6 January 2008 a Sunday

A plan that could authorize more aggressive operations follows concern that Al Qaeda and the Taliban hope to destabilize the Pakistani government, officials said.

I have to smile, because Edwards and Obama both spent a lot of time last night agonizing over the fact that, yes, they would in fact invade Pakistan unilaterally, if all of their qualifiers were met...good "actionable" intelligence about Osama's location, Pakistan unable or unwilling to help, etc etc etc. They danced and squirmed and surely did not want to pin down exactly what "good actionable intelligence" was, or how we would get it. Only Hillary exhibited some honesty when she said that "they" thought they had good actionable intelligence once when they fired a cruise rocket at bin Laden but it turned out he wasn't there after all. It will be interesting watching Edwards and Obama avoiding the Pakistan situation now.

And, of course, they're still looking through the wrong end of the telescope: all they can see is Osama bin Laden, period. It's as if once they get him the whole jihad thing ends. The Muslims did not invade Europe a dozen or more centuries ago trying to spread Islam around the world via jihad, it's a new idea of Osama's as far as they are concerned.

My biggest reservation about Obama (our guy) is that he is parroting this line about going into Iraq meant taking our eye off of bin Laden, but some of us remember that bin Laden had already fled Afghanistan before we ever started in Iraq. Perhaps Obama means we should have had our 160,000 troops sitting in Afghanistan, instead, huddled on the Pakistani border and just waiting for that good, actionable intelligence in order to invade not only a sovereign country but also an ally, since in this case those details wouldn't matter.

Why is it I think that if bin Laden is killed or captured during the next year that suddenly Edwards and Obama will think it's only a minor detail, besides being much too late (better late than never not being part of their world) and not worthy of that much credit? At this moment, though, he's all they could manage to talk about...there is no worldwide conflict.

This was poor old Ron Paul's focus, too...it's ALL about the United States. It's all about US occupying THEIR lands. He seemed oblivious of the fact that suicide bombings are taking place all around the world. If you were to attempt to explain to Paul that the jihadists consider much of Europe to also be THEIR lands it would probably short his circuits. What's that? How ignorant is he, certainly he must know that the Moors once considered Spain to be theirs? Hmmm...you think so? Anywhere else?

Paul seemed to think that bin Laden had a point when he was angry about the United States having airfields in Saudi Arabia, and you have to wonder why? Osama is not the ruler of Saudi Arabia, or even a citizen, why should what he thinks about their relationship with the U.S. be any more important than what anyone else thinks?

Osama considers himself to hold that right for the simple reason that he considers ALL of the Arab countries of the Middle East to be actually just one country, dar al-islam, and he also considers that whatever he says, goes. Thus, if he is offended at U.S. airbases in Saudi Arabia then he has every right to be...and Ron Paul agrees with him! Paul seemingly accepted the fact that we had no right to be anywhere in the Middle East if "they" didn't like it.

On the Republican side, the chorus seemed to be that McCain is weak on immigration simply because he can count. All of the candidates who want to send the illegals back to their own countries to start at the back of the line seem oblivious of the fact that there are at least 12 million and probably more like 20 million illegal immigrants involved. Only McCain seemed to recognize how many bus-loads that would require.

It will be difficult enough just to manage returning just those guilty of committing felonies.

Nobody wanted to use the "amnesty" word, but if you cannot physically move that many human bodies, even if they were all willing to line up to board the trains, planes and buses in an orderly fashion, then something has to give, like it or not. Suppose you could process 1000 people a day, every day, that's 365,000 a year...3.65 million in ten years. Okay, bump that up to moving out 10,000 people a day, 3.65 million a year. Six years later you'd be getting done with those who are already here. Some of them would be 6-year-old children...American citizens. Some would be newborns.

What kind of facilities and manpower would be required to physically deport 10,000 people a day, every day? What would that cost?

At least they have finally all agreed that the first thing necessary is closing the borders. Does any other nation in the world have borders as porous as the United States does?

My goodness, has George McGovern gone completely whacko? He wants to impeach Bush and Cheney, but all he makes are vague allegations and some of them are, perhaps deliberately, wrong. For instance:

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

But the election was, in fact, officially challenged, and the challenge went higher than a joke of a congressional investigation. Furthermore, all of the major news organizations in the United States did exhaustive counts and re-counts of the Florida election returns, and they concluded that George Bush was the winner on the original count and the winner after all of the re-counts. Does McGovern not remember this far back? Or does he figure that we don't?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States.

