Brown & The Jobs Bill

There is a lot of needless wailing and gnashing of teeth going on over the fact that Scott Brown, along with a handful of the other usual suspects, crossed party lines to vote with the Democrats to pass Harry Reid's scaled down $15 billion "jobs bill." It in fact was scaled down from a "bi-partisan" $85 billion bill that had far more tax cuts negotiated between Senators Baucus and Grassley.

What is left is essentially a cosmetic bill consisting of a . . .:

$13 billion program allowing companies to avoid paying Social Security taxes for the remainder of 2010 on new hires who have been unemployed for at least 60 days. Employers would also receive a $1,000 tax credit for each new worker who stays on the job for at least a year. Democrats tout the plan as a simple way to create tens of thousands of new jobs, though some experts dismiss it as too narrow to make a significant dent in the nation's unemployment rate.

The jobs bill also includes a one-year reauthorization of the Highway Trust Fund, a provision allowing companies to write off equipment purchases as business expenses, and an expansion of the Build America Bonds program, which helps state and local governments finance infrastructure projects. . . .

It is doubtful that this bill will create many new jobs, but at least it is mostly aimed at the private sector. That is a first for the Obama administration. I applaud them.

Let's put this, and Scott Brown's vote, in perspective. Just a month ago, Obama was asking for a jobs bill that would include $79 billion to fund more infrastructure projects even though an analysis of the near $79 billion already spent on infrastructure projects in the original stimulus shows it had "no effect" on local unemployment. Just as a reminder, of the original $786 stimulus, only 2.6% was directed towards small business loans - even though small businesses are responsible for over 80% of all the new job creation in America. Then there is Crazy Nancy and the House which passed a version of the "jobs bill" last week that would spend $150 billion on a wide variety of things - just not private sector jobs. The House bill has only $354 million - yes, million - going to small business loans. That is less than one quarter of one percent of their "jobs" bill. These people are insane.

Scott Brown never claimed to be a conservative ideologue. He may be center or center right, but if he were too much further to the right then he is, I wonder whether he could have gotten elected in blue Mass. He has already declared that he intends to hold the line on Obama care and the War on Terror. That is a lot. Besides, the reaity is that we are never going to see a better deal coming out of this Congress than a jobs bill that only spends $15 billion and at least points that money in the direction of small business. That's the zenith of what we can expect to see coming from a Congress that is redefining the terms "profligate spending" and "misplaced priorities." In truth, I would have voted for it just as a prophylactic against an alternative to something many times worse. Thus, I find those today complaining about Scott Brown either aren't paying attention or they are ideologoues engaging in a bit of counterproductive chest thumping melodrama.

The bottom line is that Obama threatens our nation in many ways. We have health care and reconcilliation staring us in the face. Cap and trade, like the theory of man made global warming itself, may be dead, but we have the EPA warning that it will start issuing binding regulations to limit carbon emissions within the next twelve months. Obama is still pushing a major overhaul of our financial system that will force race based lending standards into our financial system at a level never before seen. There are major battles to be fought between now and November and perhaps beyond if the right doesn't recapture the House or the Senate. My suggestion to those who are, like me, quite concerned with all of this - give Scott Brown a pass on this one. Scott Brown is part of the solution, not the problem. Keep your eyes on the left, because there is the real threat to our nation.

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Oil & Pelosi's Swamp

Oil prices have finally fallen below the $100 a barrel mark and look to be dropping in the near future as commodity markets worry less about supply of oil than about lessening demand brought about by crumbling financial markets. Even in the face disruption of supplies by Hurricane Ike, oil prices fell over $4 to $96.27 a barrel. In the face Ike, that is a measure of how supremely weak the market is at the moment.

The key word in that last sentence is "moment." As financial markets shake out, the same problems of limited supply and rising world demand will reassert their upward push on oil prices. Not even the Nancy Pelosi - who suspended the House in August without bring up an energy bill for fear of it being hijacked to force a vote on drilling - believes that she can possibly allow the matter to slide any longer.

