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. (continue reading post »)

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. (continue reading post »)

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. (continue reading post »)

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. (continue reading post »)

I didn’t listen to Sen. Obama’s major national security speech but this article gives me something to comment on. According to the article, here’s Sen. Obama’s priorities:

If elected president, he said, he would also finish the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban; secure nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue nations; achieve “true energy security”; and rebuild the nation’s alliances.

While Sen. Obama takes teh view that Iraq isn’t a central front in the war against the jihadists, the jihadists have said that it is. That sounds like the Dems’ approach that we weren’t at war with Radical Islam in the 1990s. Then as now, Democrats are ignoring the facts.

As for finishing the fight against al-Qa’ida, why not stay in Iraq and finish deplete their recruits there? If they’re sending people to us, the hospitable thing to do is give them one 21 gun salute after another.

Sen. Obama’s goal of securing “nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue nations” is a worthwhile goal but that won’t happen by meeting with Ahmadinejad or by not keeping the threat of war hanging over his head. (continue reading post »)

Claire ‘There’s Nothing Inconsistent’ McCaskill appeared on Meet the Press Sunday. In a short period of time, she tried telling Tom Brokaw that Barack Obama hasn’t changed his policy towards hightailing it out of Iraq. Here’s the video and decide for yourself:

Better yet, study this transcript featuring Claire McCaskill doing her best to spin her way out of a difficult situation:

MR. BROKAW: Senator McCaskill, your own candidate has had his own difficulties this past week in explaining his positions, sometimes in the same day. Let’s begin with a well-known, now, sound bite about what he would do in Iraq. He’s planning a trip there. This is what he had to say two weeks ago in Fargo, North Dakota, something that you supported in the same day in Kansas City. Here’s Senator Obama talking about his plans for Iraq.

(Videotape, July 3, 2008)

SEN. OBAMA: I’ve always said that I would listen to commanders on the ground. I’ve always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability. That assessment has not changed, and when I go to Iraq and I have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I’m sure I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.

(End videotape) (continue reading post »)

The WSJ is reporting that Chuck Hagel is likely joining Sen. Obama on his trip to Iraq. For those of us who didn’t see anything worthing in Sen. Hagel and who are thankful that he’s retiring, this presents a two-for-one opportunity.

A vocal critic of both the Iraq War and the Bush administration, Hagel mulled a run for the White House last year, but opted out of the race. He announced he was retiring from the U.S. Senate in Sept. 2007.

In a Tuesday interview with MSNBC, senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod also offered kind words for the Nebraska senator. “Sen. Hagel, I think, has been very courageous in speaking out on this issue of Iraq and the misguided policies that we’ve had from the beginning.” Axelrod declined to comment when asked then if Hagel would join Obama on the Iraq visit.

If Hagel joins Obama to Iraq, it’ll mean that two arrogant senators will have to admit that McCain supported the right strategy, not just one. (continue reading post »)

GEN David Petraeus was confirmed by the Senate as the new commander of Central Command in the Middle East (CENTCOM) while LT GEN Ray Odierno was promoted to 4-star GEN and confirmed to replace GEN Petaeus as Multi-National Force-Iraq commander in Iraq.

The Senate voted 95-2 for Petraeus and 96-1 for Odierno with Democratic Senators Robert Byrd and Tom Harkin opposing Petraeus, Harkin opposing Odierno.

While it’s unclear why Harkin of Iowa opposed the pair, D-WVa Byrd said he thinks Petraeus should finish the job in Iraq, saying:

“It does not seem prudent to remove the mastermind behind the fragile successes that have been thus far achieved.”

I suspect both Byrd and Harkin are pandering to their anti-war base, although it is true that Byrd has exhibited a complete lack of understanding military and counterinsurgency operations on the ground in Iraq.

Cross-posted @: Bottom Line Up Front

Remember Barack Obama’s response to Hillary’s saying that it took a president like LBJ to get the Civil Rights Act signed into law? “Don’t tell me that words don’t matter”, huffed the Obamessiah at the time:

Just weeks after clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama has backed out of every major policy position he took during the campaign. I won’t recite the list of major policies that the Obamessiah has flip-flopped on because each of us knows the list. Instead, I’ll simply ask 2 questions. Here’s the first question:

Is there any policy position or moral principle that Sen. Obama isn’t willing to abandon if it’ll benefit him politically? (continue reading post »)