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July 21, 2008

Exclusive: Monday, July 21

Presidential Watch

Interesting video. Obama talks about "the bomb at Pearl Harbor." It looks like he went off script: VIEW VIDEO HERE.

Barack's Iraq Trip

Editorial, NY Post.com

Barack Obama is headed for the front - including a stop in an Iraq that would look far different had Washington adopted the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's strategic imperatives.

Indeed. For the troop surge so vehemently opposed by Obama has clearly succeeded - as GOP candidate John McCain declared yesterday.

"We have succeeded in Iraq - not 'we are succeeding' - we have succeeded in Iraq," said McCain.

"The strategy has worked, and we now have the Iraqi government and military in charge of the major cities in Iraq. Al Qaeda is on [its] heels and on the run."

McCain has every good reason to be outspoken about the good news.

Back when Gen. David Petraeus and President Bush announced plans for the surge, McCain went way out on a limb and endorsed it - indeed, he'd long been pushing for precisely such a strategy.

Democrats, with Obama to the fore, predicted a military disaster and piles of American corpses. Read article.

Who Does Obama Think He Is?

A political messiah, who - unlike Reagan and Kennedy - needn't bother to do anything.

Charles Krauthammer, NRO.com

Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast - a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins - would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign-policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop?

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements? Read article.

Obama's 'Judgment'

Review & Outlook, Online WSJ.com

Barack Obama departs for Iraq as early as this weekend, with a media entourage as large as some of his rallies. He'll no doubt learn a lot, in addition to getting a good photo op. What we'll be waiting to hear is whether the would-be Commander in Chief absorbs enough to admit he was wrong about the troop surge in Iraq.

Mr. Obama has made a central basis of his candidacy the "judgment" he showed in opposing the Iraq war in 2002, even if it was a risk-free position to take as an Illinois state senator. The claim helped him win the Democratic primaries. But the 2007 surge debate is the single most important strategic judgment he has had to make on the more serious stage as a Presidential candidate. He vocally opposed the surge, and events have since vindicated Mr. Bush. Without the surge and a new counterinsurgency strategy, the U.S. would have suffered a humiliating defeat in Iraq.

Yet Mr. Obama now wants to ignore that judgment, and earlier this week his campaign erased from its Web site all traces of his surge opposition. Read article.

Obama Faces His Overseas Audition

Karen Tumulty, TIME.com

Even though the details remain sketchy, it's clear that Barack Obama's upcoming trip to the Middle East and Europe is an audition on the world stage. But the most important critics will not be the foreign leaders who will be sizing him up as a potential member of their ranks or the cheering throngs that are likely to greet him at every stop. The audience that matters most will be the voters back home, where many Americans have yet to be convinced that this young man of relatively little experience is the right person to fill the role of their Commander in Chief. "This," says Ken Duberstein, who was Ronald Reagan's White House chief of staff, "is an absolute opportunity to get over the acceptability threshold."

Polling suggests that Obama still has a way to go in that regard. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News survey, only 48% of registered voters said Obama would make a good Commander in Chief, with an equal percentage saying he wouldn't. By comparison, 72% said John McCain would be a good one. Read article.

Obama, Shaman

Michael Knox Beran, City-Journal.org

Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.

Barack Obama, in taking up the part of regenerative healer, is the latest panacea. As a society, Obama says, we are hurting. Our schools are "crumbling." There are "lines in the emergency rooms" of the hospitals, and our corporate culture is "rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed."

He points to the millions of Americans who, in struggling with life's difficulties ("high gas bills, insufficient health insurance, and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere has rendered unenforceable"), have become bitter and unhappy. Obama finds a scapegoat for the present discontents in politics-a politics, he argues, that breeds "division, and conflict, and cynicism" and that has become a "dead zone" in which "narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth."

The solution, he says, lies in a political reformation. Read article.

Satire Backfire

IBD Editorials.com

The New Yorker magazine thought it was doing Barack Obama a favor with its over-the-top right-wing caricature of the candidate. But the liberal publication underestimated his self-absorption.

The unrestrained absurdity of the cartoon that graces the New Yorker's latest cover has to be seen to be believed. There's the soon-to-be nominated Sen. Barack Obama, dressed in Islamic garb in the Oval Office, Old Glory engulfed in flames in the fireplace and the portrait of George Washington on the wall above replaced by that of Osama bin Laden. The new president knuckle-bumps the new first lady, who sports a full Angela Davis afro, fatigues and an AK-47.

The accompanying cover story is just the kind of paean to Obama one would expect from that particular magazine, arguing that he is not "some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary" and even "genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right."

But instead of gratitude from the Obama camp, came the charge that the cover was "tasteless and offensive."

Why can't Sen. Obama lighten up and join in the chuckling that the cartoon is intended to invoke? Maybe because, once again, a nerve has been touched.

In May, the senator got very touchy after President Bush warned the Israeli Knesset of those who "seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

We wondered then if Obama, to quote Hamlet, "doth protest too much" - pleading innocence when actually guilty.

Does the New Yorker's wild stereotype serve as simply too strong a reminder that this is a presidential candidate who has said he will hold summits with the heads of terrorist states without any preconditions? Does it play up too strongly his radical background as a Chicago community organizer? Read article.

The Democrats' Popularity Fetish: Global approval is overrated.

James Kirchick, Weekly Standard.com

A major theme of this year's presidential campaign is that the United States has lost the respect of the world and that electing a Democrat, especially Barack Obama, is the way to fix it. "What if we could restore America's place in the world, and people's faith in our government?" asks one Obama ad.

