Despite a mortal terrorist threat against America, Dem contenders see no evil

Whew, that was a close one. We suffered a big attack and were in mortal danger for a while, but we are safe now. Thank God, the war on terror is over. There are no Islamic extremists. Homeland security is not an issue. The only problem in Iraq is how to get out.
Wait, this is news to you? Then you didn't watch the Democratic debate Thursday. Or maybe you did watch, but since those unpleasant topics were completely or mostly ignored, you assumed the war was over and went to bed believing peace is at hand and Santa Claus is busy making toys at the North Pole.
It's not your fault. It's the Democratic presidential candidates who are sleepwalking through history.
As befitting a scrum with too many people and too little time, the debate touched on everything and illuminated nothing. Sen. Hillary Clinton made headlines by defending herself and for finally taking a position against driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, but the gaping hole was the absence of any serious reference to the war on terror. It's long been that way on the campaign trail, and now Dem debates reflect the dangerous drift.
A New York Times language tracker tells the tale. Neither "homeland security" nor "war on terror" were mentioned. Osama Bin Laden was a no-show and Al Qaeda got one mention. "Terrorism" got three, two of them by audience members asking questions, as did "extremists," with two of those in a single answer by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. On the other hand, "health" got 45 mentions and "education" 20.
It is remarkable how far the party and much of the country have strayed from the national unity of 9/11 (three mentions). While Bush's flawed handling of Iraq is a main reason, the unwillingness to separate his failure from the overriding truths of the continuing terror threat will come back to haunt not only Democrats, but the nation.
Consider that what was once called a generational war against an existential threat is now by unanimous consent of the candidates only a misguided Republican war in Iraq that must be ended immediately. What was once a bipartisan concern about the new phenomenon of lethal nonstate actors such as Al Qaeda has been reduced to denunciations of waterboarding and attacks on the Patriot Act. Thursday produced only one reference to Islam — when Sen. Joe Biden complained that Bush acts as though America is at war with the whole religion.
The one mention of the troop "surge" came from New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. He declared it "is not working," no matter what the facts say, and Obama made a similar point without using the word. Meanwhile, anything wrong in Iraq or the world is America's fault.
Threats from Iran were discussed, as was the crisis in Pakistan. But beyond the insufficient answers about those troubled nation states, answers best summed up by Clinton's promise of "aggressive diplomacy," whatever that means, the debate never touched the major development that even old Europe is taking seriously. The rise of backpack bombers and homegrown terror cells is a menace our allies are addressing and we are ignoring.
Last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced sweeping security measures that include searches and bag screenings at railroad terminals and car bomb barriers at airports and malls. Theaters, restaurants, hospitals, stadiums, schools and places of worship — any place where crowds gather — will get advice on how to train employees to carry out searches and evacuation drills, the Guardian newspaper reported. Other beefed-up measures focus on who is entering the country and where they go.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Congress that "we must fight terror together."
Germany is giving its security authorities more power after a group of Islamists were charged with violent plots and a government report said 900 members of Hezbollah were in the country. The sudden sense of danger is a shock, with one woman telling USA Today that Germany's refusal to fight in Iraq lulled the country into thinking Islamic terrorists would focus elsewhere; "we assumed that if we behaved well in the world, nothing would happen to us," the woman said.
Ah, if that woman lived here, she could run for President of the United States. I know which party would have made her feel right at home.

Harry "Dingy" Reid "We Must Lose in Iraq"

We have Dingy Harry yesterday (Thursday, November 15th), he had a press conference on Capitol Hill, and a reporter said to him, "[Dingy] Harry, do you have expectations that you'll be able to get 60 votes for this latest anti-war resolution of yours?" and Dingy Harry says, "I always have expectations to get 60 votes," and then added this.

REID: "I would hope that the Republicans have gotten the message the American people have had enough of this war and we've gotta bring our troops home. Bringing our troops home will be good for our military, but it will also be good for the American taxpayer. We cannot afford this war $12 billion dollars a month? We just can't -- we can't continue."

Readers, this man has literally taken leave of his senses. We're not spending $12 billion a month on the war. We're not spending $1.5 trillion dollars on the war, like the Democrats are saying. T The reason he wants out is because we are winning!