Note the rather cute out-of-context quote of "imminent threat" without assignation? The fact is--and it is a fact--President Bush said precisely the opposite in his SOTU speech, openly disagreeing with those who said that we must wait until the threat is imminent. Now McGovern is either guilty of a deliberate lie here or else he is so misinformed as to make you wonder about the rest of his charges. The fact that he deliberately chose not to use an attributable quote tells you something, I think.

The notion that Bush and Cheney somehow managed to deceive Congress, the press, and the public without being detected is simply mind-boggling. America boasts of having the freest and most-open press in the world, with tens of thousands of highly-skilled reporters and editors and opinion-writing pundits, and yet all of them were deceived by the Bush-Cheney team?

On McGovern's part, alas. Congress voted on a joint resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war, declaring 23 separate reasons as justification, and none of them argued a direct involvement of Iraq in the 9/11 attacks.

Well, I couldn't go any further, but assuming you are among those who feel that Bush-Cheney should be impeached then it seems to me that you should be upset when someone like McGovern tries to toss in a laundry-list of such easily-refutable charges. Not to mention inappropriate, such as the 2000 election results, which would have utterly no bearing on any impeachment issue.

More fun laughing at George Will's characterizations of Huckabee and Edwards:

Huckabee told heavily subsidized Iowa -- Washington's ethanol enthusiasm has farm values and incomes soaring -- that Americans striving to rise are "pushed down every time they try by their own government." Edwards, synthetic candidate of theatrical bitterness on behalf of America's crushed, groaning majority, says the rich have an "iron-fisted grip" on democracy and a "stranglehold" on the economy. Strangely, these fists have imposed a tax code that makes the top 1 percent of earners pay 39 percent of all income tax revenue, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent and the bottom 50 percent only 3 percent.

Huckabee says that "only one explanation" fits his Iowa success "and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people." God so loves Huckabee's politics that He worked a Midwest miracle on his behalf? Should someone so delusional control nuclear weapons?

Speaking of delusions, Edwards seems unaware that the world market sets the price of oil. He says a $100-a-barrel price is evidence of -- surging demand in India and China? Unrest in Nigeria's oil fields? No, "corporate greed." That is Edwards's explanation of every unpleasantness. Mitt Romney's versatility of conviction, although it repelled Iowans, has been a modest makeover compared with Edwards's personality transplant. The sunny Southerner of 2004 has become the angry paladin of the suffering multitudes, to whom he shouts: "Treat these people the way they treat you!" Presumably he means treat "the rich" badly -- an odious exhortation to one portion of Americans regarding another.

Edwards presumably also exempts himself from "the rich" category...he's really just a poor boy who happens to have a lot of money. A whole lot, to be sure, and the biggest mansion in the state, but still poor at heart. And in spirit.

The way to achieve Edwards's and Huckabee's populist goal of reducing the role of "special interests," meaning money, in government is to reduce the role of government in distributing money. But populists want to sharply increase that role by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth. Populists, who are slow learners, cannot comprehend this iron law: Concentrate power in Washington, and you increase the power of interests whose representatives are concentrated there.

Where in the world did we ever get the idea that all lobbyists are all bad all of the time? Where did we ever lose sight of the fact that some "special interests" are our own? All of us are part of one special-interest group of some kind, and perhaps several. Lobbyists are a lot like lawyers in that they are working, for money, as advocates for others, and that perhaps explains the ambivalence we feel towards them. After all, the only difference between an attorney and an effing lawyer is whether he represents you or your estranged wife.

Most of the 50-minute long video, titled "An Invitation to Reflection and Repentance," appeared to be aimed at ordinary Americans, with Gadahn saying al Qaeda felt the need to release the statement after Washington's "defeat" in Iraq and Afghanistan and failed attempts by Bush and other diplomats to bring peace to the Middle East.

"We felt it necessary to address the American people and explain to them some of the facts about these critical and fast-moving events," said the California-born Gadahn, who wore a white and red headscarf.

"The first questions Americans might ask is has America really been defeated? The answer is yes and on all fronts," he said while sitting behind a desk with a coffee cup and laptop computer nearby.