Thus Pelosi has finally given up the ghost on no drilling for oil - or at least that is the line she is putting out for public consumption. Once promising to "drain the swamp" and conduct the most open and fair Congress in history, Pelosi has turned Congress into her own Politburo, refusing to allow votes that she might lose and shutting out the Republican members from input into laws she crafts. The latest - an energy package written completely by the left and designed to limit drilling through the back door.
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To give some background, the only place offshore were oil drilling is allowed is in the the Gulf of Mexico. The states bordering the Gulf have both a say in allowing the driling and an economic incentive to allow it. They keep 1/3 of the royalties on the oil revenue. They collected some $9 billion for their state coffers last year.

With that in mind, Democrats have huddled for the past few weeks trying to figure a way around the conundrum off-shore drilling. The partisan result - the Pelosi Plan. The plan lifts the ban on offshore drilling with one hand but with the other gives states a right to veto drilling within 100 miles of their coastline and insures that they will do so by taking away the royalty sharing agreement. A state would be hard pressed to allow exploitation of natural resources until they have a deal to actually get paid for those resources.

Pelosi's disingenuous reason for killing the royalty sharing agreement is ostensibly because it would require a reworking of the budget because of "pay as you go rules." As applied to off-shore drilling, "Congressional Budget Office forecasts now include revenue from drilling going to the treasury. If money is diverted to states, it would have to be offset with tax hikes or spending cuts under “pay-go” rules." Siting that as an obstacle is an obvious canard. One, these rules are easilly waved - they just were for the Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac. Two, the House has yet to submit any budgets for the next fiscal year. Three, the amount the CBO has budgeted in its projections for off-shore royalties is less than $1 billion a year over the next ten years. That would not require anything like the significant budget reworking that Pelosi is claiming. This is just another partisan hack job from the Queen of the Swamp.

(H/T Hot Air)

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Dershowitz Warns Obama On Criminalizing Political Differences

The photo above is of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, imprisoned in Russia's gulags for disagreeing with Stalin. In a prior post, I wrote that it is unthinkable that political differences would ever be criminalized in this country. Yet, Obama, Biden, and many of the people most likely to populate an Obama administration have made no secret of their intent to use the police powers of the nation to prosecute the prior administration - with many seeking something akin to war crimes indictments against the Bush regime. How serious is this threat and how much of a danger does it pose to the fabric of our democracy - in today's WSJ, Obama supporter and Harvard Prof. of Law Alan Dershowitz writes to warn Obama and the far left from considering this course of action.

This from Mr. Deshowitz writing in the WSJ:

I don't agree with a lot of the Bush administration's policies in the war on terror, and I plan to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden in November. But during a recent campaign rally Mr. Biden gave a wrong-headed, if well-intentioned, answer when asked whether he would "pursue the violations that have been made against our Constitution by the present administration?" This is how he responded: "We will not be stopped from pursuing any criminal offense that's occurred."

After praising Democratically controlled congressional committees for investigating these matters -- "collecting data, subpoenaing records . . . building a file" -- Mr. Biden continued: "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued -- not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, [but] out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president -- no one is above the law."

Mr. Biden's comments echoed what Mr. Obama had said in April when he pledged that, if elected, he would have his attorney general investigate the actions of his predecessor to distinguish between possible "genuine crimes" and "really bad policies." Mr. Obama moderated his statement by stating that he would not want his first term "consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt," because his administration would have many other problems "we've got to solve."

No reasonable person can disagree with the important principle underlying these statements by the democratic nominees that "no one is above the law." But there is a countervailing principle at play here that is equally important -- namely that the results of an election should not determine who is to be prosecuted. These principles inevitably clash when the winners of a presidential election investigate and prosecute the losers, even if the winners honestly believe that the losers committed "genuine crimes" rather than having pursued merely "bad policies."

