California Conservative

Dick Morris has penned a brilliant column on why the lagging economy won’t automatically hurt Republicans this November. Here’s the most impressive part of the column:

[Clinton’s] promise to “focus like a laser beam” on the recession won him big points throughout the campaign. His 10-year record as a governor and his chairmanship of the National Governors Association bolstered his credentials. But we first met Barack Obama as an advocate of racial and partisan healing and then as an opponent of the war in Iraq. When he tried to morph into an economic expert in time for the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, voters didn’t buy it and voted for Hillary.

So the question that hangs over the election is: Are we prepared to trust a new candidate with almost no experience and no claim to economic expertise in the middle of one of the most threatening economic situations we have ever faced?

I said last spring that Sen. Obama would have difficulty getting elected because voters would turn against him when they got serious. (more…)

According to this article, US combat deaths will show a massive decline from the 66 combat deaths from July, 2007. This month’s combat death toll currently sits at 5. To be fair, though, it should be noted that last July, US troops were just getting started with the Surge’s offensive.

With those statistics in mind, we should ask Sen. Obama some questions. Here’s the first question I’d want answered:

Q1: How flexible would your 16 month plan be if Gen. Petraeus said that he didn’t want to lose the gains that the Surge has produced?

Q2: Do you think the Iraq war is winnable? If you don’t think it’s winnable, why not?

Q3: Are you committed to winning in Iraq so that we’ll have a strong, stabilized ally in the heart of the Middle East? If you aren’t committed to winning there, why aren’t you? (more…)

The NY Post’s Amir Taheri questions the purpose of Sen. Obama’s trip in his latest column. Consider it today’s must reading. Let Mr. Taheri’s excoriation begin:

TERMED a “learning” trip, Sen. Barack Obama’s eight- day tour of eight nations in the Middle East and Europe turned out to be little more than a series of photo ops to enhance his international credentials.

“He looked like a man in a hurry,” a source close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said last week. “He was not interested in what we had to say.”

Why am I not surprised to find out that Sen. Obama didn’t bother listening to the Iraqis? In fact, the better question might be this:

Shouldn’t we expect a man of Obama’s arrogance to be indifferent to listening?

Notice this exchange with Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press:

MR. BROKAW: When you get home and Michelle says to you, “Barack, what did you learn that surprised you? And did you change your mind about anything based on this entire trip?”

SEN. OBAMA: Well, I, I, I didn’t see a huge shift in the strategic policies that I’ve laid out throughout this campaign. It was clear to me that Afghanistan is the central front on terror, that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have reconstituted themselves.

Granted, this is only the first part of his answer but it’s verification of what Mr. Taheri is saying. He learned nothing. The trip was just verification that he was right all along. Stop after stop, Obama’s policies were verified in his mind. Why didn’t Sen. Obama ask Gen. Petraeus his opinion on his 16-month plan? Was he afraid he might get this response? (more…)

Yes, you read that headline right. What I haven’t told you is that the Reid I’m refering to is the AP’s Robert H. Reid. Surely, you didn’t think I was talking about Sen. Reid. Anyways, here’s what Robert Reid is reporting:

The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.

Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace, a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government. (more…)

While thousands of worshipers expressed their adoration for the Obamessiah, John McCain took aim at Sen. Obama’s decision to not support the Surge which has dramatically reduced the violence in Iraq:

Senator Obama and I also faced a decision, which amounted to a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief. America passed that test. I believe my judgment passed that test. And I believe Senator Obama’s failed.

We both knew the politically safe choice was to support some form of retreat. All the polls said the “surge” was unpopular. Many pundits, experts and policymakers opposed it and advocated withdrawing our troops and accepting the consequences. I chose to support the new counterinsurgency strategy backed by additional troops, which I had advocated since 2003, after my first trip to Iraq. Many observers said my position would end my hopes of becoming president. I said I would rather lose a campaign than see America lose a war. My choice was not smart politics. It didn’t test well in focus groups. It ignored all the polls. It also didn’t matter. The country I love had one final chance to succeed in Iraq. The new strategy was it. So I supported it. Today, the effects of the new strategy are obvious. The surge has succeeded, and we are, at long last, finally winning this war.

Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn’t just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better. (more…)

Several portions of Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin caught my attention. Here’s the first thing he said that caught my attention:

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. “There is only one possibility,” he said. “For us to stand together united until this battle is won…The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty…People of the world, look at Berlin!”

