The Iran Challenge

Obama's "responsible, phased redeployment of our troops from Iraq" would also redound to Iran's strategic benefit. The policy would erase the security and political gains the United States and its Iraqi allies have made in the last year and a half. It would lead to more violence, not less, and to a weaker Iraqi government, not a stronger one. It would breathe new life into the radicals--many sponsored by the Iranian regime--who seek a failed state in Iraq. And Tehran would quickly move to fill any power vacuum that the Americans left behind in Iraq.

Why on earth, then, would the supreme leader of Iran, seeing the U.S. president knocking on his door--a supplicant--and U.S. troops retreating from Iraq, be moved to negotiate with the United States? By what strategic calculus would he determine that that would be the time to give up his chips?

Ah, but we have entered the Obama zone, where conditions are not conditions, where Ahmadinejad is and is not really the leader of Iran, where the Iranian Revolutionary Guards isn't a terrorist group one year but is the next, where Iran is simultaneously a "tiny" and a "grave" threat, and where the absence of American combat troops in Iraq actually increases U.S. influence in the Middle East.

Voting for Commander in Chief

Green Schools legislation isn’t actually meant to improve education. “High on Green”

Once again, all eyes are fixed on Guantanamo Bay. “9/11 Plotters Are Arraigned”

We are now a litigation-obsessed society. That’s the prism through which we assess a commission process that, historically, has never been legally exacting. In the wars of prior eras, Americans were not exercised over the consignment of war criminals to comparatively barebones military trials. There was no fretting over the fact that these were unilateral executive-branch affairs, conducted outside the scrutiny of civilian judges. As a nation, we thought the point was to defeat the enemy, not to make sure he got enough due process to prevent Eurocrats and law professors from sniffling all over our reputation in the international community.

Today, to borrow the apt phrase of Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith, we have attempted to “judicialize” warfare, as if there were no distinction between an al-Qaeda mass-murderer and a common tax cheat. Consequently, our notion of a fair trial for even alien war criminals is now colored by the colossal disclosure obligations designed to protect Americans in run-of-the-mill cases.

Thus the dilemma which results directly from today’s legal culture: Do we come down on the side of protecting Americans (heretofore thought the first responsibility of government) or the side of enhanced due process for war criminals (heretofore never thought to be very high on our list of imperatives)?

By contrast, alien enemy combatants detained by the military outside the United States are not entitled to American constitutional rights. Yes, we owe them due process, but, despite what the legal commentariat spouts, “due process” is not shorthand for “the rights accorded to defendants in the civilian criminal justice system.” It means just what is says: the “process” that is “due” under the circumstances. We have never owed hostile captives in war crimes tribunals the same quantum of protection that must be extended to our own citizens prosecuted in our own civilian courts by officials of our own government. When hostile aliens threaten the nation, we are permitted to draw sensible distinctions: to conduct proceedings that are fair but that pay deference to our national self-defense, which restrains us from edifying the enemy while the war rages.

Unlike in the civilian criminal-justice system, we do not have to permit enemy combatants to represent themselves in military commissions. And if we decide to give them that privilege, we can qualify it. We don’t have to let them extort us into sharing national-defense information with al-Qaeda. We can tell KSM and his fellow barbarians: “Look, we are willing to share sensitive information with a qualified lawyer who is duty-bound to protect your interests. We can’t make you take that lawyer, but that lawyer is your only way of accessing the sensitive information. If you don’t want the lawyer, fine, but then you don’t get the access — your choice.”

We can do it in a military commission. And Congress could direct it in a hybrid system — a national-security court for handling international terrorism cases in the future — which I believe our lawmakers should create.

In a civilian trial, we can’t do it. We’d have to share the nation’s secrets with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed … and Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, and any other enemy leaders we may capture in the years ahead.

That’s something Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama might bear in mind as they decry Gitmo and promise to shut it down.

Obama changed his feathers for AIPAC. “When in Israel ...”

Can you say “Justice Caroline?” “Justice Kennedy”

The headlines have treated Obama's nomination as the second coming. “Braking for Euphoria”

Oh, his subduing tongue, his spirit all compact of fire, his beauty beauteous!“They’re in Love”

Obama is no retro-redeemer. He is a 21st-century savior, a Matrix-messiah, and Neo for our modern-day Nineveh. “Messiah In Our Midst”

Do American Jews really love Israel, or just Democrats? “Who Do They Love?”

Next time you hear about Obama and his wanting to talk to Iran without "preconditions" remember these comments from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [made at a U.N. food security summit June 3, 2008, in Rome]

The "Sanatic power" of the U.S. faces destruction and Israel will "certainly" cease to exist.  Ahmadinejad added "the Iranian people are the most peace loving nation of the world."  He also rejected a nuclear deal worked up by the Japanese.

see-dubya  •  May 4, 2008 01:56 AM [Michelle Malkin's site]

Sure, you vegans thought yourselves so morally pure. But according to the Swiss government, your hands are stained with the chlorophyll of innocent beings.

Go ahead and read the whole stupid thing now, because it’s going to be all over Fox News and every local-market talk show and right-leaning blog this week.

While you’re there, take a nice heady sniff of European morality, and with that fragrance still stinging your nostrils, go read Patterico’s expert takedown of the New York Times’ new Supreme Court reporter, Adam Liptak, who graces the pages of that august publication with a tiresome muddle of predictable criticism of American prison policy.

What does prison policy have to do with the Free Swiss Chard! movement? Well, you experienced VRWC operatives might see this one coming…among his many misstatements and misreadings of the data, Liptak inevitably reaches for that good ol’ reliable cudgel liberals use to attack American policy: European moralists who are shocked and disgusted at our cowboy-mentality barbarism.

