neighborhood of the capital, security officials said.
Antoine Ghanem is the eighth prominent anti-Syrian figure to be assassinated since 2005.
Which explains why Nancy Pelosi visited Damascus, rather than Beruit. Much safer there.
This is news?
INDIANOLA, Iowa, Sept. 16 — Appearing Sunday at a mini-Democratic convention of sorts in a field, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that if she is elected she will not wait until her inauguration to begin acting as president.
Duh. In 1993, she hardly waited till her husband’s inauguration to begin acting as president.
Rorschach test
Here’s a quick inkblot test. I give you two phrases, you tell me what comes to mind: “give a village challenge” and “rich donors.” Don’t know about you, but I immediately thought “Hillary Clinton,” combining “takes a village” and “Norman Hsu/Mark Rich.” Here’s the headline:
‘Give a village’ challenge to rich donors
Turns out it wasn’t some new way of combining Hillary’s faux social activism with her genuine campaign cash drive. It’s actually a project that gives specific badly needed things to poor communities in India and Africa.
Rudy hits Hillary’s hypocrisy
That’s a plan?
Picking on Obama’s foreign policy follies is like shooting fish in a barrel. Take this beaut, for example:
In a speech Wednesday, Obama offered his most detailed plan yet for getting troops out of Iraq, calling for the withdrawal of at least one of the 20 brigades (each made up of about 3,500 soldiers) in Iraq every month starting now, with all combat troops out by the end of next year.
I always thought a plan meant some sense of objective and a strategery for getting there. If his objective is to get the troops out, come what may, why straggle them out like that? Where is the logic of that arbitrary figure? What is the objective of those lingering behind?
At what point in this “plan” are the remaining troops simply inadequate to do anything but guard the airport for the next brigade waiting for his absurd schedule? And at what point is the sectarian genocide throughout the country we have left behind so terrifying that we begin pumping troops back in, as we recoil in shame at what we have done?
Joe Biden has a plan: partition the country and build sustainable self-governing sections. Obama’s proposal is not a plan at all. It’s an arbitrary number that bears no connection to any objective, strategy or any reality or contingency.
I used to think Obama was simply naive and inexperienced. I am increasingly convinced that he is dangerously and irredeemably shallow and unfit.
Utterly beside the point
I find it continuously bizarre that so many seemingly smart people are so obsessed with how we got into this war that they are utterly indifferent to what happens after we get out. One of the chief offenders here is Barack Obama, who every time he opens his mouth confirms that he is unfit for command:
As Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) put it in a statement sent minutes after Bush stopped speaking: “It is long past time to end a war that never should have started.”
Look, I’m willing to grant that, in hindsight, this war wasn’t the most brilliantly planned or even most necessary foreign policy adventure ever. To say the least. But you can stipulate that 2003 was as screw up without concluding in 2007 that retreat and defeat are the answer. In fact, the they are two utterly different questions.
Is Obama really so dense as to not realize this?
Rudy calls out Hillary’s suspended disbelief
Got $65K? NYTimes is running a Fall Sale:
A conservative group, Freedom’s Watch, which supports Bush’s Iraq war strategy, also plans a print ad in the Times and has demanded the same $65,000 (€46,772) rate that the liberal group paid for its full-page ad. Giuliani is getting the same rate.
Hillary, who sat in the committee room circulating jr. high school notes with her pals looking for “good bites” and “best questions,” tipped her hand with her absurd suspension of disbelief, motivated by her deep concern for pancakes. Rudy’s not amused:
Krauthammer: Al Qaeda in Iraq IS Al Qaeda
Great column here by Krauthammer slicing many key points with his cold psychiatric scalpel. Key take away for me: the canard that Iraq is not about terror and Al Qaeda has got to go:
Having poisoned one country and been expelled from it (Afghanistan), al-Qaeda seized upon post-Hussein instability to establish itself in the very heart of the Arab Middle East — Sunni Iraq. Yet now, in front of all the world, Iraq’s Sunnis are, to use the biblical phrase, vomiting out al-Qaeda. This is a defeat and humiliation in the extreme — an Arab Muslim population rejecting al-Qaeda so violently that it allies itself in battle with the infidel, the foreigner, the occupier.