Obama's supposed ability to make the United States loved again is taken as a given by the pundit class, not to mention his adoring followers. Listing his reasons for supporting the junior senator from Illinois, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan swooned, "First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan." In a New York Times dispatch datelined Paris, foreign affairs columnist Roger Cohen gushed that the French see Obama as one of "les bons Américains" alongside John F. Kennedy, Michael Moore, and Al Gore. Writing in the Baltimore Sun, University of Maryland professor Thomas Schaller declared that Obama "may yet prove to be America's next great export."

The fervor for Obama here at home appears to be matched by equal, if not more ardent, enthusiasm abroad. "Excitement about Obama spreads around the world," read the headline of a recent Associated Press story, which described the junior senator from Illinois as a "global phenomenon." Yet as tempting as some may find it to support Obama for his worldwide appeal, to believe that his election will dramatically improve America's relations with the world is incredibly shallow.

In the simplistic narrative of the Obama boosters, President Bush and his party's successor, John McCain, are cranky nationalists who view the world through the barrel of a gun. But the fact is, in this election it is the Democratic candidate who is proposing policies profoundly at odds with his promise to restore America's preeminent place in the world. Read article.

Obama's Inexperience Tough to Ignore

Ronald Kessler, NewsMax.com

A close look at Barack Obama's career reveals it has been even more mediocre than generally recognized.

Before being elected to the Illinois state Senate, Obama worked as a community organizer and a lawyer in Chicago.

In his memoir, Obama says being a community organizer taught him how to motivate the powerless and work the government to help them. His chief example is an effort to remove asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, an all-black public housing project on Chicago's South Side.

But those who were involved in the effort say Obama played a minor role in working the problem and never accomplished his goal. A pre-existing group at Altgeld Gardens and a local newspaper, the Chicago Reporter, were working on the problem before Obama came on the scene, yet Obama does not mention them in his book, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."

"Just because someone writes it, doesn't make it true," says Altgeld resident Hazel Johnson, who had been pushing for a cleanup of the cancer-producing substance years before Obama showed up. Read article.

Barack Obama's plan for giant police force

Joseph Farah, WND.com

With all the reporters covering the major presidential candidates, it amazes me no one ever seems to ask the right questions.

For several days now, WND has been hounding Barack Obama's campaign about a statement he made July 2 in Colorado Springs - a statement that blew my mind, one that has had me scratching my head ever since.

In talking about his plans to double the size of the Peace Corps and nearly quadruple the size of AmeriCorps and the size of the nation's military services, he made this rather shocking (and chilling) pledge: "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

Now, since I've never heard anyone inside or out of government use the phrase "civilian national security force" before, I was more than a little curious about what he has in mind. Are we talking about creating a police state here? Read article.

Obama's Left-Wing Extremism

Peter Ferrara, Spectator.org

Barack Obama has proposed increasing every major Federal tax. He supports increasing individual income tax rates, allowing the Bush tax cuts, which cut rates for all income levels, to expire. He has proposed almost doubling the capital gains tax rate, from 15% today to 28%. He supports more than doubling the tax on dividends, from 15% to as high as 39%. He has proposed numerous corporate tax increases. He supports increasing the death tax back to the stratospheric levels that applied before President Bush. He supports increasing the payroll tax on higher income earners.

In other words, if you run a profitable small business, you can expect to be plundered by the Obamanistas from every angle. If you work for a small business, you can expect to be looking for another job.

Indeed, as economics writer Amity Shlaes has written, Obama promises exactly the same economic policy Herbert Hoover used to turn a downturn in 1929 into the Great Depression. Read article.

Are Facts Obsolete?

Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.

As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.

Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent. Read article.

Obama & Iraq - A Dangerous Dodge

Amir Taheri, NY Post.com

Barack Obama's op-ed in yesterday's New York Times begins with a major misundestanding and follows with a dangerous pirouette.

His first paragraph reads: "The call by Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States."

Yet Maliki has made no such formal demand. Both Maliki and his security adviser, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, have stated that they wouldn't endorse any agreement that might imply a permanent US military presence in Iraq. But neither they nor the Iraqi government as a whole has presented a demand for US troop withdrawal in the negotiations with the United States. Read article.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Obama

James Taranto, Online WSJ.com

"Barack Obama received a prideful welcome from the annual NAACP convention Monday night, but in a stirring speech to the nation's oldest civil rights organization, he nonetheless insisted blacks must show greater responsibility for improving their own lives," the Associated Press reports from Cincinnati:

The man who could become the first black president urged Washington to provide more education and economic assistance. He called on corporate America to exercise greater social responsibility. But he also received his most lusty applause as he urged blacks to demand more of themselves.

"If we're serious about reclaiming that dream, we have to do more in our own lives. There's nothing wrong with saying that," Obama told a crowd estimated at 3,000.

This is of a piece with the comments that led Jesse Jackson to fantasize about lynching Obama. It got us to thinking that maybe Obama is the Mikhail Gorbachev of the civil rights movement.

Consider the similarities: Gorbachev represented a generational change from Brezhnev and his short-lived successors. Obama represents a generational change from the likes of Jesse Jackson. Gorbachev never intended to bring down communism, only to reform it. Obama says he backs racial preferences but is not wedded to their current form. Gorbachev was a media darling. Obama . . . well, if Time does a "person" of the decade in 2010, can there be any doubt who it'll be? Read article.