Right Wing Nut House

The Presidency of the United States has been called both the strongest and the weakest elected office in democratic government. This is because the President has no real constitutional authority to enact laws, consent to treaties, (theoretically) declare war, or even choose his own cabinet. All of these Presidential actions are dependent on the suffrage of the elected representatives in the Congress. The President can only “propose” not “dispose” and thus in a very real sense is at the mercy of both the partisan opposition and the vagaries of electoral politics in his own party when it comes to enacting his policies.

But the President is not a helpless giant. His ability to get what he wants from the Congress is usually directly related to his standing with the American people. Before opinion polls, Congressmen relied on a keen political ear in their own districts and states to tell them whether or not supporting the President would lead them into trouble. Even today, legislators can get a good sense of where their own constituents stand on the subject of the President’s popularity simply by reading their mail. True, there are organized attempts to influence the Congressman’s position by flooding he email or deluging his office with telegrams. These interest-group driven campaigns are also helpful although are not given as much weight as the letter from the 80 year old grandma who is worried about having her social security check cut.

What this adds up to is one of the truly remarkable aspects of our republic; the power of the President to get things done being dependent on how well ordinary people think he’s doing his job. This is not some pie-in-the-sky, starry eyed first year poli-sci nonsense but rather the cold calculation of power used by both parties, honed to a fine point via the science of polling, and then sliced and diced by experts to determine what kind of influence the President can wield.

Lately, the process has become even more sophisticated as “talking points” for the party faithful are promulgated based on this polling data and surrogates pan out to hit the various cable news shows where no matter what question is asked by the host, the talking points are driven home at least twice in the segment. Then more polls are taken and the process repeats itself. Both parties do it as does the Administration. In this way, the public is cajoled, pulled, pushed, and even manipulated in a dizzying, head snapping, confusing and often contradictory manner.

Surprisingly, people tend to resist a change in their feelings toward a President. This is because most Americans feel that they have a personal relationship with the man in the White House. Even before television and mass media, this was so. If anything, the ubiquitousness of the media has intensified the relationship.

I don’t have a clue what the internal polls of both the White House and the Democrats are really telling them about the attitudes of the American people toward George Bush. I suspect that the numbers are slightly better than the published polls that have come out recently showing the President’s “approval” (Do you like him?) ratings in the low 40’s. As has been pointed out many times by people like D.J. Drummond, much depends on the way a question is asked and who is being asked in the first place. Most public polls are taken to prove a point. The private, internal polling done by the White House and the Democratic National Committee are done to find out what people really think.

And that brings me to George Bush’s choice of Harriet Miers for Supreme Court Justice.

This has been a summer of discontent for Americans as gas prices have skyrocketed, progress in Iraq has slowed, a hurricane has virtually destroyed a major American city, consumer confidence in the future of the economy is down, and there is an overall feeling of unease in the electorate. Anyone who doubts this need only look at the political smoke signals just this past week as two high profile Republicans have declined to run for high office.

Outgoing North Dakota Governor John Hoeven has declined to run for the Senate seat currently held by vulnerable Democrat Ken Conrad while former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar tearfully turned down the opportunity to run against another vulnerable Democrat, Rod R. Blagojevich, for the statehouse in Springfield. This may be an indication that those two experienced and able politicians see 2006 as the year of the Democrat. And in an uphill battle against an incumbent office holder - even against a vulnerable incumbent - it should be apparent that the calculations made by both men included how the President was viewed in their respective states.

Bush’s nomination of Miers for the Supreme Court must be seen in this political context; the President may not have the strength to engage in a bruising partisan fight for someone more experienced and perhaps even more conservative. Not so much with the Democrats but with members of his own party who are running for re-election next year. When members of your own party start to sidle away from you, chances are your Presidency is nearing the point where your influence is waning and the crew feels less compunction is supporting the Captain as the ship is tossed on ever stormier seas.

The Bush Presidency is far from dead. But the President may have to make more decisions like the Miers choice in the future as his Administration teeters on the cusp of irrelevancy. Perhaps an easy confirmation will help him regain some momentum. That, along with the probable passage of an Iraqi Constitution next week could help the Administration regain some of the luster it has lost off its election victory less than a year ago.

SSSSHHHH…Be Vewy Quiet. I’m huntin’ Repubwicans…heheheheheheh!

The indictment of Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay is one of the least surprising developments in politics since the Democrats’ efforts to buy votes with crack cocaine in Ohio last November. Given the level of scrutiny directed toward the Texas Republican regarding everything but his bathroom habits, the laughably partisan Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, like his counterpart Elmer Fudd, was destined to succeed in finding the rabbit but will be hard pressed to ultimately catch the critter and make a stew out of him.

Instead, all Earle has succeeded in doing is making hash out of his investigation, something a federal judge will not find amusing - federal judges having a much narrower sense of humor than your average Texas pol. For in order to understand the indictment of DeLay, one must understand the wild, wild, west nature of Texas politics and how being “colorful” and “larger than life” is the best way to get ahead in the rough and tumble mud wrestling of Texas political culture.

Unlike in some of the more staid environs out east and in the Midwest, politics in Texas is a spectator sport, albeit one that requires the spectators to come equipped with a scrub brush and an extra-strength bar of soap. Both DeLay and Earle have come up through the ranks of their respective parties by successfully playing as close to the edge of the law that ethics and decency will allow, all the while “Aw Shucks”-ing and backslapping their way through successful election campaigns. It is the campaigns themselves with the ungodly amounts of money raised and spent that grease the skids of law and politics at the statehouse level.

An example would be your typical campaign for an obscure public office like State Railroad Commissioner. Through some quirk in the law, the Commission controls the oil industry in Texas which may have something to do with the fact that on average, candidates spend well over half a million dollars to get elected and most candidates spend much more than that. A run for the Texas Senate is similarly expensive. Contrast those figures in my own state of Illinois where the average amount spent on a state Senate seat is around $50,000 - figures skewed upward by races run in Chicago and its suburbs - and you have an idea of how really, really, important it is to raise money in Texas if you want to get anywhere in politics.

If money is the mother’s milk of politics, Texas has a corner on motherhood. And down through the years, well meaning reformers from both parties have attempted to change the political landscape by trying to put a stop to some of the more outrageous examples of campaign finance shenanigans, mostly to no avail. Like reformers of federal campaign laws have discovered to their utter dismay, the more strictures you put into place, the more loopholes wide enough you can drive a Texas sized 18 wheeler through are created.

Hence, we have the laughable spectacle of DeLay being indicted for a campaign finance tactic carried out gleefully by both sides. Texas law stipulates that corporate contributions to candidates are illegal. No problem, say both parties. They simply channel the money to the national parties who then churn the money back to candidates for state office through “local party building” efforts that allow the national party organs to donate money for that purpose.

Simple, elegant, legal…and unethical. Here’s a tally of what the Democrats have done with the law recently:

In fact, on October 31, 2002, the Texas Democratic Party sent the Democratic National Committee (DNC) $75,000, and on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $75,000. On July 19, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000 and, again on the same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000. On June 8, 2001, the Texas Democratic Party sent the DNC $50,000. That very same day, the DNC sent the Texas Democratic Party $60,000.