. . . We simply cannot trust a politically appointed and partisan attorney general of either party to investigate his political predecessors in a manner that is both fair in fact and in appearance. Nor would the appointment of "independent" or "special" counsel solve the structural problems inherent in our system. These ersatz functionaries bring problems of their own to the criminal justice process, as evidenced by the questionable investigations that targeted President Bill Clinton, vice presidential chief-of-staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby (full disclosure: I consulted with both of them, without fee, about their cases) and others over the past decades.

The real question is whether investigating one's political opponents poses too great a risk of criminalizing policy differences -- especially when these differences are highly emotional and contentious, as they are with regard to Iraq, terrorism and the like. The fear of being criminally prosecuted by one's political adversaries has a chilling effect on creative policy making and implementation.

Noam Chomsky -- the MIT professor of linguistics who has become a sort of guru to hard-left America bashers -- typically overstated his point when he asserted that "if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every postwar American president would have been hanged." Among the crimes committed by American presidents, according to Mr. Chomsky, were the counterinsurgency campaign in Greece (Truman), the overthrow of the Guatemala's government (Eisenhower), the Bay of Pigs (Kennedy), the Vietnam War (Johnson), the invasion of Cambodia (Nixon), the attack against East Timor (Ford), the increase in Indonesian atrocities (Carter), support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon (Reagan) and on and on to the current administration.

For those hard-left Democrats who have been pressing their candidates for a promise to prosecute, the list of crimes allegedly committed by the Bush-Cheney administration grows longer and thinner every day.

A politically appointed prosecutor, imbued with partisan zeal, could find technical violations of the criminal law in some of the envelope-pushing policies of virtually every administration. One does not have to be as ruthless as Laventri Beria -- who infamously assured his boss Joseph Stalin "show me the man and I'll find you the crime" -- to come up with "a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation" (as Mr. Biden put it).

Even the most well-intentioned and honorable partisans may see "genuine crimes" on the part of their political adversaries, where a more objective prosecutor would see nothing more than "really bad policies." Most "political" crimes are matters of degree, hinging on "mens rea," the mental state of the alleged perpetrator. The criminal law is a blunderbuss, not a scalpel, and in the hands of a partisan prosecutor it is too blunt an instrument to distinguish "genuine crimes" from "really bad policies" on the part of defeated political enemies.

Our constitutional system of checks and balances provides numerous mechanisms for dealing with "really bad policies," even those that may be seen by some as bordering on criminal. Congress may investigate, expose and legislate, but it has no authority to prosecute. In extreme cases, impeachment is available. Prosecution should be reserved for the extremely rare situation where the criminal act and mens rea are so apparent to everyone that no reasonable person would suspect partisanship. The best remedy in other cases is to campaign against and defeat those who supported the bad policies.

That is among the important reasons why I will vote for the Obama-Biden ticket, and that is also why I will try to persuade them, if they win, not to conduct criminal investigations of their defeated opponents.

Read the entire article.

Both Joe Biden and Obama represent the hard left of their party. Biden, during his tenure as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has turned the process for Supreme Court nominees into a partisan circus. Even that, however, does not even show up on the radar in comparison to the proposed course of criminal investigations for political differences. One of Obama's gifts is to make radical left positions seem completely mainstream when he speaks of them. But read between the lines and you see just how far to the left he is. Little is or would be more radical in a democracy than show trials over political differences. It is a measure of the control the radical left has over the Democratic party - and it is an indicator of just how much of a fundamental change an Obama administration poses for America.

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Doubling Down On Defeat & A Pattern Of Avoidance

Doug Ross has a superb retrospective on how our Dems have embraced defeat at all costs. After detailing their perfidy, he characterizes their actions:

They were wrong. They were unbelievably partisan, putting their interests before those of the United States and the safety of its military.

No party has been more wrong, more often, on serious issues of national import than the Democratic party since 1864.

Read the entire post.

