Bear any burden, eh?

As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I do not have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our friends and neighbors are out of work and struggle to pay the bills, and too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars.

Allah writes:

This part is cute too, coming as it does from the master of the trillion-dollar deficit...

We can afford to ignore the price of everything else, but not the $30 billion or so a year — less than one-fifth of the deficit incurred just in the month of October — that it’ll cost to staff Afghanistan with new troops.

Remember, Obama will become the deficit-reducin' president next year, or something. The military is the first to have to tighten their belts. Fair is fair -- they've had it too good for too long.

Now, he says that his dithering didn't cost any troops any reinforcements because, supposedly, not a single plan presented to him called for troops before 2010.

First of all: What?

Second of all: It will take about nine months just to get these surge troops into place (I base this on the Iraq experience taking five months -- and they had seaports and good roads). So there will be a delay -- McCrystal said we had a year to win this thing, and that was three months ago. Obama's dithering means that we won't have the troops in place before McCrystal's war's-over date.

Third: He says in almost the next breath all troops will be out of Afghanistan in 2011.

As a commenter points out -- this means the troops will just be built up in-country by the middle/late 2010 and then he's going to immediately start evacuating them out again.

Huh?

Most of the speech was directed to the left, which I guess is expected. I don't mind explaining this to the left. I mind throwing them substantive bones like cheaping out on the military and promising, effectively, to begin evacuating the moment we've just gotten all the surge troops in place.

I will give him one point:

Telling the troops you'e sending to war you're going to nickle-and-dime them in order to reduce the outsized deficits you're creating back home?

That truly is, as Robert Gibbs promised us, unprecedented.

Posted by: Ace at 04:49 PM | Comments (250)
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Among his "Big Ideas" is Vietnamization. Which Nixon did with Vietnam-- making the Vietnam War more dependent on the Vietnamese. Which makes sense, except for the minor fact 1, they weren't ready and knew they would lose, so 2, they had no reason to fight and awfully big reasons to ingratiate themselves to the soon-to-be-victors by selling information and such to the North.

Basically, when you tell your ally you're bugging out in a couple of years, and they know when you do bug out they lose, you have incentivized them to begin defecting to the enemy early.

It's not just that he's proposing Vietnamization -- it's that he's doing so with a hard-date for his "exit strategy." Which Nixon did too, for all intents and purposes, making it clear he didn't want to win the war, he just wanted a "decent interval" between America's exit and the North's victory.

Or has he? Allah says there's an escape clause in that. But of course there is. Set a hard date for evacuation and then put in an escape clause in it too, so maybe you will stay on longer if conditions demand it. Throw one clause to the left, then a different clause to the center/right. Vote present.

Anyway, use this thread to discuss his latest stupidity.

Also check out Byron York:

Democratic voters and candidates were playing a complex game. Nearly all of them hated the war in Iraq and wanted to pull Americans out of that country. But they were afraid to appear soft on national security, so they pronounced the smaller conflict in Afghanistan one they could support. Many of them didnÂ’t, really, but for political expediency they supported candidates who said they did. Thus the party base signed on to a good war-bad war strategy.

...

Other top Democrats adopted the get-tough approach, at least when it came time to campaign. In September 2006, as she was leading the effort that would result in Democrats taking over the House and her becoming speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi said George W. Bush “took his eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. “We had a presence over there the past few years, but not to the extent that we needed to get the job done,” Pelosi said. The phrase “took his eye off the ball” became a Democratic mantra about the supposed neglect of Afghanistan — a situation that would be remedied by electing ready-to-fight Democrats.

But now, with Democrats in charge of the entire U.S. government and George Bush nowhere to be found, Pelosi and others in her party are suddenly very, very worried about U.S. escalation in Afghanistan. “There is serious unrest in our caucus,” the speaker said recently. There is so much unrest that Democrats who show little concern about the tripling of already-large budget deficits say they’re worried about the rising cost of the war.