(HT: Captains Quarters)

As the Captain points out in his article, DA Earle has a problem separating his duties as a prosecutor representing the people and a partisan representing the interests of his party. This is not unusual in Texas as I’m positive you can find similar examples of Republican DA’s in Texas acting in a manner not in keeping with the ethical requirements of their office. It is the nature of the system. And that system lives and breathes money. Doing the Texas Two-Step with the campaign finance laws is a dance done by both political parties. To pretend otherwise is hypocritical. And having DeLay indicted for violating campaign finance laws in Texas is like indicting a politician for kissing babies; it may be true but given the nature of the beast and the fact that everyone does it, how can you do it in good conscience?

The funniest observer of Texas politics, Molly Ivins, has said “Good thing we’ve still got politics in Texas — finest form of free entertainment ever invented…. ” The Loony Toons moment of indicting Tom DeLay will probably be good for a few laughs but I suspect Ronnie Earle will share the fate of Elmer Fudd and other Bugs Bunny nemeses and will end up in the stew pot himself instead of the “wascally wabbit.”

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has an outstanding round-up of both blogger and media reaction to the indictment. Press react this morning has been predictable with a New York Times editorial calling for DeLay’s permanent removal from his leadership position and having a disguised editorial on the front page gleefully listing what they consider to be Republican baggage going into the midterms next year.

Also, the Captain weighs in with WaPo’s surprising skepticism regarding the indictment.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

There is a school of thought that believes the idea of loyalty to one’s country is a crass, outmoded concept not worthy of consideration by thinking people. Rather, loyalty if given at all, should be reserved for nebulous and ethereal entities like “humanity” or “the family of man.” International socialism has long advocated this global view of loyalty - except, of course, when the old Soviet Union was in trouble for one of its frequent deviations from civilized behavior. It was at this point that Moscow would crack the whip and leftists from Berlin, to London, to Los Angeles would dutifully parrot the party line, excusing the brutes in the Kremlin for all sorts of very unsocialist and inhuman atrocities.

Thankfully, this view of loyalty is not shared by the vast majority of citizens in the United States. Most Americans recognize the importance of loyalty to the government during a time of war when America’s sons and daughters are in harm’s way. This has never been more evident than when looking at how we view the war in Iraq.

According to the latest polls, barely 40% of the country approves of the way that President Bush is conducting the war in Iraq. But when asked if we should pull our troops out before the job of securing the country and helping the Iraqis achieve a stable, democratic government is complete fully two thirds of Americans say no. This slap in the face to the leftist narrative of how the American people see the war in Iraq seems to have been lost on this past weekend’s partygoers in Washington whose speakers continued to insist that the majority of the people opposed the war and wished the troops to come home.

Leave it to the left to never let the truth stand in the way of a good old fashioned Soviet-style propaganda campaign.

True, there are permutations within permutations in the poll numbers. One of the more remarkable tidbits to be found in these figures is the fact that the belief that the war was a “mistake” because no mass stockpiles of WMD were found has hovered near the 50% mark for more than a year. What makes it remarkable is that even though roughly half the nation thinks going into Iraq was an error, a sizable portion of those people also believe we should stay until the job is done.

The left would point to these Americans and call them confused. I think they should be congratulated for their loyalty. What the left sees as stupidity, I see typical American common sense. Most Americans - even those who opposed going to war in the first place - realize the dire consequences of a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. The destabilization and possible collapse of the Iraqi government would place America in great danger and would be inimical to our national interest. This fact is so obvious that it calls into question why almost all of the speakers at the anti-war rally in Washington on Saturday called for the immediate withdrawal of American troops.

To understand why one need only look a little closer at the motley collection of socialists, anarchists, anti-globalists, pan-Arabists, post modern deconstructionists, one worlders, and racialists who descended on Washington for their moment in the media spotlight. If there’s one thing the tatterdemalion left has become over these last lost years since the fall of the Soviet Union it is publicity deprived. They are absolutely starved for media attention. Even the anarchists can’t have a decent riot that hardly rates a blurb in The Guardian. Part of the problem is the fractured nature of their “coalition.” The only way they could get the kind of numbers necessary to get anyone to pay any attention to them was by inviting everyone in the world who has a grudge against America.

Hence, most of the podium speakers at the rally were not there to solely promote an anti-war agenda but rather each had their own particular anti-American ax to grind. The racialists called for an end to racism. The tribalists called for an end to capitalism. The primitives called for an end to industrialized civilization. The greenies called for an end to everything else. Yes, they all paid lip service to the anti-war message that brought them together in the first place. But their real reason for bringing their followers to Washington was to garner support from the hard-left moneymen like George Soros and leftist PR gurus like David Fenton who is currently managing Cindy Sheehan’s race toward obscurity. A few dollars here and there gleaned from the Smart Set in Washington will at least keep the mimeograph machines going and pay the rent for a few more months.

Not surprisingly, there was very little talk of loyalty. When “patriotism” was brought up, we were continually assured that yes, these were indeed patriotic Americans who only wanted to exercise their right to dissent from government. Of that, I have little doubt. The question isn’t whether they are patriotic Americans, the questions is are they loyal Americans?

The two terms are related but not mutually exclusive. Patriotism is a feeling, a “love or devotion to one’s country.” Loyalty, by definition, is an action word. It is “allegiance to one’s country” or “faithfulness to one’s government.” Many a traitor has come and gone calling themselves “patriots.” Few would agree that they were being loyal.

How does the left get around this little non-sequitur? They huffily point out that they are being loyal to the “idea” of America or “American ideals.” Since these ideals were present at the founding of the nation, it is perhaps gratifying that so many on the left have finally embraced the idea of strict constructionism - at least when it becomes a convenient explanation for their perfidy in giving aid and comfort to an enemy that is shooting at American soldiers overseas.

For that is what the demonstrators in Washington forgot to mention in all their sloganeering and speechifying; the fact that the insurgents and terrorists in Iraq have only one chance to achieve their goal of overthrowing the Iraqi government and gaining power. And that is only if America walks away before the job is done.

They are hoping that history repeats itself and America abandons an ally to its fate as a result of both timid policy makers and domestic opposition to the war. And since this hope is all that the insurgents have to go on (for they can never defeat the US military on the field of battle), leftist opposition to the war can only be judged as disloyalty. They can call themselves patriots if they want. There is no way we can look into their souls and judge their love or hate for the United States. But we can certainly judge their loyalty based on their actions - actions that have the practical affect of encouraging the insurgents in Iraq to up the body count of Americans to test the mettle of our citizenry to stay the course until the job is well and truly done.

As the democratic process in Iraq moves forward in fits and starts and the Iraqi people slowly and cautiously march toward an uncertain future that may yet include sectarian violence and other setbacks in achieving national unity, the need for our troops to stay and assist them in this historic task will remain great. And to sustain our elected leaders in this hard, slogging task with our loyalty will become more and more critical as time goes by. It no doubt is the greatest test of our fealty to the United States government that many of us will ever have. But it will be absolutely necessary for us to win through to total victory and bring our sons and daughters home in triumph.