Isn’t it odd to hear Sen. Obama talk about “in the darkest hours”, Berliners “kept the flame of hope burning” just after visiting Iraq, which Sen. Obama voted to abandon in their darkest hour?

The man who talks about hope and change voted to cut off funding for the troops, which would’ve handed Iraq to AQI’s terrorists and Iranian-funded militias. Ironic doesn’t begin to describe it. (more…)

Note the following exchange that occurred when ABC’s Terry Moran interviewed Sen. Obama :

Moran asked what Iraq would look like now if Obama’s policy of withdrawing in the face of the violence had been implemented.

“That is a hard thing to speculate,” Obama said, “The Sunnis might have made the same decisions at that time. The Shii’as might have made some similar decisions based on political calculation. There was ethnic cleansing in Baghdad that actually took the violence level down. And so, as I said before. Nobody has a crystal ball. If we did you just hire the guy with the crystal ball.”

I haven’t seen the original transcript, so this is coming via Jake Tapper of ABC blogs Political Punch.

Is the senator really going this far out of his way to avoid saying the surge was a success that he wants to credit ethnic cleansing for a 90% reduction in violence?

Cross posted at The Gentle Cricket

The notion that the Agenda Media or other branches of the Dead Tree Coalition were outlets of the truth disappeared decades ago. Now there’s proof that they’ve made the final step into being an outlet for the DNC. When Obama wrote a factually inaccurate op-ed on Iraq, the NYT published it without hesitation. When John McCain submitted an op-ed rebutting Obama’s points, former Clinton speechwriter and current NY Times hatchetman David Shipley opted not to publish Sen. McCain’s op-ed.

Shipley’s delivering what he thought was a death blow turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Sen. McCain because the McCain campaign sent the op-ed and Shipley’s email to Drudge. Mr. Drudge was perfectly willing to publish it in its entirety. Here is Sen. McCain’s op-ed verbatim:

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% 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. (more…)

According to Ralph Peters’ latest NY Post column, al Qa’ida’s stock is about to bottom out. Col. Peters doesn’t think it’ll recover, either. Here’s his harshest words, directed at the Democrats, though he doesn’t do it by name:

The partisan hacks who insisted that Iraq was a distraction from fighting al Qaeda have missed the situation’s irony: Things are getting worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan not because our attention was elsewhere, but because al Qaeda has been driven from the Arab world, with nowhere else to go. Al Qaeda isn’t fighting to revive the Caliphate these days. It’s fighting for its life.

I’ll remind everyone that Ralph Peters isn’t a pro-Bush shill. This is simply his honest opinion on the trouble al-Qa’ida is in. That he’s saying that al-Qa’ida is fighting for its life is pretty dramatic. Col. Peters isn’t given to making such statements very often.

Where do Osama & Co. stand today? They’re not welcome in a single Arab country. The Saudi royals not only cut off their funding, but cracked down hard within the kingdom. A few countries, such as Yemen, tolerate radicals out in the boonies but they won’t let al Qaeda in. Osama’s reps couldn’t even get extended-stay rooms in Somalia, beyond the borders of the Arab world. (more…)

Senator McCain, Words don’t do justice to the admiration I have for your heroism, sacrifice and steadfastness while you were imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton. i can’t even begin to understand what that ordeal was like. I’m impressed by the fact that you not only survived that ordeal but that you then served our nation in such an honorable way.

During your time in the Senate, military officials knew that they could count on you to support them when they told you about their needs, whether that need was about a new jet, a new weapons system or in straightening out turf wars within the Pentagon.

We also know that you haven’t been a yes man for the military. When you saw this war going badly, you spoke out, telling the nation that you didn’t have confidence in Donald Rumsfeld or his plan for victory. Your championing the Surge was instrumental in turning the tide in Iraq.

While we know that you didn’t design the plan, we know that youdefended the plan when your opponent and others were saying the strategy was doomed for failure. Thanks to your steadfastness, the plan was given time to succeed. And succeed it has, possibly beyond our highest expectations.

In short, you’ve led while others adopted a defeatist attitude.

While the war turned around, the economy soured. The biggest hindrance to America’s prosperity are high gas prices. Now is the time to focus like a laser beam on this crisis. Because some politicians refuse to let oil companies explore for oil off our coast or in the Mountain West, our nation faces a Crisis of Choice. (more…)