It is in that atmosphere that Obama makes his West Point speech. He had to make certain promises to get elected. Unlike some of his supporters, he has to remember those promises now that he is in office. So he is sending more troops. But he still canÂ’t tell the truth about so many Democratic pledges to support the war in Afghanistan: They didnÂ’t mean it.

Oh, by the way: It took five months to move the surge troops into Iraq, and Iraq had seaports, an adjacent nation with seaports (Kuwait), and good roads. Experts say that air-lifting all these troops and tanks into Afghanistan with that country's infamously-awful roads is going to take an awful lot longer.

Dispute: Rodney and Arthur challenge my characterization of Vietnamization.

You mis-characterize the fall of Vietnam.

The South did not fall to the first invasion from the North after the vast majority of U. S. Forces were withdrawn. The South was able to beat that one off (with some air support and a lot of logistic support from the U. S.) in '73. The second invasion from the North (1975) succeeded, largely because we did not live up to our treaty obligations and did not provide air and logistical support.

Posted by: Rodney G. Graves

Yeah, what he said. Vietnamization WORKED. Right up to the point where Congress decided not to send any more ammo/supplies to the South Vietnamese.

The North invaded in '73 - got their ass handed to them. They tried again in '75 because they judged that the new Congress (after the bloodbath of the 1974 elections) didn't give a rat's ass about South Vietnam - and the North was right.

Posted by: Comrade Arthur

I can't dispute this -- I do not know. I am repeating the stuff I thought I learned in college, which may have been misremembered or wrong from the outset.

To be honest, I just mostly wanted to write that headline.

Posted by: Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (452)
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Again, no link for Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan finally admits gee, maybe he's sorta not a "conservative" anymore.

Is this significant? Well, he's not significant, so no. But, the media will not be able to do its standard trick of interviewing one liberal who hates conservatives and one "conservative" -- Andrew Sullivan -- who also hates conservatives.

You know who this benefits?

That's right -- Kathleen Parker, now the go-to gal "conservative" for the media.

It's an odd formulation in some ways as "the right" is not really a single entity. But in so far as it means the dominant mode of discourse among the institutions and blogs and magazines and newspapers and journals that support the GOP, Charles Johnson is absolutely right in my view to get off that wagon for the reasons has has stated. Read his testament. It is full of emotion, but also of honesty.

"Testament." Charles Johnson posted a year-end top-ten "What's Hot/What's Not" list and Andrew Sullivan thinks it's a "testament."

Posted by: Ace at 02:42 PM | Comments (227)
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Sweet.

Cook Political Report House analyst David Wasserman notes a telling indicator that the political environment in 2010 is shaping up to be favorable for Republicans: Several Democratic candidates have decided to drop out of tough races, while Democratic members of Congress who rarely face serious challenges are finding themselves with their toughest re-elections in years.

Over the last week, three Democratic candidates touted by national strategists abruptly withdrew from their races: Solano Beach Councilman Dave Roberts (running against California Rep. Brian Bilbray), state Rep. Todd Book (running against Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt) and Tennessee Commerce and Insurance Commissioner Paula Flowers (in the seat held by retiring Rep. Zach Wamp).

In a neutral political environment, the seats held by Bilbray, Schmidt, and the open Tennessee seat would be enticing targets for Democrats. Democrats aggressively contested the first two seats in both 2006 and 2008, and experienced unexpected success in Southern open seats over the last two elections.

But in 2010, defense is the name of the game for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is defending several dozens vulnerable freshmen and second-term members, while also protecting veteran members who could find themselves in newfound trouble. It will be a lot more challenging for a first-time candidate running in a tough district to get financial support from the DCCC when the party is worried about defending its own.

Meanwhile, as the article says, Republicans are having a good ol' time recruiting solid candidates to challenge Democrats.

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Comments (51)
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As Maximus said, "Are you not stimulated?"