I don’t envy Hillary Clinton one bit.

With meticulous and calculated care over the last 7 or 8 months, Senator Clinton has crafted - brilliantly in my opinion - a centrist personae designed to entice moderates and perhaps even moderate conservatives to her banner while not alienating her base of support with the left wing of the Democratic party. It has been a tightrope walk worthy of a star circus performer. And what makes Mrs. Clinton’s political changeling strategy even more remarkable is that she’s had the assistance of some heavy hitting Republican conservatives as she maneuvers toward the center in anticipation of the election.

After initially voting for the resolution authorizing force against Iraq and then harshly criticizing Administration war policy in the lead up to the election last November, Mrs. Clinton took a high profile trip to Iraq with none other than John McCain and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In Iraq, Mrs. Clinton praised the government of then Prime Minister Allawi and declared her belief that the insurgents were losing. Since then, she has come out against any kind of timed withdrawal from Iraq, stating that events on the ground should dictate the pace of the troops’ homecoming not an artificial timetable. Her views on Iraq won her praise from McCain and other Republicans while establishing her bona fides as a hawkish Democrat capable of leading the country in wartime.

She has also enlisted the help of former Speaker of the House and notorious liberal bugbear Newt Gingrich to promote health care issues. While the duo would seem to be the odd couple of the year, both are policy wonks with a passion for issues - similarities that seemed to overcome some of the more striking differences in their personalities.

Other Republican Senators like Bill Frist and Lindsey Graham have also had praise for Hillary’s ability to work with the other side and compromise to get things done. And that’s been the key to Hillary’s strategy; not only has she tried to sidle toward the center on issues of importance but she has also attempted to establish her credentials as a “can-do” Senator who is not only an advocate for issues but a leader who can accomplish what she sets out to do.

Indeed, Hillary’s transformation has been a marvel; that is, until this week. In the last few days Mrs. Clinton has run smack into the apparent contradictions of her transformation; she just can’t be all things to all people. This was never more evident when she agreed to meet with Mother Moonbat Cindy Sheehan and announced that she will vote “nay” on the nomination of John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the United States.

There is no way that Hillary Clinton could have won in the primaries without voting against Roberts. And by meeting with Sheehan (albeit, in a brilliant political maneuver for both of them, she and McCain will meet Sheehan together thus giving each other political cover) Clinton maintains a tenuous connection with the anti-war left.

The vote against Roberts was a foregone conclusion. With the pro-choice 527’s dead set against him, Hillary would have been committing political hari-kari by supporting him. In her statement explaining her vote, Clinton tries rather lamely to have her cake and eat it to:

Since I expect Judge Roberts to be confirmed, I hope that my concerns are unfounded and that he will be the kind of judge he said he would be during his confirmation hearing. If so, I will be the first to acknowledge it. However, because I think he is far more likely to vote the views he expressed in his legal writings, I cannot give my consent to his confirmation and will, therefore, vote against his confirmation.

By appearing to straddle, she does herself no good with either moderates or her lefty base. That said, Clinton had very little choice in the matter seeing that the expectations for her candidacy have already generated an enormous amount of excitement among hard-left feminists and pro-choice advocates. These groups will make up the backbone of her candidacy in the primaries and she couldn’t very well alienate them by voting for someone who could very well be a deciding vote on overturning Roe v Wade. And unless the President’s next nominee to replace Justice O’Connor is pro-choice - a very unlikely possibility - she will probably vote against that nominee as well.

The Sheehan gambit with McCain came about as a result of a perceived slight on Senator Clinton’s part when the anti-war bus tour was in New York. Evidently, the home town papers made a big deal of Clinton not meeting with her then (no mainstream Democrat will touch Sheehan with a ten foot pole since her comments on Israel, 9/11, and Bin Laden have received widespread exposure) which necessitated the change in strategy. Although not as important as her nay vote on Roberts, the Sheehan meeting is still a potent signal to the anti-war left that she hasn’t entirely abandoned them.

Indeed, Clinton has been caught in a trap that every Democrat since 1972 has found themselves. In order to get nominated for the office of President, a Democrat must be liberal enough to energize the base of the party so that primary voters will come out in the dead of winter in Iowa and New Hampshire to support their candidacy and lefty donors will open their pocketbooks to supply enough funds to buy the TV time necessary to have a viable candidacy. But once nominated, the putative candidate then must scramble toward the middle of the political spectrum in order to woo the independents necessary to win the Presidency.

This has proven impossible for every Democratic Presidential candidate for the last 25 years except her husband. Bill Clinton was helped by the fact that he was a southern governor whose policies in Arkansas were necessarily moderate although during the primary campaign, he was able to sound an awful lot like a liberal. The end result for Clinton was that he was able to peel the deep southern states of Louisiana and Georgia away from the Republican column and deny Bush #41 the border states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Those states pretty much gave Clinton his margin of victory in the electoral college in 1992.

Due to the fact that the country is much more polarized today, Hillary will be denied any “Southern Strategy” to garner the necessary electoral votes to win in a general election. She won’t have to. With states like Florida and Ohio so closely divided as well as some other toss-up states like West Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Colorado, and New Mexico, it wouldn’t take much for a smart Democrat like Hillary to put together the 270 electoral votes necessary to win in the general election.

Hillary’s political moves this week were necessary but have set her back a bit in her quest to appear more moderate. There will be other pitfalls for her candidacy in the months ahead that will test her political skills to the limit including the possible failure of elections in Iraq, the rebuilding of New Orleans, and perhaps dealing with a Bird Flu pandemic as early as this winter. And there’s very little difference in politics between walking the tightrope and walking the plank; it’s all in how the balancing act is received by both your supporters and your political enemies.

Her husband was one of the best politicians in my lifetime. And while Hillary has demonstrated a knack for the sport, it remains to be seen if she has the skills and the staying power to make it all the way to the top.

When the history of the twentieth century is written a hundred years from now, I suspect that there will be a paragraph or two on William Jefferson Clinton. While there will be volumes written about the Roosevelts, Wilson, Reagan, and even Johnson, I doubt whether Clinton’s legacy will rate much attention from future historians for one simple reason; nothing much happened during his Presidency.

Clinton had the misfortune (from his own perspective) of being the very first “post-cold war” President. For more than 50 years, through economic crisis, war, and the standoff with communism, the American Presidency was where the action was. But following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the stirrings of democracy in Russia, it was as if the hot air was let out of a balloon. Suddenly, the Presidency as an office, began to revert to something closer to what the founders intended; a Chief Executive who disposed what the Congress proposed. While it’s true that the Presidency still wielded enormous power in foreign affairs, the American people made it crystal clear with the defeat of Bush the elder (and the election of his son in 2000) that they wanted a President who stayed at home to mind the economic store and not go gallivanting off on foreign adventures.

“It’s the economy, stupid” was more than a catch phrase for the Clintonistas; it was a mantra that when repeated ad nauseum signified the changing nature of the Presidency. While it was generally true that even during the cold war the American people voted their pocketbook when casting a ballot for President, that simplistic explanation never took into account the underlying relationship between an American citizen and their President.