The surge is working, and they (the Democrats) can't withstand that politically. There has never been -- well, this is hard to say -- I think there's been very clear illustrations of the Democrat position on prior occasions, but this shows how invested in defeat that they are. We have stability in Baghdad. Al-Qaeda has been run out of there except for 13% of it. We have Petraeus representatives that are going to sit down with Mookie al-Sadr, other provinces, it's all going great. The word "victory" is starting to show up on certain people's lips, and this scares Harry Reid all to hell. This is sabotaging victory, pure and simple.

Also obvious: There are fewer votes now in Congress -- and less cause -- to cut off funding for the war than there were last Spring. A renewed campaign on the part of the hapless Democratic leadership to cut off the supplemental funds will only increase the public sense of Democratic futility. It will also play into the very real, and growing, public perception that Democrats are too busy wasting time on symbolic measures (like trying to cut off funds for the war) and shoveling pork (the water projects bill) to pass anything substantive for the public good. Too much time, and political capital, has been wasted fighting Bush legislatively on the war. I'm sure the President and the Republican Party are salivating over the prospect that Democrats will waste more time and capital over it this month...especially at a moment, however fleeting, when the situation on the ground seems to have improved in Iraq.

Democrats need to think this over very, very carefully before they proceed." Joe Klein, TIME Magazine, sounding a warning. This is the second. Richard Benedetto at The Politico.com yesterday issued the first warning to the Democrats, don't do this again, you're 1-and-40 on this, you're not going to win this one.

They have no way they can claim partial credit for the victory, because they had us losing this two years ago.

On a side note, Republicans are seeking a retraction from the Democrats of a report on the hidden costs of the war. "Senior Republicans on Congress's Joint Economic Committee called Tuesday for the withdrawal of a report by the committee's Democratic staff that argues that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost more than $1.5 trillion. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, and Rep. James Saxton, R-N.J., attacked the report on 'hidden costs' of the wars, calling its methodology flawed and asserting factual errors. The report, issued Tuesday, November 13th, said the war has cost nearly double the $804 billion in appropriations and requests for war funding thus far. It estimated that the wars have cost the average American family of four more than $20,000." If this war had cost $1.5 trillion, that's half of the federal budget. But more importantly, every social program that the United States Congress has introduced has never met, never been constrained by its actual proposed cost. Social Security, Medicare, you name it, Medicaid, they all balloon beyond what we are told they are going to cost.

I'll tell you what this is. It's just more of the same, of the Democrats trying to sabotage victory here, because they can't afford it. They are so invested in defeat. The surge is working. Baghdad's calm. People are moving back to Iraq. Entrepreneurial capitalism is starting to break out in the place. This is the worst thing that could happen to these people, particularly going into a presidential election year. You know, you guys in the Democrat Party, we're going to win this! We are the United States of America. We're going to win it despite your attempts to secure defeat, and you haven't done anything that will allow you to lay claim to helping win this. They haven't done anything. The only way they could do that would be to come up and lie and obfuscate and say that their protests and their resolutions and their clamoring for change forced Bush into a policy that worked. But they can't even do that, and they've opted out of that. They are still trying to sabotage this, and the latest business here, Dingy Harry suggesting lying, that the Republicans had better understand where the American people are on this. The American people are nowhere near on the war in Iraq where they are on illegal immigration.

And Democrats, if you want I think a very good comparison for you to make would be, take all the pork-barrel spending from the beginning of the war and compare it with war costs, and I think it would be very interesting. But, here we have a war that is being fought in the interests of US national security. This is one of the legitimate responsibilities of government. If you start placing a cost on freedom, you're going to lose it. If you put a limit on how much you will spend on freedom, you are going to lose it. All you have to do is go find not just the pork, find the waste, the fraud, the multiple redundancies of programs in the federal government and point out positive people like Harry Reid, "Senator, how is it that you never complain about cost overruns on any other government program other than the war in Iraq?"

