Sen. John McCain, FoxNews.com

 

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80 percent to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

 

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

 

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

 

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City — actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism. Read article.

No Quarter USA.net

 

You’re all familiar with the uproar in Germany over Obama’s original plan to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate. In her fine essay, “The Adulation of a Leader: a Cautionary Tale,” Medusa noted that Obama was attempting “an ancestral hat trick,” evoking both Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy’s speeches at the site.

 

Well, Mr. Obama has been pushed down the road by German leadership to the Siegessäule monument, which Der Spiegel notes may be “contaminated by its Nazi past.”

 

In his Washington Post column, “The Audacity of Vanity,” Charles Krauthammer made the essential point about the “audacity” of Obama presuming he could speak at the Brandenburg Gate:

 

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald 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 John F. 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?

 

Der Spiegel wonders: “Is Obama Speech Site Contaminated by Nazi Past?”

 

The German magazine writes: The column originally stood in front of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, but was moved by Adolf Hitler to its current location in 1939 to make way for his planned transformation of Berlin into the Nazi capital “Germania.” Read article.

 

Robert Stacy McCain, Spectator.org

 

Barack Obama's handlers had obviously wanted the candidate's appearance in Germany to invoke comparisons to presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

 

Yet their original choice of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate -- venue of Reagan's historic 1987 "tear down this wall" speech -- was rejected by Germans who noted that Obama is merely a candidate, rather than an actual president, and objected to the Democrat's appropriation of their symbol of national unity for a political campaign event.

 

Foiled in their original quest for an iconic backdrop, Team Obama accepted as an alternative speech location the plaza adjoining the Siegessaule ("Victory Column") about a mile west of the Brandenburg Gate. Alas for the apostles of Hope, the symbolism of this site has proven "problematic," as a spokesman for Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats told Der Spiegel.

 

History-minded Germans point out that the Siegessaule was erected to commemorate Prussia's 19th-century victories over Austria, France and Denmark. Furthermore, the current location of the monument was chosen by none other than Adolf Hitler, as part of his ambitious plans for the architectural renovation of the German capital.

 

Team Obama's difficulty in finding a suitable site for his Berlin speech is unlikely to get much attention from the TV news anchors traveling with the candidate this week. Yet it highlights the fundamental problem of Obama overseas excursion: It is a purely symbolic gesture from a campaign that increasingly seems more interested in symbols than substance. Read article.

 

Spiegel.de

 

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama will land in Berlin on Thursday. Europeans have fallen in love with the Democrat, mostly because he's not Bush. But they may not like what they hear this week.

 

He has already found his spot at the Brandenburg Gate. Indeed, it's where he speaks every day between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. -- his voice, met with wild cheers from his audience, is enough to send shivers down one's spine even today. After giving his speech, he is driven in an open limousine through Berlin, where hundreds of thousands line the streets, chanting: "Kennedy, Kennedy."

 

Barack Obama's voice, by contrast, will not be heard at the Brandenburg Gate and he will not be gazing at the "The Kennedys" museum when he speaks in Berlin. Though he is often compared with Kennedy and sparks similar hopes, Obama hasn't come that far yet. He still lacks the kind of stature that would spare him from being ground through the mill of German politics. German Chancellor Angela Merkel turned down his request to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. Read article.

 

Aaron Klein, WND.com

 

The 9-11 attacks were carried out because of a lack of "empathy" for others' suffering on the part of al-Qaida, whose terrorist ideology "grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair," Sen. Barack Obama explained in largely unreported comments eight days after the mega-terror attacks that rocked the nation.

 

Obama went on to imply the September 11th attacks were in part a result of U.S. policy, lecturing the American military to minimize civilian casualties in the Middle East and urging action opposing "bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle-Eastern descent."

 

Robert Spencer, director of the Jihad Watch website, noted, "Barack Obama, back in late September 2001, completely ignored Islam itself. He found the roots for Muslim terrorism not in Islam but in 'a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.'

 

"What Obama could not, and apparently cannot, allow himself to do is to investigate the nature of Islam, to find out what it teaches about Believers and Infidels. I can help out a bit. I can tell him, right now, right here, that Islam is based on a clear division of the universe between Believers and Infidels." Read article.

 

Tom Raum, Breitbart.com

 

Republican Sen. John McCain insisted on Monday that he has been consistently right on both Iraq and Afghanistan while Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama "has been completely wrong."

As Obama toured the war zones, McCain ridiculed him from afar during a visit with the first President Bush at his summer home on the Atlantic.

 

"My respect for him knows no bounds," the elder Bush said of McCain. Still, Bush said he wished Obama well on his overseas trip, and said he hoped the Democrat would get an especially warm welcome in Berlin.

 

McCain told reporters he didn't care if Obama's trip was stealing attention and "doesn't in the slightest undercut" his own message. "It is what it is," he told reporters..

 

Any withdrawal of troops from Iraq "must be based on conditions on the ground," McCain said.

 

He disparaged Obama as "someone who has no military experience whatsoever."

 

"When you win wars, troops come home," McCain said. "He's been completely wrong on the issue. ... I have been steadfast in my position." Read article.

 

Peter Ferrara, NRO.com

 

Barack Obama continues his overseas trip today in the Middle East, where the facts on the ground have recently been moving so fast hardly anyone in the U.S. has really kept up. But unheralded press reports in recent weeks establish this new reality.

 

The war in Iraq is over. America and her allies won. Sorry, Barack, but it is too late for you and your misguided, uninformed, anti-American netroots to surrender.

 

The surge that Obama opposed and said would fail has succeeded spectacularly. McCain was right about that from the beginning. Read article.