When catastrophic nuclear war was a real possibility, the American people wanted a President that they could poke in the chest and feel a hardness, something more substantial than the platitudes and bromides heard during an election campaign. This is why the vote for President is the most personal, most complex vote any American makes. The decision to vote for one man over another was always based on intangibles, something that President Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell brilliantly elucidated during the Democratic primary campaign of 1980.

Caddell believed that even though Senator Ted Kennedy had a 30 point lead over Carter in the fall of 1979, primary voters would turn against him once his “character” was made an issue. For Caddell, it wasn’t just Chappaquiddick that was in play, it was Kennedy’s ultra liberal “squishiness” that the Democratic voters wouldn’t be able to stomach. To illuminate Kennedy’s character problem, Caddell then designed a series of “man in the street” interviews with ordinary Americans that were absolutely devastating in their impact. Carter turned that 30 point deficit into a series of stunning primary victories that destroyed Kennedy’s presidential ambitions forever.

Clinton’s problem in 1992 was similar to Kennedy, but the election dynamic had changed. The character issue now dealt with how closely Americans could identify with their President on a personal level. This was a luxury not available to Democratic Presidential aspirants from Adlai Stevenson to Michael Dukakis. So Clinton’s venality could be seen in the context of personal peccadilloes that all men are either tempted to engage in or are actually guilty. In a very real way, Clinton’s faults became political pluses; something Republicans to this day refuse to acknowledge and could never understand.

Recently, Clinton has engaged in a series of activities designed to create a legacy that will overshadow the inconsequentiality of his time in office. His participation with the President’s father in both Tsunami and hurricane relief are, I’m sure, heartfelt efforts to assist the humanitarian efforts in these twin disasters. And while many Republicans have criticized his “Clinton Global Initiative” as an exercise in hubris, the fact is it successfully brought together world leaders in an organized way to talk seriously about problems facing all of humanity.

This is no small achievement which unfortunately has been overshadowed by the aftermath of Katrina. But leave it to Bill Clinton to mix the selfless with the selfish, the heartfelt with the heartless. In an interview on This Week, Clinton blasted President Bush for his Administration’s handling of relief efforts in the immediate aftermath of Katrina as well as the President’s policies in Iraq, the economy, and even Afghanistan:

Former US president Bill Clinton sharply criticized George W. Bush for the Iraq War and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, and voiced alarm at the swelling US budget deficit.

Breaking with tradition under which US presidents mute criticisms of their successors, Clinton said the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq “virtually alone and before UN inspections were completed, with no real urgency, no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction.”

The Iraq war diverted US attention from the war on terrorism “and undermined the support that we might have had,” Bush (sic) said in an interview with an ABC’s “This Week” programme.

Clinton said there had been a “heroic but so far unsuccessful” effort to put together an constitution that would be universally supported in Iraq.

John Hinderacker at Powerline allows himself to engage in a little hyperbole on the issue of past-presidents criticizing their successors:

This has never happened before. Until now, both parties have recognized a patriotism that, at some level, supersedes partisanship. Consistent with that belief, former Presidents of both parties have stayed out of politics and have avoided criticizing their successors. Until now. The Democrats appear bent on destroying every element of the fabric that has united us as Americans.

This is true up to a point. While Eisenhower never overtly criticized Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs fiasco - an operation planned under his Administration - he let it be known to several prominent newspaper friends that he was unhappy at Kennedy’s performance. And acting as a surrogate for his former boss, Richard Nixon was harsh in his criticism of Kennedy’s handling of the matter.

Also, Jimmy Carter regularly criticizes American policy under his successors although no one pays any attention to him. Anyone who heard his speech at the Democratic Convention knows that Mr. Carter never let tradition stand in the way of a pouty, sanctimonious rant.

So while not unknown, it is unusual for a President to lash out at a successor in this manner. The language Clinton uses as well as the forum - a Sunday morning talk show - was designed to get the maximum amount of exposure for at least two 24 hour news cycles. In other words, Bill Clinton once again is the talk of the town, something I’m sure he relishes more than anything except returning to the White House.

And that ultimately what this may be about. One could probably say that this marks the official beginning of the 2008 Presidential campaign. The titular head of the Democratic party has fired a shot across the bow of the campaign of any putative Republican nominee. For unless President Bush self destructs, or the economy goes south in a big way, or progress in Iraq is arrested or reversed, the President will have an enormous say in who is standing at the podium delivering an acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican convention. And it should go without saying that the nominee will have run in the primaries on Bush’s record of achievements. Hence, the Clinton political challenge should be seen in the context of him being a stalking horse for his wife Hillary.

As he makes the transition from statesman to surrogate, Clinton may find that his statements will receive more critical scrutiny from the press. It is unfortunate that his current rant against the President will not. As Hinderaker says quite correctly, Clinton “flat out” lied:

Clinton’s assertion that there was “no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction” is a flat-out lie. The Consensus Estimate of the American intelligence agencies has been made public, and we have quoted from it and linked to it on many occasions. America’s intelligence agencies said, with a “high degree of confidence,” that Saddam possessed both chemical and biological weapons. These were the same intelligence reports that Clinton received as President, so he is well aware of them. His statement was not a mistake, it was a lie.

Lori Byrd at Polipundit has even more evidence from Clinton’s own mouth and reiterated as recently as 2003 that his Administration firmly believed that Saddam had WMD.

So the question isn’t really about the ex-President’s selective memory, it’s about attacking the current occupant of the White House on behalf of his wife’s forthcoming Presidential candidacy. And it may even be about the great unspoken question of Hillary’s candidacy: What role will Bill Clinton have in her administration?

With the world such a dangerous place again, Americans appear to be inclined to couch their Presidential vote in terms of personal security, something John Kerry found out to his detriment in 2004. Will Bill Clinton add to or subtract from a Hillary Presidency in this regard? Will Republicans be able to use the fact that America was sleepwalking through the 1990’s as al Qaeda gathered its forces to attack us? Or will the presence of Bill Clinton allow Americans to think back to the days before 9/11 when the world seemed a much simpler and less stressful place?

Bill Clinton is the wild card of the Presidential campaign of 2008. And I suspect, that fact gives him an enormous amount of pleasure. Because win or lose, the Clintons are about to make history - something any ex-President would give their right arm to achieve.

It’s been an article of faith for conservatives since before Lyndon Johnson’s celebrated War on Poverty was announced in 1964 that the goals of government social programs that benefit the poor should be geared toward helping the recipients of such aid achieve eventual independence so that they could live productive lives and contribute to society. What emerged from the flurry of legislation proposed by LBJ and his anti-poverty gurus was a nightmare of generational dependency that lowered self esteem, destroyed families, led to an epidemic of teenage pregnancy, and contributed to a breakdown in values that made recipients easy prey for the siren song of drug addiction and the criminal lifestyle. This has been the de rigueur of conservative critiques of the welfare state.