Anti-war dems [like that laughable lightweight Obama] hammer, hammer and hammer on the notion that because Iraq was not a center for Al Qaeda in 2003 that the battle in Iraq today is not war on terror.
They are still fighting and refighting the decision to go into Iraq. And they are so intent on finally winning that battle, they categorically refuse to recognize facts on the ground. It’s a psychopathology that calls for a psychiatrist. Fortunately, Krauthammer is in the house.
Hillary’s passionate about pancakes
Great post here on Newsday about Hillary’s dust-up with the General:
In the Slate/Yahoo/Huffington Post “mashup” with presidential candidates, moderator Charlie Rose asked Hillary whether she was questioning Petraeus’ veracity when she told him his testimony required a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
Her response, which was basically no, began this way: “No, what I said was meant to convey my very strong feeling that no matter how flat the pancake, there’s always two sides.”
We do agree that pancakes have two sides. But, has anybody ever heard that particular analogy before? And does anybody have any idea what it’s supposed to mean, in the context?
As one of the readers there commented, it sounds like a waffle. But I’m still working with the pancake. Do thick pancakes have more obvious dual sides? What does flatness have to do with two-sidedness? And what does any of this have to do with General Patraeus?
Her comment sounds like one of those inscrutable New Yorker cartoons: “Cartoons are like gossamer and one doesn’t dissect gossamer.”
Iran’s meddling in Iraq: substance vs. symbol
The substance, as anyone watching carefully has known for many months, is that Iran is meddling heavily in Iraq, intent on undermining our mission there. General Petraeus confirms that in striking testimony:
“The evidence is very, very clear,” Petraeus said. He cited documents discovered during the capture in March of Qais Khazali, a Shiite Muslim militant with ties to the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the arrest of a deputy commander of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite group supported by Iran. Petraeus said the evidence links Iran to an attack in Karbala in January that resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.
Under interrogation, Khazali was asked if he could have carried out that attack without Iranian support, Petraeus said in the news conference. “He literally throws up his hands and laughs and says, ‘Of course not,’ ” the general said.
The symbol, for the rabid anti-war left, is that Iran cannot be meddling in Iraq, because if they were it would serve as a rationale for U.S. action against Iran and that cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed. So in their tail-wagging-dog logic, they simply stipulate away the uncomfortable and obvious facts.
A sucker born every minute
As the subprime mortgage crunch drags on, news comes out today that Norman Hsu–the Everyready Rabbit of Democratic party campaign cash–somehow walked off with $40 million in cash from some idiotic investment firm that failed to figure out that the guy had pulled a similar stunt way back in 1991.
[WSJ] reports that a company run by Norman Hsu, who donated nearly $2 million to Democratic candidates since 2004 — including presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton — recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, one of the creators of the fabled Woodstock rock festival in 1969.
Now, that $40 million is missing, Rosenman reportedly told investors this week.
Hsu reportedly told Rosenman the funds provided by Source Financing Investors would be used to manufacture apparel in China for top designers such as Gucci and Prada, and would yield a 40 percent profit, according to documents examined by the newspaper.
Rosenman now says that when Source Financing tried to cash checks from Hsu’s company, Components Ltd., the checks bounced.
Rosenman reportedly now wants Hsu to repay the entire $40 million.
Good luck with that. My sense is that Norm is a bit tied up right now.
I guess the lesson is never invest funds with someone who fried his brain at Woodstock.
Bereft of ideas, devoid of substance
Any ideas about best questions?
Good bites.
[This pic is not photoshopped. HT: Doug Ross, via Don Surber.]
Good thing he’s not running for president
At least, not really running, eh? Dennis Kucinich just voted against commemorating 9/11. His explanation sounds like that of a dysfunctional old pill who turns everything, no matter how tangential, into an opportunity to remind someone of some affront. Relatives, those who don’t avoid him outright, understand to avoid anything that prompts the reflex:
“I believe the best way to honor the memory of those who died on Sept. 11 is to tell the truth of what the administration did in the wake of Sept. 11,” Kucinich said in a statement. “The Bush administration launched a war against Iraq, conflating the true tragedy of September 11 with lies about weapons of mass destruction.”