This news item is easily overlooked, and revealing: "Highway-construction companies around the country, having completed the mostly small projects paid for by the federal economic-stimulus package, are starting to see their business run aground, an ominous sign for the nation's weak employment picture."

The month the stimulus passed, February of this year, 6,593,000 Americans were employed in construction; in the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5,966,000 Americans were employed in that field. In other words, while all of this stimulus-based construction was going on, the profession lost 627,000 jobs.

Not only did the stimulus fail to create a significant number of jobs in the overall economy, it had little or no impact in the one area that provided that much-hyped slogan: “shovel ready.”

Since I just stole Geraghty's whole post, let me link this takedown of Huck. And quote, um, merely most of it.

Joe Carter, probably the best part of Huckabee's presidential campaign, notes that the candidate really saw this issue differently from almost everyone else in the political world, for better or worse: "The governor seemed genuinely surprised that he was held responsible for the criminal acts committed by those whose sentences he had commuted as governor. It was as if he believed that simply having noble intentions and a willingness to make tough decisions would provide political cover."

...

Huckabee's initial statement, declaring, "should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State" seemed to be deflecting his share of the blame. The criminal justice system in Arkansas, for example, was going to keep Clemmons behind bars until the year 2098 until Huckabee stepped in.

Today Huckabee went on Joe Scarborough's radio show, and finally used strong language - not to criticize his earlier decision, but to denounce critics of the decision as "disgusting" and lamenting "how sick our society has become that people are more concerned about a campaign three years from now than those grieving families in Washington."

It takes a particular bravado for a man in Huckabee's circumstances to contend that his critics are the ones who should hang their heads in shame; some people might find letting violent criminals go free early out of a misguided sense that they've changed their ways a clearer reflection of a sick society.

Okay, well, I ripped off that whole post pretty much too.

How about I link his posts on "Bloody Afghanistan" and Bush's "abandonment" of that war?

Update on Huckabee: Huckabee (in Allah's update) accepts partial responsibility for Clemmons while ripping the prosecutors who let him go (since Huckabee let him go), and states unequivocally that in this case religion played no part.

Well, we'll see.

As I conceded, Huckabee does have a point here: 108 years is a long spell for a series of felonies that don't include murder or rape. Still: Part of the decision is about whether this guy had shaped up, and clearly, he had not. Huckabee could have reduced 108 years to 30 years, rather than 11, and this guy would still be in the Slamma like MC Hamma, as Jane Lynch says in Role Models.*

* Possibly erroneously, as the film notes.

Spare Parts: Since I'm apparently just sticking into this post anything and everything that occurs to me, I want to note the witticism of "dr. kill" (I think): He called Michael Mann "Piltdown Mann."

Hee, hee.

He also said scientists were really angry and spitting venom about this sham and that a whitewash wasn't as in-the-bag as I was thinking.

Correction: I had the chronology wrong. SarahW (and other posters) inform me...

Ace, FWIW, Hbee commuted the sentence to 47 years. There is no record of prosecutors objecting in any official or unofficial way.

It's the parole board what sprung him after 11 years. They didn't have to.

Okay, so Huck reduces the sentence to a certain point, then the parole board springs him. But that had to be anticipated. Surely it wasn't a shock to Huck.

Posted by: Ace at 01:22 PM | Comments (101)
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Teach 'em while they're young, I always say. And so do Democratic fraudsters, who had the College Dems help win an election by offering to paying them a $5 bounty for each voter the brought to the polls. The election in the Fourth Ward was the only contested election in Athens. The Democrat took the seat by only 30 votes.

Here's a letter from Ohio University College Democrats Vice President Kellie Galan reminding her fellow "darling Dems" (blech) in broken English that "if you bring a friend from 4th ward they are more then a friend, they're 5 bucks!"

Fortunately for Kellie, Ohio prosecutors are only setting their sights on Athens County Democratic Party Chair Susan Gwinn.