With that being said, I think even fighting this comparing dollars to dollars, accepts their (Democrats) premise, and I think that's where so many of us get wrong in arguing with these people is accepting their premise. When we accept the premise and argue on their terms, it's a waste of time. What we need to point out is why they're making the argument and what the purpose of it is. They are attempting to engage this country in defeat. They are trying to secure it. They're doing everything they can to turn public opinion against it because we're winning. The word "victory" is coming out of more and more mouths now about what's happening in Iraq, and that's the worst political outcome for the Democrats possible.

CNN Caves, But Clinton Will Still Struggle

Will Wolf get his testicles back now that he laid down?

Under Wolf Blitzer's gentle questioning, Hillary was able to avert another debate meltdown in the Nevada Democratic debate held last night, November 15. Asked about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, a compliant, even subservient, Blitzer accepted Hillary's one word answer, "No," with no follow up. Had a better journalist been asking the questions -- like Tim Russert -- he would have followed up the bland negation with probing questions about why she is yet again flip flopping on the issue.
The Drudge Report today highlights that a "senior adviser to the Hillary campaign" said, earlier today, that Blitzer "was outstanding, and did not gang up like Russert did in Philadelphia. He avoided personal attacks, remained professional and ran the best debate so far." And Blitzer checked his journalistic instincts at the door.
The debate also had a pro-Hillary bias in the amount of time allocated to Bill Richardson -- who had the third longest face time in the debate. Since Richardson is auditioning for Vice President on Hillary's ticket, using his time to plead for unity among Democrats (i.e. don't bash Hillary), giving him the mike was the same as giving it to Hillary.
The audience booed when candidates knocked Hillary, likely also a part of her defensive debate strategy.
The net result was that CNN saved Hillary from yet another embarrassing debate performance.
Hillary's strategists had prepared the way for Blitzer's cave-in by pre-debate warnings against a repetition of Tim Russert's aggressive -- and appropriate -- questioning during the Philadelphia debate. Their loud criticisms of the bias of the "all boys club" paved the way for Blitzer's intimidated and pathetic performance during the Nevada debate.
And, of course, the reason Hillary could give a clipped one word answer to the question of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants was that New York's Governor Eliot Spitzer withdrew the proposal the day before the debate. Spitzer, who is not universally known for his weakness or even flexibility, likely pulled back the proposal to spare Hillary the embarrassment of having to defend it in the Nevada debate.
Hillary, for her part, couldn't oppose the license proposal as long as Spitzer was backing it. She could not risk a public split with the Democratic governor of her adopted home state. Spitzer takes no prisoners and would probably make Hillary pay dearly for any public criticism of his initiative. But once he pulled it back, the New York Senator was free to say her "no."
In the meantime, Hillary used the debate to spin her platitudes. One of them was a peon against unsafe toys. "We shouldn't permit the import of unsafe toys," she said in the debate. But her chief strategist, Mark Penn, is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, the PR company that represents Aquadots, the company that makes the bead toys with an adhesive coating that turns into the date rape drug when children suck on it. Penn is paid by Burson based on a percentage of their profits, and Aquadots is an important contributor to their bottom line. But neither Blitzer nor any of Hillary's Democratic opponents were alert enough to call the conflict into question.
But the underlying inability of the New York Senator to take clear positions on issues has not been assuaged and will increasingly become apparent to the savvy voters of Iowa and New Hampshire. Her slide in Iowa has reached dangerous proportions. She now holds a bare two-point lead over Edwards and a three-point lead over Obama in that pivotal early state.
Despite Blitzer's and CNN's assistance, she might have trouble in Iowa.

Movin' On Up

A Treasury study refutes populist hokum about "income inequality."
If you've been listening to Mike Huckabee or John Edwards on the Presidential trail, you may have heard that the U.S. is becoming a nation of rising inequality and shrinking opportunity. We'd refer those campaigns to a new study of income mobility by the Treasury Department that exposes those claims as so much populist hokum.

OK, "hokum" is our word. The study, to be released today, is a careful, detailed piece of research by professional economists that avoids political judgments. But what it does do is show beyond doubt that the U.S. remains a dynamic society marked by rapid and mostly upward income mobility. Much as they always have, Americans on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder continue to climb into the middle and sometimes upper classes in remarkably short periods of time.