Condemning several generations of poor, mostly black people to lives of invisible desperation was forseen by one of the most thoughtful men of 20th century public life, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan made himself the bane of liberals and conservatives alike during his quarter century of service in the Senate. Prior to that, Moynihan had served in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations, putting his brilliant mind to work on the problems associated with poverty and dependence. George Will called him “the most penetrating political intellect to come from New York since Alexander Hamilton.”

Moynihan was the architect of many of the social safety net programs conservatives love to hate; relaxation of AFDC rules, WIC, housing subsidies, and changes in a vast array of existing social programs were all either proposed or strenuously backed by Moynihan during his service in government. But perhaps his greatest contribution came from a book he wrote in 1965 entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In the starkest terms possible, Moynihan laid out the case not for the elimination of social programs helping the poor, but a redirecting of priorities that would end dependence and help the rapidly developing “underclass” (a term he coined) achieve independence from government. For daring to point out the bleak statistics for black families at the time, he was skewered by the more radical anti-poverty warriors who were moving government programs toward an entirely different goal; a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI).

Some of the statistics Moynihan used in his book were frightening; 26% of children born out of wedlock (a staggering 70% today), a divorce rate of 23% (nearly 70% today), and single parent households at nearly 40% for black familes (almost 80% today).

But Moynihan’s critique went beyond the numbers. His analysis went to the heart of the importance of family in any society:

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”

This kind of thinking eventually led Moynihan to another inescapable conclusion. By breeding dependence on government for subsistence, we will make it impossible for the poor to take care of themselves:

Millions of people, Moynihan notes, have for generations become accustomed to living outside the circle of social responsibility and economic productivity. Under the AFDC program alone, started sixty years ago to provide temporary help to a relative handful of widows and jobless women with children, well over half the families receiving benefits now begin as AFDC families. In almost all cases, these are women with children born out of wedlock, and Moynihan notes that “there are millions of families in just this circumstance.”

A major political problem, and it is also a compassion problem, is that most of the country is untouched by this catastrophe. Those who are on AFDC for a short time are more or less evenly distributed across the land, while those who are more or less permanently on the dole are concentrated in the cities. In 1993, Moynihan notes, 59 percent of the children in Atlanta, 66 percent in Cleveland, 55 percent in Miami, 57 percent in Philadelphia, and 66 percent in Newark were receiving AFDC. Most of these children and their mothers have never known and possibly will never know any other way of life than living on welfare. In many cases, the mothers and grandmothers of these mothers never knew anything but welfare.

In 1996 as Congress prepared for welfare reform, many conservatives believed that Moynihan would join an effort the Senator himself had been pushing for since he arrived in Washington 20 years earlier. Instead, Moynihan ended up issuing dire warnings that millions would become homeless as well as this prescient take on the effect of welfare reform on young, black males:

Young males of the welfare-dependent mainly black urban underclass “can be horrid to themselves, horrid to one another, horrid to the rest of us.” Dismantle the defense system of the welfare status quo and you loose them upon society.

Most revealingly and depressingly, Moynihan concludes his declaration by drawing an analogy with the “deinstitutionalization” of mental patients in the 1960s and 1970s. That fatal step resulted in the hundreds of thousands of “homeless” wandering our streets in alcoholic and drug-induced stupor. But most of them are not dangerous. The thugs who do “horrid things” carry knives and guns. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” according to Kennan, were ideological and nationalistic. The sources of welfare conduct, according to Moynihan, are in congenital criminality and general social incompetence. In both cases, there is nothing to be done for it except containment.

In short, Moynihan had gone from advocating independence for welfare recipients to pushing for “containing” the problem. In other words, maintaining the status quo.

For containment is precisely what the government had been doing since at least 1968 when the blue ribbon panel charged with investigating the urban riots that nearly destroyed the inner cities in the late 1960’s cited “two Americas” as the major cause of black frustration and anger. Headed up by former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, the Commission determined that virulent white racism was the cause of black rioting and that the solution was radical income redistribution.

What happened next was again predicted by conservatives. In order to oversee this income redistribution, a huge bureaucracy was created along with an alphabet soup of agencies that worked hand in hand with a growing number of anti-poverty NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations) - including groups like the Black Panthers and the notorious Black P-Stone Nation in Chicago who were little more than street gangs. In effect, the federal government was involved in a protection racket believing that they were solving the income inequity problem of black versus white by creating dependence.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. All these income distribution schemes did was hasten the destruction of the black family which led to a vicious cycle of more dependency, more frustration, and more anger. Even the welfare reform of the 1990’s did little to change what had become a national shame; a permanent underclass unable to escape the ravages of poverty. Millions of young men have grown up, lived, fought, and died in the streets who didn’t have to all because the compassion merchants and anti-poverty bullies have failed to grasp the debilitating effects of dependence on government and the causal relationship between that dependence and the “otherness” felt by African Americans in general but especially by young black men.

This feeling of being separate takes many forms. In education, it has created a culture where black achievement is frowned on by some lest a student appear too “white.” It has also created seperate ideals with regards to employment, relationships, and neighborhood.

Has dependence also created a separate attitude on the part of the underclass toward the law?

The explosion of anarchy and mayhem in New Orleans will be studied for years and answers may never be found. But whatever the reason, it goes far beyond a “few malcontents” taking advantage of a lack of law enforcement. If it were a small number, it wouldn’t take 15,000 National Guardsmen to restore some semblance of order. Nor would people out for a lark be shooting at helicopters evacuating desperately sick people from hospitals. Something much deeper was at work in New Orleans, something beyond the disaster, beyond even the harsh and reportedly brutal treatment of young black men by the New Orleans Police Department in the past.

An economic determinist would point out that the looters were lashing out at whites by stealing their possessions and engaging in other criminal acts. This was what the Kerner Commission found back in 1968. The problem with that assumption is that cities have changed dramatically in the last 40 years. Where New Orleans used to have a majority of white people as citizens it is now 2/3 black. The people have elected a black Mayor. A black Police Superintendent has been named. Black elected officials permeate the government. The question then arises; if nearly 70% of the population is black in a city run by a black government, why were so many involved in lawless activity?

Clearly, race is not the answer. There must be something else at work besides color. Part of the explanation must be this “otherness” felt by young black men who have different perception of the law and how it doesn’t apply to them. Growing up as they have in a totally dependent environment where food, shelter, clothing - life itself - is dispensed by a formless, shapeless government, they have carved out a separate existence to achieve a twisted kind of independence and freedom. It’s all they’ve got.

Do we have the courage to discuss this otherness issue without the usual namecalling into which every single conversation regarding race degenerates? Jeff Goldstein has a challenge:

Rich Lowry [of NRO] sees the writing on the wall and is wary of what he presumes will be the “toxic and unhealthy” “post-catastrophe debate.” But I welcome it, suspecting as I do that any attempt to racialize this catastrophe will result—after the inevitable and necessary public debate—in a huge setback to the identity politics movement.

Bring it on.

Since the beginning of the republic we’ve failed to talk about the issue of race. If indeed the hurricane strips away the politics that prevent such a discussion, I’m all for it. As Goldstein says… Bring it on.

Every time I see Chuck Hagel I feel sorry for Nebraskans.