I found myself reflecting on this about the same way that I felt about McGovern's Op-ed...do these people really believe what they are saying, or are they selling something to an audience they believe won't know any better?

The difference between Democrats and Republicans this year is visible not only in the much- higher numbers and greater enthusiasm at the Democratic caucus, but in the general sense among Democrats that any of the choices would be fine, or better than fine, while Republicans are straining to find one they can live with.

I certainly haven't gotten that sense of the differences between the four remaining candidates, and if Hillary's negatives have managed to magically disappear, I wonder how that happened. The Democrats have dropped their ding-dongs faster, that's all, while the Republicans still have Paul and Huckabee left. I hate to say it, but Thompson is in the Richardson position, the nice guy who mostly watches the other three who will wind up being the two candidates and the wanna-be.

Hillary cannot be knocked out even if she loses all the early primaries. Her berth in the finals is assured by her national standing, her strength among “super delegates" (Congressmen, Senators, Governors and State Party Chairmen who automatically get votes at the convention) and her financial clout. But she can and will be bloodied. Meanwhile, if Obama wins in New Hampshire, particularly if he does so by a convincing margin (which we think is likely) he will probably go on to sweep Nevada and South Carolina, the other two early primaries. His status as front runner will be solidified - and that's where his troubles will start.

If he thinks he's got problems now, wait until he learns he has to try to run facing backwards to protect his back.

Rudy Giuliani doesn't have to win any of the early primaries. He doesn't even have to compete. Like Hillary, his national standing gives him a spot in the finals. But he faces a serious threat in John McCain. Since the former POW appeals to the same vote that Rudy covets - moderates whose main focus is terrorism and national security - he poses a real danger to Giuliani. In early 2007, Rudy edged ahead of McCain and moved even further into the lead when the Arizona Senator became identified with what the right calls the Bush amnesty plan for illegal immigrants.

But, largely on the strength of some very, very good television commercials, which summoned an outpouring of national emotion as they showed McCain in captivity in Vietnam, Rudy's advantage evaporated. The price Rudy has to pay for avoiding a battle in Iowa and New Hampshire is that he will have to run against McCain, splitting his vote for the rest of the primaries.

These are the two finalists. Huckabee is a joke because Iowa is a joke, as just about everybody admits every election year. Romney simply isn't liked well enough by a majority of the electorate, for whatever reason you choose to pick as your own. If he didn't have money he'd be gone after New Hampshire...and he might be, anyway, if Michigan weren't coming up right away. But with Romney gone, Rudy is the only guy with real executive experience. That's true of Richardson, too...so if it doesn't count for him, will it count enough for Rudy? Is Rudy the likeable Bill Clinton rogue candidate and McCain the sober and sensible Dole? If McCain were ten years younger, would that make a difference? I think so...a hard thing to admit since McCain is younger than I am!

The best-qualified candidate in terms of job experience is Giuliani. Consider: the last two presidents have been governors who had obliging personalities. Mayor of New York City is indisputably a bigger job than governor of Arkansas, and Rudy definitely has an obliging personality...a trait which had carried Huckabee as far as he's gone and also provides Obama with his biggest advantage over Hillary. If Hillary was as well-liked as Oprah, Obama would be toast. McCain's weaknesses, in this scenario, are two: he's admired more than liked, and he was only a senator, meaning no executive experience.

What's that? McCain is a legitimate war hero? Sure, but so was Bob Dole, and he lost to an amiable draft-dodger.

If it appears likely that the GOP field will come down to Rudy, McCain and Huckabee, the economic conservatives (Rush Limbaugh et al) will realize that they have no horse on which to bet. On taxes and fiscal issues, they see McCain as too liberal for opposing Bush's tax cut and worry about Huckabee's spending and tax policies in Arkansas. They might back Rudy but his pro choice position scares them. So . . . they may need to breathe new life into either Thompson or Romney. The former task is like raising the dead, so they may settle on Romney giving Mitt a new lease on life.

I don't think so. Look at the knock on McCain about opposing the tax cuts. In the first place, he didn't simply oppose them, he thought they should be matched by spending cuts. Oh. That...but isn't that a good, solid conservative position? Yes, it is.

I guess I'm a McCain fan who recognizes that Rudy probably has the best chance of getting elected, especially against Obama. If Hillary is the candidate then I can afford McCain.