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

Also encouraging is the fact that the after-inflation median income of all tax filers increased by an impressive 24% over the same period. Two of every three workers had a real income gain--which contradicts the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin about stagnant incomes. This is even more impressive when you consider that "median" income and wage numbers are often skewed downward because the U.S. has had a huge influx of young workers and immigrants in the last 20 years. They start their work years with low wages, dragging down the averages.

Those who start at the bottom but hold full-time jobs nonetheless enjoyed steady income gains. The Treasury study found that those tax filers who were in the poorest income quintile in 1996 saw a near doubling of their incomes (90.5%) over the subsequent decade. Those in the highest quintile, on the other hand, saw only modest income gains (10%). The nearby table tells the story, which is that the poorer an individual or household was in 1996 the greater the percentage income gain after 10 years.

Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income--the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005. Some of these people might have been "rich" merely for one year, or perhaps for several, as they hit their peak earning years or had some capital gains windfall. Others may simply have not been able to keep up with new entrepreneurs and wealth creators.

The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up--another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The "rich" are not the same people over time.

The study is also valuable because it shows that income mobility remains little changed from what similar studies found in the 1970s and 1980s. Some journalists and academics have cited selective evidence to claim that income mobility has declined in recent years.

But the 58% of lowest-income earners who moved to a higher income quintile in this study is roughly comparable to the percentages that did so in several similar studies going back to the late 1960s. "The basic finding of this analysis," says the Treasury report, "is that relative income mobility is approximately the same in the last 10 years as it was in the previous decade."

All of this certainly helps to illuminate the current election-year debate about income "inequality" in the U.S. The political left and its media echoes are promoting the inequality story as a way to justify a huge tax increase. But inequality is only a problem if it reflects stagnant opportunity and a society stratified by more or less permanent income differences. That kind of society can breed class resentments and unrest. America isn't remotely such a society, thanks in large part to the incentives that exist for risk-taking and wealth creation.
The great irony is that, in the name of reducing inequality, some of our politicians want to raise taxes and other government obstacles to the kind of risk-taking and hard work that allow Americans to climb the income ladder so rapidly.

As the Treasury data show, we shouldn't worry about inequality. We should worry about the people who use inequality as a political club to promote policies that reduce opportunity.

Dems Tie Up Fiscal 2008 Appropriations Bill in PorkBy

November 12, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Despite the Democrats' pledge to get control of their addiction to wasteful spending, their mountain of pork-barrel provisions has prevented Congress from passing its appropriations bills for fiscal year 2008. Exhibit A is a Labor, Health and Human Services and Education bill taken up by the Senate last week that was filled to the brim with pork (also known as earmarks). This "minibus" bill was engineered by Democrats attempting to draw just enough votes to make it veto-proof.
Last week, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., one of the stellar anti-pork warriors in Congress, said this about the bill: "The Democrats have made a joke of the ethics bill as they packed this 'minibus' with thousands of pet projects. They have shown their (so-called anti-pork) rules to be laughable and ineffective, as they continue to spend millions on secret earmarks and hide their pork from public scrutiny."
All told, this spending package contained at least 2,200 earmarks worth more than $1 billion. Among them, a $1 million earmark for the Thomas Daschle Center for Public Service and Representative Democracy at South Dakota State University, named for the former Senate Democratic leader.
Democrats often go to great lengths to disguise what their earmarks are actually for, making their intentions sound far more important than they are. A $300,000 item that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., inserted into the Labor-HHS-Education spending bill for a museum called Exploratorium, which promotes "teacher recruitment, retention, and improvement initiative" (http://www.exploratorium.edu/).
But the Exploratorium's Web site describes the museum as "a collage of hundreds of interactive exhibits in the areas of science, art, and human perception" Its mission is "to create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them."
Pelosi's pet project has been given more than $33 million in federal-funding earmarks and grants over the past six years. "Should federal taxpayers be subsidizing a wealthy city's museum during a time of deficit spending?" asked the Senate Republican Conference's Pork Report?
In addition to bogus descriptions of what your tax dollars are paying for, lawmakers are fond of sticking their earmarked projects into bills that have nothing to do with the bill's purposes. Here's a sampling of the kind of pork found in the Defense Appropriations Act that was uncovered by Citizens Against Government Waste:
-- $23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) added by Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa. It has received more than half a billion dollars since 1992, but the Justice Department, which administers the program, wants to shut it down, calling its work "duplicative."
-- $4.8 million for the Jamaica Bay Unit of Gateway National Recreation Area sought by Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., described as "a wealth of history, nature and recreation."
-- $3 million for "The First Tee," added by House Democratic Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina. The program's Web site says its mission is to "promote character development and life-enhancing values through the game of golf." -- $1.6 million for the Allen Telescope Array, inserted by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., whose work is "dedicated to astronomical and simultaneous search for extra-terrestrial intelligence observations."
So far the Democrats' fiscal year 2008 appropriations bills would dish out a total of $24.7 billion for more than 12,000 earmarked expenditures like these.
"Democrats can't let go of their pork and keep inventing new ways to stop new earmark disclosure rules and bypass the old ones," DeMint said last week. "These shameful backroom deals are exactly why Congress continues to earn its lowest approval rating in history," he said. When will it stop? When the voters decide they have had enough.