After all, people in Nebraska are generally friendly, nice, and sane (except on the 7 Saturdays when the Cornhuskers are playing at home). They exude the kind of wholesome, all-Americanism that drives liberals crazy. And anyb0dy who drives liberals nuts can’t be all bad. They’re devoutly religious and sport the most productive agricultural economy in the history of human civilization. Despite it’s small population, the state contributes more than 13% of all US beef output with a value of almost $6 billion.

Anyone who’s ever visited Omaha knows that Nebraskans like most Midwesterners are eminently practical in their politics and policies. The city is one of the friendliest, best run cities in the United States. This is an outgrowth of the good sense and good humor that can generally be ascribed to Nebraskans in general.

Which makes their embrace of Chuck Hagel all the more mystifying. Since his arrival in the Senate, Hagel has chosen to be something of an idiotarian. And while Nebraska has always been something of a maverick when it comes to government (they have a unicameral legislature - the only state in the country to have one) the independent streak demonstrated by such luminaries as James Exxon (D) and Carl Curtis( R ), didn’t extend very much beyond an occasional straying from party orthodoxy.

Hagel, however is different. And what makes him different is that he wants to be President of the United States - badly. His campaign has purchased the domain names “hagel2008.com and “ChuckHagel2008.com.” And his calculated effort to distance himself from the President on Iraq has paid huge dividends. I mean, who would have ever paid attention to a Senator from Nebraska unless he received glowing, fawning attention from the New York Times who wrote a puff piece on he and other Republican “moderates” last spring?

However, if I were Senator Hagel, I’d just go ahead and sell those domain names because after statements like the one he made yesterday, he doesn’t have a ghost of a a chance to win the Republican nomination:

“We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” Hagel said on “This Week” on ABC. “But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East. I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.”

Hagel said “stay the course” is not a policy. “By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq … we’re not winning,” he said.

We used to call this sort of thing “defeatism.” Now we call it “analysis.” But the good Senator wasn’t through:

Hagel, who was among those who advocated sending two to three times as many troops to Iraq when the war began in March 2003, said a stronger military presence by the U.S. is not the solution today.

“We’re past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” Hagel said. “The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.”

This sort of nonsense has been fisked to death so I’m not going to do that here. Suffice it to say that Republicans have a very long memory and you can be sure any political opponent of Hagel’s will use those statements to great effect.

Is anybody keeping track of the number of revelations coming out in recent days on what the 9/11 Commission failed to include when giving us what was supposed to be the “definitive narrative” of the events leading up to that tragic day?

Bill Clinton’s team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was “very dangerous” and could have “deadly results,” according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.
Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.

Looking back after 9/11, the memo makes for eerie reading — because White’s team foresaw, years in advance, that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.

“This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities,” wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.

Mary Jo White you may recall is the same former US Attorney whose memo to Janet Reno about the danger represented by the “wall” set up by the Department of Justice between intelligence and law enforcement went unheeded:

White knew that prevention should take place over prosecution if the US intended on keeping its citizens safe. She wrote her first memo objecting to the political decision to create an almost-insurmountable barrier that far exceeded the requirements of FISA as interpreted by earlier administrations. When that got her nowhere, she wrote a second memo, giving specific and prescient warnings about what would happen as a result:

That memo surfaced during the 9/11 hearings. But The Post has learned that White was so upset that she bitterly protested with another memo — a scathing one — after Reno and Gorelick refused to tear down the wall.
With eerie foresight, White warned that the Reno-Gorelick wall hindered law enforcement and could cost lives, according to sources familiar with the memo — which is still secret.

The 9/11 Commission got that White memo, The Post was told — but omitted any mention of it from its much-publicized report. Nor does the report include the transcript of its staff interview with White.

And here the Commission engages in its second covert act of omission in order to protect those who made it impossible for the intelligence community to act on its findings. What happened to the second White memo? Mary Jo White gets three mentions in their final report, all of them in the footnotes, and none of them refers to her warnings to Gorelick or Janet Reno. Nowhere does the Commission reveal her objections to the wall or her efforts to reverse the Gorelick decision.

What makes the discovery of this second memo so damaging to the 9/11 Commission is that the warnings contained in it were so spot on, so prescient of exactly what was going to happen if the Department of Justice continued with this idiocy that it’s an outrage both documents were not included in the 9/11 Commission Final Report.

Captain Ed:

Mary Jo White had a good understanding of the consequences of the 1995 policy change. She predicted this outcome five years before it happened. Second, if the policy was indeed misunderstood, who had responsibility for implementing it correctly and ensuring that the FBI understood it properly? The Department of Justice, of which the FBI is a part, and its leadership — Janet Reno and Jamie S. Gorelick.

Mohamed Atta and the other hijackers were able to fly under our intelligence radar precisely because the FBI was prevented from sharing information with the CIA and vice versa about the terrorist’s movements. And the evidence that a Clinton appointee realized the consequences of the wall only serves to open the floodgates to more questions about the author of the policy, 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, and why the Commission went out of its way to avoid criticizing both the wall and its enabler.

The question now has to be what’s the next step?

Clearly some kind of Congressional hearings are in order with the Commission itself on trial. Should all revelations about the Commission’s inadequacies be included in the hearing process? What about Able Danger? Or even more explosively, should the entire question about Iraq-al Qaeda connections be re-opened?

Captain Ed has coined the term “Omission Commission” to describe the current state of the 9/11 Commission’s credibility. I sincerely hope that these omissions are explainable due to sloppiness or shallow thinking and not some kind of cover-up or worse, an effort to discard information that did not fit into pre-conceived conclusions.

If the latter were the case, the Commission’s entire effort would have been a waste. This would necessitate the formation of a completely new panel to try and get at all the facts relevant to the attack and draw new conclusions and recommendations accordingly.

UPDATE

Austin Bay weighs in:

I’ll defer to my wife — who is a lawyer– on this point. [objections raised by DoD lawyers] She says attorneys are trained to say no and raise objections. They’ll hesistate because they anticipate an ACLU law suit and a DC political firestorm. A senior military commander will focus on the potential for attack — he knows the American people are “the final client” and will weigh the data with that in mind. So far there is no evidence that says any discussion between attorneys and senior commanders took place.

It’s time for the President to make a statement about Able Danger, even something as simple as “the lieutenant-colonel’s statements require further investigation.” Then, let’s investigate, with presidential authority.

Also, check out AJ’s fantastic AM roundup of the latest on Able Danger at The Strata-Sphere.. I have a feeling he’s going to be adding to it as the day goes on.

GOP Bloggers:

Remember, this was a Clinton appointee! And to whom did this memo go? Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, Clinton’s #2 at Justice and, incredibly, a member of the September 11 commission - a very conflicted member.

The Clinton administration clearly had a preference for inhibiting government intrusiveness, even in national security cases. As this story develops, its impact on Hillary Clinton’s political ambitions will be interesting to watch.

This brings up a general question of how much will Hillary’s chances be affected by Bill’s shennanigans? I tend to discount much impact for the simple reason most people have made up their minds already about the Clintons which, ironically, could be the biggest obstacle to Hillary even getting the Democractic nomination much less win the Presidency.

