Politics Blog

William Safire gives readers a rundown of the rudimentary formation of an Iraqi government, then ends with the reality of the situation:

The purpose of all this jockeying is to form an organization capable of holding an election in a country beset by Saddam loyalists and terrorists determined to block that election. This will take Iraqi politicians courageous enough to risk their lives, sensible enough to work closely with coalition generals to protect the voters from the killers, and persuasive enough to enlist many more Iraqis to join the fight for freedom.

Present Iraqi leaders like Alawi are clearly asserting themselves. We will not like all they insist upon. But they are lurching toward a democratic decision, and despite the hand-wringing of Gloomy Gus & Company, that’s real progress.

— Lorie Byrd

The silliest thing I have heard lately is the claim that Bush is actually following Kerry’s Iraq policy now. Nancy Pelosi made it yesterday on Meet the Press (just after rationalizing her venomous rhetoric against a sitting President during war by accusing Bush 43 of saying nasty things about his father’s 1991 actions in Iraq – I am not making this up). She bases the claim that Bush is stealing Kerry’s policy on the fact that Bush is involving the UN in the formation of the Iraqi government. This is something he has said he would do all along. The only time it was seriously in question was when the UN turned tail and ran after the terrorist attack on their headquarters in Iraq last year. (I personally believe the Oil for Food debacle destroys any credibility the UN has, especially in Iraq, but Bush has not allowed that to deter his efforts to involve them in the new Iraq.) So why the push to have Kerry linked in any way to the current Iraq policy? Maybe Kerry’s supporters are beginning to fear that the June 30 handover will, in fact, take place and Iraqis will be on their way to democracy by the fall, so they are setting up any success to be seen as the result of policies advocated by Kerry.

On the other hand, Democrats and most of the media are making sure that all aspects of the war effort are described in negative terms. The term I hear used most often to describe the war from Democrats and “historians” and experts that are presented by the media as impartial, is “this mess”. They say it as if any war could be anything but a mess. (Read Mark Steyn linked to below on that subject.) I wonder which words were most used during the Clinton years to describe Mogadishu. (Maybe I should research that.) I wonder how they would compare the progress made in Iraq in just over a year to that in Mogadishu or Haiti, or even Kosovo. Things there aren’t exactly perfect these days.

Whether Iraq is seen as a success or failure in the fall, Democrats are trying to set the stage so they can say they predicted it all along.

– Lorie Byrd

Drudge’s link to this story says “STANDING OVATION FOR RUMSFELD IN D.C”. However, I was unable to find a reference to a standing ovation for Rumsfeld anywhere in the Reuters story by Cate Hescox. What I did find were these quotes:

Bush, who avoided combat in Vietnam while serving as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard, has fashioned himself as a war president for his re-election campaign against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran…Public concern about Iraq has pushed Bush’s job approval ratings to new lows and stirred calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom the president defends…Appearing on stage with the embattled Pentagon chief, Bush lauded the character of U.S. military personnel…

So Bush “fashions” himself a war president. Newsflash to Reuters – we are at war and he is the president! I guess if Reuters was fair and balanced, then I would be able to check back in the archives and find this sentence in a story about Clinton on Memorial Day in 1996. “Clinton, who avoided combat in Vietnam by dodging the draft, has fashioned himself as a Commander-in-Chief for his re-election campaign against Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, a decorated WWII veteran who still bears the scars and is partially disabled from wounds suffered in combat.” I won’t even bother checking; it isn’t there. If they were really fair they would have described the contempt about 90 percent of those in the military had for President Clinton, which was easy to see in the difference between the reaction he got from any military crowd and the reactions Bob Dole received. Many in the media must think that if they don’t tell us about it, we won’t know it happened. That may have been true before the internet, but those days are no more.

– Lorie Byrd

William Safire gives readers a rundown of the rudimentary formation of an Iraqi government, then ends with the reality of the situation:

The purpose of all this jockeying is to form an organization capable of holding an election in a country beset by Saddam loyalists and terrorists determined to block that election. This will take Iraqi politicians courageous enough to risk their lives, sensible enough to work closely with coalition generals to protect the voters from the killers, and persuasive enough to enlist many more Iraqis to join the fight for freedom.

Present Iraqi leaders like Alawi are clearly asserting themselves. We will not like all they insist upon. But they are lurching toward a democratic decision, and despite the hand-wringing of Gloomy Gus & Company, that’s real progress.

— Lorie Byrd

The silliest thing I have heard lately is the claim that Bush is actually following Kerry’s Iraq policy now. Nancy Pelosi made it yesterday on Meet the Press (just after rationalizing her venomous rhetoric against a sitting President during war by accusing Bush 43 of saying nasty things about his father’s 1991 actions in Iraq – I am not making this up). She bases the claim that Bush is stealing Kerry’s policy on the fact that Bush is involving the UN in the formation of the Iraqi government. This is something he has said he would do all along. The only time it was seriously in question was when the UN turned tail and ran after the terrorist attack on their headquarters in Iraq last year. (I personally believe the Oil for Food debacle destroys any credibility the UN has, especially in Iraq, but Bush has not allowed that to deter his efforts to involve them in the new Iraq.) So why the push to have Kerry linked in any way to the current Iraq policy? Maybe Kerry’s supporters are beginning to fear that the June 30 handover will, in fact, take place and Iraqis will be on their way to democracy by the fall, so they are setting up any success to be seen as the result of policies advocated by Kerry.