The Ohio University College Democrats, however, who were allegedly also involved in the plan, will not face any charges, according to the special prosecutor handling the case.

“We’ve got young people, students, not judicious… who are following the lead of a licensed professional, an adult,” said special prosecutor Dave Yost. “To the extent that there’s culpability, we don’t think it rests with the students.” He added that the College Dems have cooperated in his investigation.

On top of the charges already pending against Gwinn of theft in office, money laundering, unauthorized use of property, and falsification, an Athens County grand jury has now added two counts of elections-related bribery.

The charges relate to GwinnÂ’s alleged involvement in a plan to pay members of the OU College Democrats $5 for every voter they brought to the polls in the city of AthensÂ’ Fourth Ward on Election Day, Nov. 3. That ward was the only one in the city that had a contested City Council race.

Even Democrats are making pro forma calls for Gwinn to resign. So far, she has refused.

College Republican National Committee Communications Director (can't fit that on a business card) James Richardson has been all over this.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 01:07 PM | Comments (55)
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Grieve not for the police I inadvertently had a role in killing. Grieve for me.

Under fire for commuting the sentence of suspected cop-killer Maurice Clemmons, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Tuesday called some of the criticisms “disgusting” and suggested they were attempts to score political points.

“It really does show how sick our society has become that people are more concerned about a campaign three years from now than those grieving families in Washington,” Huckabee said during an interview on Joe Scarborough’s radio show. “It is disgusting, but people use anything as a political weapon.”

Huckabee moves from his usual poor-me bullshit to a more substantive defense of his actions, and one that actually makes some sense:

Huckabee granted Clemmons, a suspect in the killings of four police officers in Washington state over the weekend, clemency in 2001. He had served 11 years in prison after being sentenced at the age of 18 to 60 years in prison for burglary and theft and was set to serve the 60 years, in addition to the 48 years he was already serving on five felony counts.

After his sentence was commuted, Clemmons was paroled by an Arkansas board and moved to Washington in 2004, where he was charged with eight felonies prior to gunning down the police officers in a coffee shop.

Clemmons was shot and killed Tuesday morning by an officer investigating a stolen car.

Huckabee has been thrashed in the right-wing blogosphere by leading online conservative voices who have criticized his commutation of ClemmonsÂ’ sentence.

In addition, Minnesota GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty – one of Huckabee’s potential challengers for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012– said Tuesday that he would not have granted Clemmons clemency if he had been in Huckabee’s position.

“I don't think I've ever voted for clemency,” Pawlenty told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. “We’ve given out pardons for things after everybody has served out their term, but again, usually for more minor offenses. But clemency? Certainly not. Commutation of sentence? Certainly not.

Huckabee defended his choice to grant the Arkansas felon clemency by insisting that Clemmons original sentence went too far.

“If he were a white kid from an upper middle class family he would have gotten a lawyer and some counseling,” Huckabee said. “But because he was a young black kid he got 108 years.”

Huckabee said the sentence was “far disproportionate from any other punishment in Arkansas at the time for a similar crime.”

It does make some sense. Not enough, but some. Here's the thing: Maybe this guy was oversentenced. Maybe. But Huckabee's primary decision turned on an evaluation over whether this guy was reformed and fit to be returned to free society.

Let us just say on that count his decision can be described best by the internet-put-down FAIL.

Here are my two major problems with Huckabee, apart from his "compassionate" Social-Democratic-Christian soft-socialism. (I mean Social-Democratic-Christian in the European sense -- important, big parties in Europe are pretty damn socialistic on economic/"social justice" issues, but are more moderate and rightward on other issues, especially morality and the like.)

The first is that I find him so transparent and shameless in his manipulations that I weep for those who are somehow prey to it. He's underhanded and mercenary and self-pitying and always manages to be nasty with that smooth, soft demeanor. I just hate his guts on a personal level. It bothers me that he's so damned obvious about his manipulations and that many people's bullshit detectors are so defective they fail to go off.