I’ll confess to not being an expert about much of anything. And being a “generalist” has many, many drawbacks when trying to write coherently about the War in Iraq. I’ve never served in the military so I can’t speak to what our soldiers are enduring on the ground as they try to stamp out what appears to be a never ending insurgency that continues to take its toll in American lives and treasure. I was never much of a “policy wonk” so it’s difficult for me to write about how the White House and Pentagon are formulating and carrying out our policy there.

All I can do is read. So for 10-12 hours a day I sit in front of my computer as the world tries to squeeze itself through my little 17″ monitor and enlighten me. I try to cram as much information and opinion as I can on a wide variety of issues that interest me. But what takes up most of my day is reading about the war.

I don’t write about Iraq as much as I used to because frankly, I’ve been pretty confused. I’ve contented myself with writing about the fight here at home between right and left believing that it’s vitally necessary to counter what Michelle Malkin so aptly describes as “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” seeing in that disease a real danger to both our continuing effort in Iraq and the poisoning of political discourse that makes governing here at home so much the harder.

I think what I am good at is detecting and recognizing trends. It’s quite simple, really. Flood your mind with enough information and the most fantastic computer ever built - the human brain - does the rest. As long as you arm yourself with a good enough bias detector (and B.S. detector) there really is nothing to it. And the trend I’ve been most concerned with lately has a dual track; the progress the anti-war left is making in playing to the war weariness of the American people and the situation on the ground in Iraq that is not improving and, in some ways, is worsening.

I’ve taken the President to task before on this site for not putting the war front and center on his agenda. In fact, the problem the President now has is if he tries to refocus the American people’s attention on Iraq and why we are there, he can rightfully be accused of playing politics with the issue. His approval rating on Iraq is going down because he has abandoned the issue to his political and ideological opponents. You can have administration spokesmen giving speeches all over the country and Congressional Republicans talking about the war until they”re blue in the face. But no one can grab the attention of the American people like a President speaking about war. The people are anxious and not a little confused. With the left wing in full cry against the war and the President personally along with continuing and in some respects escalating violence in Iraq, the people need to hear their President constantly, patiently, and doggedly explain why we are there, what losing the war would mean, and defining the rough parameters of victory.

It’s not that the American people don’t know these things already. It’s that they need to hear it again and again to buttress their faith against the faithless and steel their resolve against those whose major domestic concern is a humiliation of the President personally and the United States in general.

The left’s effectiveness in instilling war weariness in the public is the result of a constant drumbeat day after day of saying exactly the same thing; the President lied about WMD in Iraq. From this, all other critiques of the war resonate because, according to polls, people are now convinced this is so. Amplified as it is by a sympathetic media, the left’s message is falling on fertile ground because of the President’s unwillingness to take his critics head on, unashamed and without apology.

Once the President’s honesty about the reasons for going to war is successfully questioned, it’s simply a matter of people picking and choosing what other criticisms of the war they wish to believe. Is this a war for oil? For Haliburton? For Israel? To “finish the work” of his father? Take your pick. Once the President’s credibility is destroyed, anything is possible.

Mark Noonan points out the consequences of the President losing his credibility:

For the longest time I didn’t care much about the conspiracy theorists - putting them down as harmless nuts. This was a mistake on my part: a lie is a lie, and all lies are bad. We’ve become used to lies here in the United States - indeed, in a lot of cases a lie is much more easily believed than the truth. As it relates to our War on Terrorism, there is a built-in ability to believe a story about the President lying to get us into Iraq. We should have resolutely fought against the conspiracy theory lies right from the beginning, rather than allow them to become woven into the fabric of our society.

The price we are paying for allowing lies to gain currency is being paid in blood - the blood of our soldiers, as well as the blood of innocent non-combatants. You see, the people who believe conspiracy theories about the war might seem like laughable lunatics to most of us, but to our enemies they seem rational beings who, because of MSM puff-pieces on them, represent the average American - and in representing the average American, they play up to enemy propaganda about us. Unlike our domestic leftists, our Islamist enemies are not at all shy about stating their conspiracy theories in public - the theory that Mossad carried out 9/11 is underground in the United States, but it is front page news in the Arab world…to have paranoid theories “confirmed” by the statements of Americans protesting against President Bush and the war is like water in the desert to terrorists in Anbar province…and their masters in Damascus and Tehran.

This is why the Cindy Sheehan campaign is starting to pay dividends for the left. Contained in her “plea” for the President to “explain” why her son died is the accusation that he lied in order to start a war. In fact, the Sheehan drama is a two ring circus; one ring is the grieving mother seeking answers to her questions about why her son had to die. The other ring is the fiery, anti-war activist that accuses the President of doing the bidding of Israel and the oil companies. The first ring speaks to the fairness and compassion of the American people. The second ring feeds their doubts about the President’s motives.

I still think Mrs. Sheehan will self-destruct - especially now that apparently every loon who wants to get his face on TV is descending on Crawford. This will turn the “Cindy Sheehan show” into something similar to what happened to the right during the Terri Schiavo tragedy. The extremists will take center stage and the American people will turn away in droves.

This won’t solve the President’s political problem of re-invigorating the war effort here at home. For that, he could use some help with good news about Iraq both from a military and political standpoint. At the moment, neither seems likely.

For the last several months, the analysis I’ve read from people whose opinion is generally respected by both the left and the right has slowly been changing from cautious optimism to growing alarm over several trends in Iraq. They include:

1. An insurgency that is getting more sophisticated in their tactics and more deadly in their ability to inflict casualties. This sophistication includes being able to mount attacks aimed at causing political damage to the new government as well as escalating sectarian tensions.

2. A growing dismay at the lack of concrete progress in the training of the Iraqi army.

3. A deepening worry over sectarian militias that call to mind Lebanon’s fractious past.

4. The real possibility that despite the best efforts of government and religious leaders, civil war is growing more likely.

5. The political struggle over the form and content of the Iraqi Constitution that now appears will result in a delay in approving the document.

6. The battle at home over troop withdrawal which will test both the unity of the Administration as well as the President’s ability to resist the impulse to leave too soon.

Greg Djerjian on many of these trends I outlined above:

But to win this thing we need to be decimating the enemy–not disrupting him–with overwhelming force. And we simply don’t have that amount of force in theater. So we are doing the best we can with the resources at hand (do we really need all those troops in Germany, by the way?), scraping by really, and hoping against hope that the political process will improve and help us turn some corner in the not too distant future.

But hope isn’t a strategy, and to all those (and there are more and more) ready to give up (or fakely declare victory in that we weren’t strictly ‘defeated’ on the battlefield) and say to hell if Iraq degenerates into civil war, we gave it our best shot–let me be clear. An Iraq mired in large-scale sectarian conflict, let alone full-blown civil war, would be a cluster-f*&k of epic proportions. Why? Because it would mean a failed or failing state smack in the center of the Middle East. We would have created an embittered Sunni para-state, a terror haven really, roiling and destabilizing the region (such an unstable state of affairs would help foster radicalization of Shi’a behavior also, of course, in ways not helpful to the U.S. national interest).