THE TRUTH ON TRADE

PRESIDENT Bush urged Congress yesterday to pass four pending trade agreements, telling a White House audience that open markets boost economic growth, raise standards of living by creating higher-paying jobs and deliver more choice and better prices for consumers. Despite claims to the contrary by populist opponents of trade expansion, the president has the facts and decades of experience on his side.
Critics of trade counter that real wages have stagnated while the middle class has been squeezed by a loss of jobs to low-wage competitors such as China and Mexico. Democrats in Congress point to those anxieties to justify their opposition to any meaningful trade-expanding legislation - including pending free trade accords with South Korea and Colombia and renewal of presidential trade-promotion authority.
Like so many assumptions about trade, the belief that more global competition has somehow lowered the living standards of the average American worker and family is just a myth.
The critics have it all wrong: The middle class isn't disappearing - it's moving up.
The Census reports that the share of U.S. households earning $35,000 to $75,000 a year (in '06 dollars) - roughly, the middle class - has indeed shrunk slightly over the last decade, from 34 percent to 33 percent. But so, too, has the share earning less than $35,000 - from 40 percent to 37 percent.
It's the share of households earning more than $75,000 that's jumped - from 26 percent to 30 percent.
Trade has helped America transform itself into a middle-class service economy. Yes, the country's lost a net 3.3 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade - but it's added a net 11.6 million jobs in service and other sectors where average wages are higher than in manufacturing. Most of these new jobs are in better-paying categories, like professional and business services, finance and education and health services.
Trade and globalization have also helped bolster the balance sheets of American households by delivering higher incomes, lower interest rates and wider investment opportunities. From 1995 to 2004, the real median net worth of U.S. households jumped by 31 percent, boosted by rising home values and stock prices. (Even with the recent housing slump, average home values remain more than 2.5 times what they were a decade ago, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index.)
Despite frequently heard worries, American families are not "drowning in debt." Yes, total household debt has risen in the past decade - but total assets have risen in value even faster.
On average, U.S. households spent 14.4 percent of their income on debt payments in 2004, not much different from the 14.1 percent they spent in 1995. The bulk of what we've borrowed hasn't paid for groceries or big-screen TVs but for housing - which, again, has appreciated strongly in the last decade.
Like so many assumptions floating around about trade, the belief that more global competition has somehow lowered the living standards of the average worker and family is just a myth. In fact, trade has delivered lower prices, higher worker compensation and an upwardly mobile middle class.
Critics of trade repeat as a mantra that real wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. But the data on real wages exclude benefits - which have been rising as a share of worker compensation. Those data also rely on a cost-of-living index that has systematically overstated inflation and thus understated real income gains.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average real hourly compensation earned by Americans has actually grown by 22 percent during the past decade - even as trade and other measures of globalization have grown rapidly.
Trade has brought us lower prices on a broad range of goods - from fruits and vegetables to consumer electronics and automobiles - stretching the paychecks of U.S. workers.
Household incomes have also been rising. When they point to a small decline in median household income compared to 2000, opponents of trade are cherry-picking their numbers. That year was the frothy peak of a decade-long expansion. Use 1996 - the comparable point in the previous business cycle - as the baseline, and you see a 6 percent rise in median income.
Convincing Americans that we are worse off than we were in years past has become a popular line of attack against globalization and trade expansion. But trade has played an important part in the positive story of long-term gains in hourly compensation, household income and net wealth.
To promote further progress for U.S. workers and their families, Congress and the administration should work together to pursue policies that expand the freedom of Americans to participate in global markets.