The second is that he is simply not savvy enough to be President. He's a chump, a rube, a simple-minded dupe. We don't know yet what his reasons for pardoning this particular possibly-oversentenced repeat felon are, but we know the long sordid history of his pardons: left-leaning pastors knew they only had to utter the magic words "Saved by the Grace of Christ" to Huckabee and there was a fair shot that hardened career criminals would get the Get out of Jail Free card they sought.

Can someone be this easily gulled, over and over, and yet be crafty and devious enough to defend America against a host of enemies and adversaries?

Some might say my criticisms are contradictory: in the first criticism, I accuse him of being too devious; in the second, not devious enough. I don't think that's true -- I don't think he's devious enough in his manipulations, because they're so crude and obvious and shameless and transparent.

I think he's a rube. And a sneaky one But unlike a successful politician and serious threat to win the presidency, he's not sneaky enough. He's like a six year old with cookie-crumbs all over his face who keeps saying the Invisible Cookie Thief took the cookies.

I think he's only capable of fooling the 20% of the country that is the most fooled by his particular act (i.e., those who want to believe the best about a man representing himself as God-fearing and morally-straight) and that's not enough for me.

If you're going to be devious and sneaky and manipulative your act has to work on 51%.

P-Shop by Slublog.

Put Huckabee on It. He's a Sneaky Little Shit Like You. The Animal House line about Niedermayer always goes through my mind when Huck does this stuff.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (351)
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Penn State will, supposedly, investigate Mann. I expect a Rathergate-style whitewash. Bear in mind -- in one of the appendices to the the Rathergate report, their expert in document authentification determined, without question, the documents were forged, but in the report itself, CBS' bought and paid for investigators claimed there was still some ambiguity on this issue. Giving CBS and Rather the scrap of deniability they paid for.

I can already write the conclusion: Mistakes were made. But the science is settled. And I didn't have to open a single book.

But still.

The media sort of has to make mention of this now, eh?

The Penn State administration plans to investigate Climategate and determine if it needs to take further action, the Daily Collegian reports. A little more than a week ago, E-mails exchanged among an English university's climate change researchers were illegally obtained from a server and posted online, the report says.

Climate change opponents say the E-mails indicate that climate change researchers—including Penn State Prof. Michael Mann—exaggerated or fabricated global warming data. And, according to the report, some E-mails indicate that the director of the research unit in question may have contacted researchers and asked them to "delete certain E-mails."

Penn State officials, who will not discuss the matter, are investigating the controversy. If anything requires further inspection, the school will handle it, a spokesman tells the Daily Collegian.

Who, O Who?, could have possibly predicted that if "scientists" were permitted to work in the darkness, their data and methods shuttered from the light of day, their careers and salaries dependent on finding the "right" result, that the process would end up corrupt, self-serving, and hopelessly mercenary?

Oh yeah -- that's right. We did. The people who care about genuine science, and who don't just want to put on a "Pro-Science" talisman to impress the college chippies.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:40 AM | Comments (140)
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Dare I say it? I question the timing.

President Obama is sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan but wants to conclude the war and withdraw most U.S. service members within three years, senior administration officials told CNN Tuesday.

Eh... I see this was posted already. I like my headline. It's not a repost, it's a recontextualization.

Screw you guys anyway.

Posted by: Ace at 11:27 AM | Comments (98)
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The science suspension is settled.

Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

Fuller story here.

Until about what, two weeks ago? This guy was one of the leading figures in the AGW world and now he's on his way out.

And so begins the great unraveling.

One great upside to this...the media embargo has to break. This guy is to big to just step aside without being commented upon. Now, the stories will be slanted and idiotic but the truth will start to seep out in drips and drabs.

How long until Charles Johnson releases one of those sobbing internet videos imploring the world to just "Leave Phil Jones ALONE!"?

Thanks to Jean (who is a guy) in the comments for the heads up.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:48 AM | Comments (164)
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