On the other hand, Democrats and most of the media are making sure that all aspects of the war effort are described in negative terms. The term I hear used most often to describe the war from Democrats and “historians” and experts that are presented by the media as impartial, is “this mess”. They say it as if any war could be anything but a mess. (Read Mark Steyn linked to below on that subject.) I wonder which words were most used during the Clinton years to describe Mogadishu. (Maybe I should research that.) I wonder how they would compare the progress made in Iraq in just over a year to that in Mogadishu or Haiti, or even Kosovo. Things there aren’t exactly perfect these days.

Whether Iraq is seen as a success or failure in the fall, Democrats are trying to set the stage so they can say they predicted it all along.

– Lorie Byrd

Drudge’s link to this story says “STANDING OVATION FOR RUMSFELD IN D.C”. However, I was unable to find a reference to a standing ovation for Rumsfeld anywhere in the Reuters story by Cate Hescox. What I did find were these quotes:

Bush, who avoided combat in Vietnam while serving as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard, has fashioned himself as a war president for his re-election campaign against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran…Public concern about Iraq has pushed Bush’s job approval ratings to new lows and stirred calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom the president defends…Appearing on stage with the embattled Pentagon chief, Bush lauded the character of U.S. military personnel…

So Bush “fashions” himself a war president. Newsflash to Reuters – we are at war and he is the president! I guess if Reuters was fair and balanced, then I would be able to check back in the archives and find this sentence in a story about Clinton on Memorial Day in 1996. “Clinton, who avoided combat in Vietnam by dodging the draft, has fashioned himself as a Commander-in-Chief for his re-election campaign against Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, a decorated WWII veteran who still bears the scars and is partially disabled from wounds suffered in combat.” I won’t even bother checking; it isn’t there. If they were really fair they would have described the contempt about 90 percent of those in the military had for President Clinton, which was easy to see in the difference between the reaction he got from any military crowd and the reactions Bob Dole received. Many in the media must think that if they don’t tell us about it, we won’t know it happened. That may have been true before the internet, but those days are no more.

– Lorie Byrd

Friday night on Dennis Miller’s show on CNBC, Gary Sinise appeared to promote Operation Iraqi Children. He brought some of the many pictures he has that he says show the good news that is happening everyday in Iraq. He has been there two or three times, and he was in some of the pictures. In addition to being a heck of a good actor, he appears to be a genuinely kind and decent person, as well.

Dennis Miller’s show can be quirky and doesn’t get the ratings of the other cable news chat shows (it is on CNBC, after all), but I love it. Last night in addition to Sinise and several other guests, on his “varsity panel”, Doug McIntyre talked about his work on the animated series “Liberty’s Kids”. He said he actually sat in on a conversation with PBS people who asked him if they couldn’t somehow do the show without including the references to or images of guns. McIntyre said it was necessary to explain to them that the series was based on the American Revolution, after all. He said something else about how we didn’t defeat the British by throwing parades at them or something to that effect. (I was laughing so hard at that point that I may have misunderstood him, and since the website doesn’t provide transcripts, I wasn’t able to double check it.) Anyway, if you haven’t seen his show, or haven’t seen it recently, give it a chance. It is definitely different.

— Lorie Byrd

In a brilliant piece at opinionjournal.com, P.J.O’Rourke (in his uniquely humorous way) imagines how the world might look if America did as the anti-war protestors, France and many others suggest and just recused ourselves from our international responsibilities and commitments. Don’t miss the last paragraph where O’Rourke reminds us how this country we are told the world now hates, is still the place everyone in the world wants to come.

— Lorie Byrd

Read this entire column by Mark Steyn because he is brilliant, and in this Memorial Day piece he is even more brilliant than usual. In case you don’t believe me, here is an excerpt:

More than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War – or about 1.8 percent of the population. Today, if 1.8 percent of the population were killed in war, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.

But that’s the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren’t a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screwups worth re-examining, but they weren’t a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn’t lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.

There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites – from the deranged former vice president down – want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it’s pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we’re supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.

Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America. Even in its grief, my part of New Hampshire understood that 141 years ago. We should, too.

— Lorie Byrd

Friday night on Dennis Miller’s show on CNBC, Gary Sinise appeared to promote Operation Iraqi Children. He brought some of the many pictures he has that he says show the good news that is happening everyday in Iraq. He has been there two or three times, and he was in some of the pictures. In addition to being a heck of a good actor, he appears to be a genuinely kind and decent person, as well.

Dennis Miller’s show can be quirky and doesn’t get the ratings of the other cable news chat shows (it is on CNBC, after all), but I love it. Last night in addition to Sinise and several other guests, on his “varsity panel”, Doug McIntyre talked about his work on the animated series “Liberty’s Kids”. He said he actually sat in on a conversation with PBS people who asked him if they couldn’t somehow do the show without including the references to or images of guns. McIntyre said it was necessary to explain to them that the series was based on the American Revolution, after all. He said something else about how we didn’t defeat the British by throwing parades at them or something to that effect. (I was laughing so hard at that point that I may have misunderstood him, and since the website doesn’t provide transcripts, I wasn’t able to double check it.) Anyway, if you haven’t seen his show, or haven’t seen it recently, give it a chance. It is definitely different.

— Lorie Byrd