A Failure to Lead

The Democratic Congress is more interested in acting out than in taking positive action.

This week is the one-year anniversary of Democrats winning Congress. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid probably aren't in a celebrating mood. The goodwill they enjoyed after their victory is gone. Their bright campaign promises are unfulfilled. Democratic leadership is in disarray. And Congress's approval rating has fallen to its lowest point in history.
The problems the Democrats are now experiencing begin with the federal budget. Or rather, the lack of one. In 2006, Democrats criticized Congress for dragging its feet on the budget and pledged that they would do better. Instead, they did worse. The new fiscal year started Oct. 1--five weeks ago--but Democrats have yet to send the president a single annual appropriations bill. It's been at least 20 years since Congress has gone this late in passing any appropriation bills, an indication of the mess the Pelosi-Reid Congress is now in.
Even worse, the Democrats have made clear all their talk about "fiscal discipline" is just that--talk. They're proposing to spend $205 billion more than the president has proposed over the next five years. And the opening wedge of this binge is $22 billion more in spending proposed for the coming year. Only in Washington could someone in public life be so clueless to say, as Sen. Reid and Rep. Pelosi have, that $22 billion is a "relatively small" difference.
Let's also be clear about what it means to roll back the president's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, as the Democrats want to do. Every income-tax payer will pay more as all tax rates rise. Families will pay $500 more per child as they lose the child tax credit. Taxes on small businesses would go up by an average of about $4,000. Retirees will pay higher taxes on investment retirement income. And now we have the $1 trillion tax increase proposed as "tax reform" by the Democrats' chief tax writer last month.
Failing to pass a budget, proposing a huge spike in federal spending and offering the biggest tax increase in history are not the only hallmarks of this Democratic Congress.
Beholden to MoveOn.org and other left-wing groups, Democratic leaders have ignored the progress made in Iraq by the surge, diminished the efforts of our military, and wasted precious time with failed attempts to force an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. They continue to try to implement this course, which would lead to chaos in the region, the creation of a possible terror state with the third largest oil reserves in the world, and a major propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden as well as for Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
After promising on the campaign trail to "support our troops," Democrats tried to cut off funding for our military while our soldiers and Marines are under fire from the enemy. For 19 Senate Democrats, this was simply a bridge too far, so they voted against their own leadership's proposal. Democrats also tried to stuff an emergency war-spending bill with billions of dollars of pork for individual members. Now the party's leaders are stalling an emergency supplemental bill with funding for body armor, bullets and mine-resistant vehicles.
After pledging a "Congress that strongly honors our responsibility to protect our people from terrorism," Democrats have refused to make permanent reforms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that the Director of National Intelligence said were needed to close "critical gaps in our intelligence capability." Their presidential candidates fell all over each other in a recent debate to pledge an end to the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Then Senate Democratic leaders, thinking there was an opening for political advantage, slow-walked the confirmation of Judge Michael Mukasey to be the next attorney general. It's obvious that this is a man who knows the important role the Justice Department plays in the war on terror. Delaying his confirmation is only making it harder to prosecute the war.
Democrats promised "civility and bipartisanship." Instead, they stiff-armed their Republican colleagues, refused to include them in budget negotiations between the two houses, and have launched more than 400 investigations and made more than 675 requests for documents, interviews or testimony. They refused a bipartisan compromise on an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, instead wasting precious time sending the president a bill they knew he would veto. And they did this knowing that they wouldn't be able to override that veto. Why? Because their pollsters told them putting the children's health-care program at risk would score political points. Instead, it left them looking cynical.
The list of Congress's failures grows each month. No energy bill. No action on health care. No action on the mortgage crisis. No immigration reform. No progress on renewing No Child Left Behind. Precious little action on judges and not enough on reducing trade barriers. Congress has not done its work. And these failures will have consequences.
Democrats had a moment after the 2006 election, but now that moment has passed. They've squandered it. They have demonstrated both the inability and unwillingness to govern. Instead, after more than a decade in the congressional minority, they reflexively look for short-term partisan advantage and attempt to appease the party's most strident fringe. Now that Democrats have the reins of congressional power, their true colors are coming out and the public doesn't like what it sees.
The Democratic victory in 2006 was narrow. They won the House by 85,961 votes out of over 80 million cast and the Senate by a mere 3,562 out of over 62 million cast. A party that wins control by that narrow margin can quickly see its fortunes reversed when it fails to act responsibly, fails to fulfill its promises, and fails to lead.