Not to mention the fact that dude, they think plants have dignity and rights. But I guess it’s a wash: if you do murder a hydrangea with malice aforethought, they won’t imprison you for very long.

It’s going to be hard to take anything a European not named Thatcher says seriously ever again. They’re not particularly interested in stopping Islamic honor killings, but zut! that American prison system is too harsh.

And oh yeah, plants have rights.

see-dubya  •  June 5, 2008 12:00 PM [Michelle Malkin's site]

He seems to have a few disagreements (link added) with Obama’s foreign policy:

What is implicit in Obama’s reference to “tiny” threats is that they are sufficiently insignificant that negotiations alone can resolve them. Indeed, he has gone even further, arguing that the lack of negotiations with Iran caused the threats: “And the fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons, funding Hamas, funding Hezbollah.”

This is perhaps the most breathtakingly naive statement of all, implying as it does that it is actually U.S. policy that motivates Iran rather than Iran’s own perceived ambitions and interests. That would be news to the mullahs in Tehran, not to mention the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.

It is an article of faith for Obama, and many others on the left in the U.S. and abroad, that it is the United States that is mostly responsible for the world’s ills.

That’s not even the best part. Bolton pins a great big MONDALE sign on him.

Scumbag Pakistani ambassador blames Denmark for embassy bombing

Terrorism experts and Pakistan's ambassador in Denmark are linking Monday's terror bombing to the Mohammed cartoons

Danes need look no further than their own newspapers to find the reason for the car bombing that severely damaged their embassy in Pakistan on Monday, according to Rohan Gunaranta, an international terrorism expert from Pakistan.

“Far more Americans believe that the press coverage has favored Barack Obama than think it has favored Hillary Clinton,” a just-released survey, from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, discovered in determining 37 percent recognize a bias in favor of Obama. Even 35 percent of Democrats “see a pro-Obama bias” compared to 45 percent of Republicans and 40 percnt of independents.

Pew's rundown: people-press.org

In the middle of a war on two fronts, Barack Obama plans to gut the military. He also wants to dismantle our nuclear arsenal. And he wants to keep you in the dark about it.

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In a 132-word videotaped pledge (still viewable on YouTube), Obama agreed to hollow out the U.S. military by slashing both conventional and nuclear weapons.

The scope of his planned defense cuts, combined with his angry tone, is breathtaking. He sounds as if the military is the enemy, not the bad guys it's fighting. Here is a transcript:

You can bet that Obama will not make this sweeping indictment of our security forces again as he tries to move to the center in the general election. But this is what he thinks, and this is what he plans to do.

His campaign Web site doesn't list a separate category for military or defense under "Issues." But search shows near-identical language there regarding nuclear weapons.

His plan, needless to say, is frighteningly irresponsible given the world threats.

Cutting allegedly "unproven" missile defense systems is music to Kim Jong Il's and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ears, let alone all the PLA generals wishing our destruction.

Yet Obama wants to kill a program that's yielding success after success, with both sea- and land-based systems. The military just this week intercepted a ballistic missile near Hawaii in a sea-based missile defense test.

Proposing "deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal" amounts to unilateral disarmament, and it's suicidal given China's and now Russia's aggressive military buildup.

Barack Obama's most obvious kindred spirit on the political scene is Jimmy Carter. The same shortcomings that Carter advises his party's presumptive nominee to balance are those he subjected America to for four years.

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Political tips from the worst president of the 20th century are usually of questionable value. But James Earl Carter Jr. has just provided some remarkably insightful counsel to Sen. Barack Obama.

"I think it would be the worst mistake that could be made," said Carter, who with his unceasing meddling in foreign affairs doubles as the worst ex-president of the 21st century. Placing the former first lady on the ticket "would just accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates" because of Hillary's high negatives of about 50%.

 Amnesty Hasn't Helped McCain with Hispanics

The latest Gallup poll is out.  It's the daily tracking results for the presidential general election, and in the Hispanic vote breakdown, as we stand today, Obama gets 62% of the Hispanic vote, McCain gets 29% of the Hispanic vote.  Now, you can make of that what you will, but if anybody on the Republican side has an identity that everybody should know, pro-illegal immigration, amnesty and so forth, it would be Senator McCain.  We kept hearing during this amnesty debate that the Republican Party had to get in gear, the Republican Party had to modernize, the Republican Party had to understand the future, and we needed to get these Hispanic votes, and the only way to get these Hispanic votes was to understand that the 12 to 20 million illegals here in the country had to know that we were not against them, that we were their friends and so forth.  Here's the biggest friend they ever had in the Republican Party getting 29% of their vote in the latest presidential tracking poll according to Gallup. 

"All Obama has is his oratory, all he has is his charisma. That's why he is where he is, not because of any achievements. He does not have substance. He doesn't have anything that you can really grab onto and say, 'Yeah, that's great!' He's not talking about the greatness of America."

"No matter what you do for the libs, no matter what you give them, it's never enough. Here's Senator McCain trying to score all these points with Democrats and independents by touting his independence and the Democrats are saying, 'That doesn't count for anything.' It just gets you mocked. It doesn't work."

"Obama leaves his church not because of a black minister, not because of black hate talk, not because of black separatism, not because of liberation theology. He leaves because of a white priest.

the Washington Post admits -- as if they had nothing to do with it -- that the news out of Iraq is so good, the media's not covering it, and asks WHAT Obama will do to back away from, "We've lost."

WP: Iraqi Upturn: The U.S.-backed government and army may be winning the war

Obama says he never doubted the surge could work. Wrong. In 2007, he said it was pointless and doomed

Democrats will have such big margins in Congress, you're gonna get a bunch of liberal junk no matter what.

Senator McCain wants to win with support from moderates and independents, so he can point to that and say he's not beholden to either party as president.