Plus there is not only an embrace of defeat, but a refusal to defend it - at least from our would-be Messiah-in-Chief. Gateway Pundit notes that Obama met with Maliki but DID NOT raise the issue of his sixteen month timetable during the meeting - apparently wanting to avoid any fall out that might require Obama to publicly discuss "refining" his plans. To put this in context, Obama also deliberately avoided raising his sixteen month timetable when he had the opportunity to question General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in April. He went AWOL from a town hall meeting before military families where the issue of Iraq and his embrace of defeat was almost sure to be raised - rather pointedly. And he is staying as far away as possible from any debates with McCain that are not both truncated and moderated by MSM synocophants. There is a pattern here.

What does one take from all of this. My take is that Obama is one cowardly SOB without the courage of his convictions to be able to defend his positions in any sort of pointed debate.

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Iraq Through GAO Glasses Darkly

Within the past two days, both the Department of Defense and the GAO have issued reports on Iraq. The DoD report is guardedly optimistic about Iraqi progress. It is an important report and I will summarize it separately. The GAO report is a partisan document that uses selective facts and data, ignores key facts, and seems written by people best described as 'bean counters.' As the Washington Post states, "the two reports seemed to assess wholly different realities." I beg to differ. Only one report documents reality, and it is clearly not the GAO report.
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The GAO’s last major report on Iraq was, if I recall correctly, the document solicited by Democrats in the week before General Petraeus briefed Congress in September, 2007. That was the document all Democrats relied upon to suggest that General Petraeus was being highly dishonest about the success of the surge. In reviewing the GAO's most recent product, there seems to be no improvement in quality, veracity or objectivity.

The problems with the newly released GAO report are systemic. One, there is definitely a partisan bent that shows throughout the report in how data is presented to shine the worst possible light on Iraq. Two, this report is an attempt by bureaucrats and bean counters to find bright lines and right angles in a situation that has murky lines and is chock full of odd angles – and they are having a lot trouble digesting it. For example, the GAO makes a great deal out of the fact that no oil law is yet in place in Iraq. They completely ignore the fact that, while this law is still in negotiation, the situation is not broken simply because an oil law is not in place. They ignore that oil revenues are being shared and shared fairly.

Likewise is the GAO’s take on the vast improvements being made in Iraqi security forces. If one reads the GAO report, it is as if there has been little to any qualitative improvement occurring among Iraqi security forces since the September, 2007 GAO report. The GAO comes to it assessment of the lack of progress in Iraqi forces by cherry picking DOD data and, claiming as one of the reasons that the Iraqi forces are not making sufficient progress that Iraqi forces are overly “dependen[t] on U.S. and coalition forces.” The clear implication is that if we simply do an Obama and leave, the Iraqi forces will improve. Nowhere in the report is the greatest threat to Iraq – the mad mullahs next door who, incidently, threaten the Western world – even mentioned.

What I find most offensive about this report is that it claims a “new strategy” is needed in Iraq, apparently finding the surge planning insufficient and not achieving its goals. The precise contours of a change in strategy are only vaguely hinted at in the report, but it seems certain this conclusion is tailor made for Obama and the Democrats.

Having taken the time to read the GAO, I feel that I have been cheated out of two hours of my life. The DOD, Treasury, and State Dept. all have filed dissents from this report which are attached to the report as annexes. But make up your own mind. You can find the report with annexes here.

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Cut, Run & Dominoes

Aurthur Hermann, writing at the WSJ, gives us a retrospective on the laundry list of effects resulting from the America's legislated surrender in Viet Nam and then the complete refusal to further support the South Vietnamese government. As he says, America cannot afford another retreat.

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This from Mr. Hermann in the WSJ:

Most people have never heard of Operation Frequent Wind, which ended on April 30, 1975, 33 years ago. But every American has seen pictures of it: the Marine helicopters evacuating the last U.S. personnel from the embassy in Saigon, hours before communist tanks rolled into the city. Thousands of desperate Vietnamese gathered at the embassy gate and begged to be taken with them. Others committed suicide.