Ted Kennedy: Expert on Drowning

KENNEDY: "My concerns began with Judge Mukasey's answers to our questions about waterboarding. Waterboarding is a barbaric practice in which water is poured down the mouth and nose of a detainee, to simulate drowning. It's an ancient technique of tyrants. The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in, and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to an almost instant plea to bring the treatment to a halt. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right, it is controlled death. "

You know, I think we're missing the whole point of all this anyway. We get focused on the details of waterboarding. Who the hell are we talking about here? We're talking about the type of lowlifes that behead people and plot things like 9/11, and not just in this country, but around the world. They are still doing it. It's time we stopped beating ourselves up. We are good people, folks. We are a fine nation. It's time we stopped beating ourselves up over the steps we take to protect ourselves.

Our Own Worst Enemy

As soon as Congress gets done torturing Michael Mukasey over waterboarding, perhaps they should turn their energies to the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

Here's an idea for the ivory-tower philosophers in Congress: As soon as they get done torturing Michael Mukasey over waterboarding, perhaps they should turn their energies to the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Or maybe they can figure out what happened to Judge Crater or who shot Liberty Valance. Solving any of those cases would be more entertaining and less harmful to national security.
Though late last week, key Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein announced their support for Mukasey, his confirmation is still uncertain — because he won't say clearly that waterboarding is both torture and illegal under American and international law. He should stick to his guns because his reasons are sound — he doesn't know exactly what techniques the classified interrogation programs use, and there may be legal jeopardy questions involved.
But there's an even better reason he shouldn't give the answer much of the Senate wants. The demand is nonsense of the highest order; one that can only undermine the national effort in a time of war. Why should we spell out for our enemies, on TV no less, exactly how far interrogators can go? Sometimes less is more, and this is one of those times. Leaving something to the imagination can be an effective tool in fighting a war in which the rules of civilization don't neatly apply.
Either that, or let's send a brigade of nitpicking lawyers to Iraq and Afghanistan and let them fight the terrorists with their legal briefs.
The seriousness of the attack on Mukasey reveals an utter lack of seriousness about the reality of the war. And it comes from the same place as the earlier attempts to set arbitrary deadlines for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and to de-fund the military. All are borne out of a childlike frustration at the inability to muster the votes to get Bush to change course. But with the surge working, levels of violence in Baghdad falling and our casualties declining, a new Democratic punching bag had to be found.
With Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales gone, it's Mukasey's turn. And so we have the threats to scuttle a perfectly fine candidate to replace Gonzales and put the Justice Department back on track. Bush met his critics more than halfway by naming someone Schumer suggested. For his efforts, he gets only obstruction. And for his efforts to serve his country in a time of need, Mukasey gets humiliated, his impeccable credentials trashed in another proxy fight over the war.
In a perfect world, the questions being put to Mukasey are reasonable. But in the real world of fighting Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists that routinely target civilians, the questions are not only unreasonable, they are the wrong questions entirely.
The ultimate issue for America is not whether we should use waterboarding on terror suspects. The issue is whether we should be publicly debating and explaining every jot and tittle of our interrogation tactics when the results could be the difference between life and death for thousands of Americans.
Osama Bin Laden must be laughing in his cave at us as we try to draw bright red lines in the shifting sands of clandestine operations. His theory that people always gravitate toward the strong horse perfectly fits this foolish fixation.
Don't get me wrong — I think waterboarding is torture — by the norms of life in peacetime and even civil confinement. And so are a number of other techniques that are routinely used by the CIA and special-operations groups in harm's way. Common sense tells us that.
Moreover, I wouldn't want any of our troops to be subject to these tactics, and I hope we don't have to use them, except in extraordinary situations like the ticking-bomb scenario.
But peacetime values are often the wrong measurement for wartime policy. It does not follow that, just because we find certain practices repugnant in our living rooms, we have to create a battlefield policy that satisfies our personal tastes or even our national ideals. War by definition is at odds with our ideals. Shooting people, blowing them up, bombing — there's nothing idealistic about it.
By all means, let's not descend into barbarism or become like the beasts we're fighting. But above all, let's not torture ourselves in ways that undercut our efforts in this life-and-death struggle.