Obama disses the grown-ups
Obama? Obbbaaammmma! Put away you compact and look at the camera. It’s your turn to ask your “questions.”
It must be oddly frustrating for a Senator and Ambassador steeped in experience to be cross-examined by the crotchety mediocrities and wet-behind-the-ear pop icons who comprise the U.S. Senate.
Obama, for example, launches a long, mind-numbing tirade retracing ground from 2003 to the present–so as to remind us all that he didn’t vote for the war. Then he “stipulates” a handful of inane stipulations to the effect that the surge ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. He stipulates that the success in Anbar has been political, not military [I’m not kidding; I think he was reading his talking points upside down], ignoring the inextricable bond between the two.
At the end of this long, rambling pirouette, Obama finally asks one question, which merely serves to demonstrate that he was not been listening all along:
OBAMA: And if we’re there the same place a year from now, can you please describe for me any circumstances in which you would make a different recommendation and suggest it is now time for us to start withdrawing our troops? Any scenario? Any set of benchmarks that had not been met?
CROCKER: Senator, I described for Senator Sununu a little bit ago some of the things that I think are going to be very important as we move ahead.
OBAMA: Can you repeat those? And I know I’m out of time, so I’m just going to ask for both the general and the ambassador to answer.
Memo to the intellectual lightweight with the thin resume: the least you can do is listen and take notes when the grown-ups are speaking.
Voldemort in a new body
David Broder on the meaning of a Hillary Clinton presidency:
But one thing is absolutely clear. Her marriage is the central fact in her life, and this partnership of Bill and Hillary Clinton is indissoluble. She cannot function without him, and he would not have been president without her. If she becomes president, he will play as central a role in her presidency as she did in his. And that is something the country will have to ponder.
For many, Hillary must be viewed as a way as symbolically undoing the Bush presidency, just as the election of Bush II in 2000 avenged his father’s defeat of 1992.
The other rest of the country must be scratching its head, trying to figure out how the impeached Perjurer in Chief is again on the verge of returning to the West Wing. What does it take to put a stake through this guy?
Bill Richardson is profoundly unserious
With some of the off-beat candidates, you ask, “why aren’t they in the top tier?” With others, you ask, “what are they smoking?”
Bill Richardson, erstwhile governor of New Mexico and UN ambassador under Clinton, is nuts. He actually thinks, or says he thinks, that the way to get the Iraqis to work out their differences is for us to abandon them ASAP:
Our troops have done everything they were asked to do with courage and professionalism, but they cannot win someone else’s civil war. So long as American troops are in Iraq, reconciliation among Iraqi factions is postponed. Leaving forces there enables the Iraqis to delay taking the necessary steps to end the violence. And it prevents us from using diplomacy to bring in other nations to help stabilize and rebuild the country.
The only way I can see the violence “ending,” according to the Richardson plan, is when one side has slaughtered the other or both are slaughtered to exhaustion.
A man like that was a perfect fit at the UN. They understand each other.
What’s funnier than a school board on graft?
Paraphrasing Kissinger, the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. Michelle Malkin has the lowdown on the small time crooks swaggering around with their big payoffs in the FBI sting. Don’t get me wrong. Some of this involves big time stuff–city mayors, etc.. And the culture of corruption on NJ seems to run deep indeed. But even still, the pettiness of it all is a riot:
On or about November 8, 2006, defendant McCORMICK was interviewed at the FBI office in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During the interview, defendant McCORMICK acknowledged that he had received the $3,500 wire transfer discussed in paragraph 13. In explaining why he had received these funds, defendant McCORMICK stated that he told Official 1 that he needed $2,000 to $3,000 to renovate his basement so that the Pleasantville Democratic Club had a place to hold its meetings. Defendant McCORMICK further stated that he then received a telephone call from Official 1, who asked defendant McCORMICK whether he wanted the funds by cash or check. Defendant McCORMICK said that he
instructed Official 1 that he wanted the money transferred into his account.
Mess of pottage indeed.