Those scenes are a chilling reminder of what happens when a great power decides to cut and run. Two of the three presidential candidates are proposing to do just that in Iraq. We need to remember what happened the last time we gave up on an unpopular foreign policy, not only in humanitarian terms but in terms of American power and prestige.

Actually, the U.S. had won the war in Vietnam on the battlefield, just as the surge has done today in Iraq. Over Easter 1972, South Vietnamese forces, backed by U.S. airpower, crushed the last communist offensive, killing nearly 100,000 North Vietnamese troops.

The North was forced to sign peace accords in Paris recognizing the Republic of South Vietnam. The last 2,500 U.S. support troops went home. What they left was a fragile but sustainable peace, and an elected government in Saigon that was growing stronger every month.

But with 160,000 North Vietnamese soldiers still in South Vietnam, keeping the South free was going to require continued U.S. help, especially air support and military equipment if the North ever attacked again.

Democrats and American public opinion, however, had had enough. Much like Iraq today, the vast majority of South Vietnam had been pacified. Its government was taking on difficult but essential political changes, including land reform. The Democratic-controlled Congress, however, did not want to hear about success. They assumed failure in Vietnam would complete their rout of the hated Richard Nixon, who was already out of office thanks to Watergate, and position them for victory in the 1976 presidential election.

Meanwhile, the American public had been conditioned by the media to see Vietnam as a failed policy, and taught that America had gotten itself in the middle of a "civil war" which the Vietnamese had to sort out themselves. Once the last American troops left Vietnam, public opinion would never tolerate re-entry into a war widely seen as a blunder and endless quagmire.

In early 1975 the communists launched a massive attack. President Gerald Ford asked for $1 billion in supplemental funds to help the South Vietnamese, and Congress refused. They had already pulled the plug on the U.S.-supported government of Lon Nol in Cambodia. Ford had no choice but to order the evacuation of remaining U.S. personnel.

After nearly two decades of devastating war and 58,000 American combat deaths, the U.S. left Southeast Asia. As the last helicopter lifted off from Saigon, the New York Times's Sydney Schanberg wrote an article with the title, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." And the Times's columnist Anthony Lewis asked, "what future could possibly be more terrible than the reality" of a war that had cost so much in lives and treasure?

With the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge taking over, the world was about to find out.

At least 65,000 Vietnamese were murdered or shot after "liberation" – the equivalent in terms of Vietnam's population at the time, of killing three-quarters of a million people in today's U.S. The new communist regime ordered somewhere between one- third to one-half of South Vietnam's population to pass through its "re-education" camps, where perhaps as many as 250,000 died of disease, starvation, or were worked to death (the last inmates were not released until 1986).

That number does not include the thousands of "boat people" who tried to flee the totalitarian nightmare of communist Vietnam, and perished at sea.

Cambodia's fate was even worse. At least one and a half million innocent Cambodians were butchered or starved to death in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and re-education camps, put to death by a fanatical regime that believed that anyone who wore eyeglasses must have "bourgeois intellectual tendencies" and be shot.

The scale of moral collapse and suffering went beyond Indochina. The pullout had a ripple effect on U.S. power and prestige, just as the proponents of the so-called "domino theory" had warned. American foreign policy, crippled by remorse and self-doubt, stood helplessly as others rushed into the power vacuum.

Marxist-Leninist regimes emerged not only in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but in Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau (1974), Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola (1975), Afghanistan (1978), and Grenada and Nicaragua (1979). Soviet troops were welcomed in Fidel Castro's Cuba for the first time since the 1962 missile crisis. Cuban troops traveled freely to Africa to prop up Marxist regimes there.

In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to establish his brutal theocratic rule over Iran, confident that America, having learned "the lessons of Vietnam," would never intervene. . . .