The Petraeus Curve

Special Thanks to "The Times"

Serious success in Iraq is not being recognised as it should be.

Is no news good news or bad news? In Iraq, it seems good news is deemed no news. There has been striking success in the past few months in the attempt to improve security, defeat al-Qaeda sympathisers and create the political conditions in which a settlement between the Shia and the Sunni communities can be reached. This has not been an accident but the consequence of a strategy overseen by General David Petraeus in the past several months. While summarised by the single word “surge” his efforts have not just been about putting more troops on the ground but also employing them in a more sophisticated manner. This drive has effectively broken whatever alliances might have been struck in the past by terrorist factions and aggrieved Sunnis. Cities such as Fallujah, once notorious centres of slaughter, have been transformed in a remarkable time.

Indeed, on every relevant measure, the shape of the Petraeus curve is profoundly encouraging. It is not only the number of coalition deaths and injuries that has fallen sharply (October was the best month for 18 months and the second-best in almost four years), but the number of fatalities among Iraqi civilians has also tumbled similarly. This process started outside Baghdad but now even the capital itself has a sense of being much less violent and more viable. As we report today, something akin to a normal nightlife is beginning to re-emerge in the city. As the pace of reconstruction quickens, the prospects for economic recovery will be enhanced yet further. With oil at record high prices, Iraq should be an extremely prosperous nation and in a position to start planning for its future with confidence.

None of this means that all the past difficulties have become history. A weakened al-Qaeda will be tempted to attempt more spectacular attacks to inflict substantial loss of life in an effort to prove that it remains in business. Although the tally of car bombings and improvised explosive devices has fallen back sharply, it would only take one blast directed at an especially large crowd or a holy site of unusual reverence for the headlines about impending civil war to be allowed another outing. The Government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has become more proactive since the summer, but must immediately take advantage of these favourable conditions. The supposed representatives of the Iraqi people in Baghdad need to show both responsibility and creativity if the country's potential is to be realised.
The current achievements, and they are achievements, are being treated as almost an embarrassment in certain quarters. The entire context of the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has been based on the conclusion that Iraq is an absolute disaster and the first task of the next president is to extricate the United States at maximum speed. Democrats who voted for the war have either repudiated their past support completely (John Edwards) or engaged in a convoluted partial retraction (Hillary Clinton). Congressional Democrats have spent most of this year trying (and failing) to impose a timetable for an outright exit. In Britain, in a somewhat more subtle fashion admittedly, Gordon Brown assumed on becoming the Prime Minister that he should send signals to the voters that Iraq had been “Blair's War”, not one to which he or Britain were totally committed.
All of these attitudes have become outdated. There are many valid complaints about the manner in which the Bush Administration and Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, managed Iraq after the 2003 military victory. But not to recognise that matters have improved vastly in the year since Mr Rumsfeld's resignation from the Pentagon was announced and General Petraeus was liberated would be ridiculous. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have to appreciate that Iraq is no longer, as they thought, an exercise in damage limitation but one of making the most of an opportunity. The instinct of too many people is that if Iraq is going badly we should get out because it is going badly and if it is getting better we should get out because it is getting better. This is a catastrophic miscalculation. Iraq is getting better. That is good, not bad, news.