Iran, Turkey, Syria and even Saudi Arabia and Jordan would have direct interests implicated too, of course. Need I sketch this out more? (Hint: Borders wouldn’t be treated with any sanctity by the neighbors, friends). The point is, leaving Iraq to fend for itself without a viable, stable polity in place would be a disaster–for the thousands and thousands (coalition and Iraqi alike) who will have died in vain, for the region, for our national prestige, for the war on terror generally.

Does the President have the political courage not to mention the political skills necessary to dramatically increase troop strength in Iraq? What kind of resistance would he get from the military? Would an increase in troop strength only serve to heighten sectarian tensions, feed the insurgency, depress the Iraqi armed forces, and embitter the average Iraqi citizen? Or has the military situation made all those concerns ancillary to the need to establish some semblance of order so that an elected Iraqi government can function?

This is why I think we’re in the biggest crisis of the war. We’re at a crossroads. And the decisions taken over the next few months by the President will determine whether the war is a success or failure. What makes me a little bitter is that this is taking place as the President seeks to put the war to the side as he pursues domestic concerns. The war may be a political downer for the White House. But we’ve got 138,000 men and women in Iraq who don’t give a fig about politics. They only want to get the job done and come home. And if getting the job done means increasing troop strength in the sort term then so be it.

The long and short of it is we need the President to do his job. I find it hard to imagine that FDR or Lincoln could have endured as political leaders if they had sought to sweep the war they were waging under the rug. If the President’s hope is that the American people will forget about the war, someone should dash that hope for him immediately. His opponents and the press won’t let that happen. If that ’s the case then the President has a choice; he can either treat the war with the seriousness and focus that it deserves or he can continue on as he is now.

It’s no longer a question of whether or not he should be more active in dealing with the war. It’s a question only of whether he will attempt to take control of events and guide the country to a far distant shore where Iraq is a peaceful, democratic state or whether events will instead control him. If it’s the latter, we will have no chance of succeeding. The former, we wing big.

There really is no other choice.

Watching Cindy Sheehan as she carries on outside of the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas I’ve been struck by her apparent heartfelt sincerity. She really does believe that the President of the United States is personally responsible for the death of her son, Casey. She really does believe that the War in Iraq is a gigantic conspiracy involving Israel, the oil companies, and big business. This is not a bid for publicity on her part, at least not consciously. I believe that she thinks that the best way to honor her son’s memory is to have the United States cut and run in Iraq. And I believe that she’s sincere when she says that she wants to talk to the President and get an “explanation” as to why her son had to die.

Cindy Sheehan is in the grip of some pretty powerful emotions. Grief and anger can play very strange tricks on the mind. I can remember my mother blaming the government for the death of my father in 1981 because of exposure to radiation while he was serving in the army in occupied Japan. She would rail constantly against the government for killing her husband, for knowingly sending him to his death. There was no reasoning with her or talking to her about alternative reasons for the cancer that killed him. So, I just let her go on and on about it, hoping that eventually the grief and hurt would subside and she could move on.

She never really did. In the midst of her grief, Alzheimers disease began its slow, insidious work and I don’t know if she ever really came to terms with her loss.

I think Cindy Sheehan is going through something similar now. Her pain has become such a constant companion that it seems natural, a part of her life. She can’t imagine living without it. In short, in order to feel good, she has to feel bad. Her grief is like a comfortable old blanket that she wraps around herself in order to insulate her from the very scary prospect of moving on in life without her son.

This is why any Gold Star mother deserves our pity and yes, our respect. Losing a child under the circumstances of war is especially hard. And her questions about the government’s plans for the war’s aftermath are legitimate, as pertinent as questions mothers in World War II who lost a son at Anzio or the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, or Kasserine Pass may have asked. Those battles were American blunders that resulted in thousands of needless deaths.

Mothers ask these questions in every war. What makes Mrs. Sheehan’s situation unique is that she has chosen to make her ordeal a public spectacle. She has taken the personal and made it political. And she has made common cause with those whose actions in support of the terrorists in Iraq may have, in fact, assisted in the death of her son.

I’m not talking about the rational anti-war left whose critiques of Administration policy are harsh but do not descend into the kind of exaggerated, conspiratorial hyperbole that Mrs. Sheehan and the crazy left have adopted. The gimlet-eyed anti-Americans who have captured her cause and made it their own know exactly what they’re doing and where they want to go. They want to piggyback their agenda on Mrs. Sheehan’s grief and ride her until the media tires of the spectacle and moves on to something else.

Michelle Malkin calls them “grief pimps.” Somewhat vulgar, but apt. They are without principals and without honor. To try and cash in politically on someone who so obviously is suffering the kind of denial Mrs. Sheehan is going through defies belief. The simple, common decencies normal people take for granted do not apply because to them, the personal is political. This is the foundation of modern leftist ideology. It has brought us multiculturalism, identity politics, and a host of irrational idiocies that threaten to destroy our civilization. What R. Emmett Tyrell has called liberalisms “riot of conceits” now allows for the exploitation of grief. One may ask, well why not? The left has managed to exploit everything else, why not human misery?

There’s an extraordinary picture of National Security Adviser Steve Hadley sitting at the feet of Mrs. Sheehan a few days ago talking to her and listening to what she has to say. Her subsequent recollection of the meeting reveals what happens to mind and memory when grief and anger take over:

Joe Hagin [WH Deputy Chief of Staff] told me that he goes with the president when he meets with families, and that George Bush really cares about the soldiers and the families, and I said, “Don’t even tell me that! Because I met with him before, and that man doesn’t even have an ounce of compassion in his body.” And he looked really surprised. Don’t you think that’s something they would have known about before they had this little tete-a-tete with me yesterday

Contrast what she said there with this snippett from her meeting with the President in June of last year:

THE REPORTER of Vacaville, CA published an account of Cindy Sheehan’s visit with the president at Fort Lewis near Seattle on June 24, 2004:

“‘I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,’ Cindy said after their meeting. ‘I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.’

“The meeting didn’t last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son’s sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith.

“The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

“For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

“‘That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,’ Cindy said.”

I have no doubt that Cindy Sheehan remembers her meeting with the President the way she described it two days ago on Air America. She’s not lying. She has replayed that meeting over and over in her mind and where she first thought the President showed compassion, she now sees flippancy. She re-runs every word, every gesture of the President’s and each time she does, she becomes more convinced that the President is an unfeeling, uncaring monster. The two descriptions may not sound the same, but they relfect what she actually felt back then as well as the way she feels now.

The fact that this has now caused a split in her family is actually feeding the pain she needs to go on. Being encouraged by the left to carry a cross, her martyrdom would be complete if her family abandoned her. And this apparently is what she wants.

I doubt whether Mrs. Sheehan will ever retreat from the precipace that has opened beneath her feet. It remains to be seen whether her friends on the left will push her over the edge or simply abandon her and move on. Either way she’s a lost soul. For that reason, I can’t be too harsh on her. I can only pity her as she wallows in her pain and grief and is exploited by people who aren’t fit to clean her dead son’s army boots.