Read the entire article. I've always found it interesting that it was Democrats who got us into the Vietnam War in the first place, starting with Truman and then major increases in involvement, first under JFK than under LBJ with the Gulf of Tonkin incident leading to massive intervention. Yet, within a period of a few years, it was as if the Democrats absolved themselves of any responsiblity whatsoever and, indeed, by 1972 the war was being portrayed as a Republican albatros. That is a turn of events that still mystifies me.

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Partisanship and Judges

The partisan left obstructs Bush's judicial nominees as his term nears an end. Arlen Specter is hatching a strategy to force their hand.






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One thing that troubles me about our Congress is the repetitive cycle in which our newly elected representatives ascend to our highest offices in Congress with integrity and idealism, but then succumb to the cynicism and amoral expediency of partisan politics. Yes, this is a bipartisan disease, as any observer of the corrupt earmark practice will tell you, but it seems to have much more of an effect the left.

A case in point is judges. Supreme Court judges are certainly one issue. Republicans allowed Clinton to appoint qualified, though highly liberal, justices to the Court without any issue. Justice Ruth Ginsberg is incredibly far to the left in many respects, yet she was easilly confirmed by a Republican controlled Senate.

The left, however, has hardly returned the favor. They appear determined to block any further Bush appointees, despite historic practice and dire need. This from the WSJ:

. . . In the last two years of Bill Clinton's Administration, when Mr. Specter was in the chairman's seat, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed 15 appellate court nominees.

Now, more than halfway through Mr. Bush's final two years, Chairman Patrick Leahy isn't returning the Constitutional courtesy. The Democratic Senate has confirmed a mere six nominees with no plans in sight to move the remaining 11 forward. . . Democrats figure they'll retake the White House in November, and they don't mind leaving the courts short-handed for another year or two as they stall for liberal nominees.

Mr. Specter says he has recommended that Republicans "go full steam ahead" until Democrats agree to hold confirmation votes. He has in mind a series of procedural stalls that would make it next to impossible for the Senate to get anything done. These could include refusing to accept the usual unanimous consent motion to have the previous day's deliberations entered into the official record without a formal reading, a process that would take hours. So would reading the text of many bills, which can run to hundreds of pages.

The Democrats' slow judicial roll follows their misuse of the filibuster when they were in the minority during the first Bush term. It's also an abuse of the Constitution, which gives the President the responsibility of selecting judges while the Senate has an obligation to vote up or down. "I sided with Clinton on his judges who were competent," Mr. Specter points out. After the judicial wars of the Bush years, this notion seems almost quaint.

Mr. Leahy has taken a far more partisan approach to his responsibilities as chairman, holding just one confirmation hearing since September. . . Nor does Mr. Leahy appear to mind that, of the 11 appeals-court nominees awaiting Senate action, seven would fill seats deemed to be judicial emergencies. One-third of the 15 seats on the Fourth Circuit, covering Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina, are vacant. . . .

As for Mr. Specter's plan, there's no guarantee it will work, as Democrats will denounce Republican "gridlock." But it has the advantage of getting the issue of judicial confirmations back in front of the public in an election year. . . .

As we learned in the first Bush term, Senate Democrats are willing to abuse their power to thwart a President's judicial nominations. The only way to get them to move is to force them to pay a political price for their obstructionism.

Read the entire article.

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Michael O'Hanlon's Suicide Hotline

The Democrats’ mantra of defeat in Iraq, their refusal to acknowledge the reality wrought by the surge, and their continued attempt to surrender legislatively has senior Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon trying to lead his Democrats back from the brink of Copperhead suicide. O’Hanlon long ago saw the changing reality in Iraq and understood why victory there was of great importance. Now he is trying to find some way for his Democrats to extricate themselves from their complete embrace of defeat. He suggests that the Dems adopt what seems more than a bit shameless historical revisionism.

Writing in the USA Today, O’Hanlon muses

Rarely in U.S. history has a political party diagnosed a major failure in the country's approach to a crucial issue of the day, led a national referendum on the failing policy, forced a change in that policy that led to major substantive benefits for the nation — and then categorically refused to take any credit whatsoever for doing so.