 

Donald Lambro, Washington Times.com

 

About a week ago I reported in this column that a top defense adviser to Barack Obama was proposing that a large "residual" U.S. military force remain in Iraq under his mercurial troop withdrawal plan. The freshman Chicago Democrat pooh-poohed such reports at the time, saying that those who accused him of changing his position on pulling out all U.S. combat forces from Iraq "haven't apparently been listening to me."

 

But in an op-ed column in Monday's New York Times, Mr. Obama said he will leave behind "a residual force in Iraq" that would carry out a number of missions, including going after al Qaeda insurgents, defending remaining U.S. servicemen left behind and training Iraqi security forces.

 

It is hard to follow the swiftly changing positions in his troop withdrawal plan, but at last count it has gone from removing all U.S. military forces to all "combat forces" to his most recent position: pulling out most combat forces with an apparently undetermined number of brigades left behind for the foreseeable future. Read article.

 

Michael Medved, Townhall.com

 

Barack Obama isn’t just conducting a political campaign; he’s launching his very own religious cult.

 

Under the headline “Obama Supporters Take His Name as Their Own,” the New York Times reported on a bizarre fad among the candidate’s enraptured acolytes: across the country, they’ve begun adopting his middle name, Hussein. “The result is a group of unlikely sounding Husseins,” writes reporter Jodi Kantor, “from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Oklahoma, to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.”

 

One of the key elements in many religious cults involves a name change – like transitioning from Richard Alpert to Baba Ram Dass, or from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X. To Obama’s true-believers, adding an Islamic middle name is a small price to pay for connecting with a candidate who qualifies as a “lightworker” and “an enlightened being,” according to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford. Read article.

 

Emmett Tyrrell, Townhall.com

 

As I suggested a few weeks ago, Sen. Barack H. Obama is not going to have an easy time of it. For one thing, Sen. John McCain is a much tougher candidate than has been suspected. Looking over his career, one will note that McCain learned politics before ever entering politics. As a young Navy liaison to the Senate in the 1970s, he worked effectively with Democratic and Republican hawks to reverse the post-Vietnam military decline.

 

 He, having managed the largest fighter squadron in the Navy, has management skills of which he can boast, as Sen. Obama cannot -- despite the junior senator from Illinois' prodigious capacity to boast. McCain's budget for his squadron was more than $1 billion. Finally, in this inhospitable year for Republicans, McCain's record of independent conservatism positions him so that he is difficult to attack and poised to pounce.

 

Thus, I am not surprised to see the likely Democratic presidential standard-bearer slip into a dead heat this week with the likely Republican presidential standard-bearer. What is more, readers of this column might recall that weeks ago, I spotted the darkest of dark clouds glowering down on the unctuous young senator's halo. In a word, he seems to be victimized by the bizarre. Read article.

Steve Kornacki, NY Observer.com 

 

Conventional wisdom can be and often is wrong, especially when it comes to running-mate speculation.

 

Maybe you can remember back to 1992, when just about every wise man and woman opined on the supposed importance of Bill Clinton, then a 45-year-old Southern governor, balancing his ticket with a gray-haired Northerner. Clinton, of course, ignored them and picked an even more youthful Tennessean named Al Gore, forming a visually powerful partnership that netted 370 electoral votes and made an utter mockery of conventional wisdom.

 

But there are times when, just like the proverbial broken clock, conventional wisdom actually gets it right. Case in point: the widely repeated view that Barack Obama needs to compensate for his perceived national security and foreign policy inexperience by selecting a running mate with reassuringly impeccable credentials in those areas. There is more than a little something to this idea.

 

Seventy-two percent of voters in an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Tuesday said that John McCain would make a good commander in chief. Only 48 percent said the same thing about Obama.

 

It's certainly possible for Obama to chip away at it by building confidence with the public over the next four months. But it demonstrates a potentially devastating perception problem for him: Too many voters have trouble instinctively conceiving of him as the commander in chief. Read article.

 

Jonathan Gurwitz, JWR.com

 

About many things, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is spectacularly and self-righteously wrong.

 

But about his most famous parishioner of 20 years, he got it correct. In an April interview with Bill Moyers, Wright said Barack Obama "goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician."

 

A few days later, he clarified the point at the National Press Club: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

 

Remember Obama in his widely praised speech on race in Philadelphia in March? He said he could no more disown the Rev. Wright — "imperfect as he may be" — than he could disown the black community or his grandmother.

 

After Wright's comments with Moyers and at the National Press Club, it was a different story. Obama was all about disowning. 

 

The irony is that Obama had for years neglected to disavow the demonstrably false statements of his pastor that were patently offensive to a broad swath of the American people. But when Wright spoke truthfully about an issue that could only be offensive to a thin-skinned politician, Obama kicked his spiritual mentor to the curb. Read article.

 

Rick Moran, Right Wing Nut House.com

 

It wasn’t exactly a highlight of Barack Obama’s rather uninspiring speech on national security the candidate gave in Washington on Tuesday. But buried under the interminable rhetoric on how the candidate, once president, will be able to wave his magic wand (or perhaps wiggle his nose like Jeannie) and conjure up coalitions of allies to deal with this problem or that (even getting Iran and Syria to cooperate on Iraqi security which would be a magic trick worthy of Merlin), there was a shocking admission by Mr. Obama that he and his Democratic colleagues had been wrong about Iraq for years.

 

For the first time since the Iraq war began, a Democratic leader uttered the “V” word and “Iraq” in the same sentence. That’s right; Obama called for “victory” in Iraq:

 

 

The candidate actually defines the terms of “success” and “victory.” Why is this significant.

 

Because last year, Barack Obama declared the war a failure and unwinnable. Read article.

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