O’Hanlon posits the tenuous position that it was only the Democratic takeover of Congress that led Bush to adopt the surge strategy. He suggests the Democrats rely on his suggested narrative to now claim credit for the success in Iraq. Shameless? - you bet. Welcome? - very much so if they would now, as he also suggests, begin playing an affirmative role in making Iraq a success rather than their current course of "rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory" by attempting "to mandate an end" to operations in Iraq.

We now have a realistic chance, not of victory, but of what my fellow Brookings scholar Ken Pollack and I call sustainable stability. Violence rates have dropped by half to two-thirds in the course of 2007, the lowest level in years. Iraq is still very unstable, but it has a chance.

Despite this progress, many Democrats are inclined to provide Bush the roughly $12 billion a month he requests for Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008 only if the money is devoted narrowly to counterterrorism and bringing home U.S. troops. This is a mistake.

On strategic grounds, it appears that we now have an opportunity to salvage something significant in Iraq. Given sectarian tensions and brittle Iraqi institutions, this almost surely requires us to execute a gradual drawdown of U.S. forces there rather than an abrupt departure. In political terms, it would be rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory to mandate an end to an operation, however unpopular, just when it is showing its first signs of progress.

Democrats should change course. Rather than demand an end to the operation no matter what, they should continue to keep up the pressure for positive results in Iraq. They can retain their anti-war stance, emphasizing that their default position is that U.S. troops should soon come home absent continued major progress. . . .

Read the article here. O’Hanlon makes a series of recommendations for attaching strings to funding that would allow for the Democrats to maintain an anti-war patina while playing a positive role in making Iraq a success. It’s a reasonable argument and one certainly in the best interests of America's national security and foreign policy. But it is one with little, if any, chance of being implemented.

While O’Hanlon has grasped the reality of Iraq, he has not grasped the reality that he is fundamentally different from his neo-liberal compatriots. O’Hanlon is an anachronism – a classical liberal. His Democratic compatriots are almost entirely neo-liberals who have ejected classical liberalism’s defining quality – intellectual honesty - in favor of the calculus of partisan power. And they long seen defining Iraq as an abject failure a the key to that calculus. With intellectual honesty no longer at issue, facts, reality, and indeed, any interest beyond attainment of partisan power are of no importance.

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Lieberman Explains The Fall of the Democrats

Joe Lieberman catalogues the moral and ethical degeneracy of his former Democratic colleagues as they have placed the desire for political power above our national security interests. This partial transcript of Lieberman’s speech appears in today’s NY Post:

BETWEEN 2002 and 2006, there was a battle within the Democratic Party - a battle I was part of. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework that President Bush articulated for the War on Terror as our own - because it was our own. It was our legacy from [Presidents] Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton.

We could rightly criticize the Bush administration when it failed to live up to its own rhetoric or when it bungled the execution of its policies. But I felt that we should not minimize the seriousness of the threat from Islamist extremism or the fundamental rightness of the muscular, internationalist and morally self-confident response that Bush had chosen in response to it.

But that wasn't the choice most Democrats made.

Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign-policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the War on Terror or to strengthen our democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America's moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran . . .

Even as evidence has mounted that Gen. David Petraeus' new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving . . .

. . . There is something profoundly wrong - something that should trouble all of us - when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran's murder of our troops than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyperpartisan sentiment in the Democratic base - even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.

For me, this episode reinforces how far the Democratic Party has strayed . . .

That is why I call myself an Independent Democrat today. It is because my foreign-policy convictions are the convictions that have traditionally animated the Democratic Party - but they exist in me today independent of the Democratic Party, which has largely repudiated them. . .

Read the entire transcript here. Lieberman is an old school liberal. The only way to describe the Democratic Party today, given their elevation of rhetoric and emotion over reason and intellectual honesty, is as neo-liberals.

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