The leftwing Canadian reporter on American legal affairs for Stale magazine Dahlia Lithwick, in contributing her own little bit to the MSM-fabricated “8 Fired US Attorneys” scandal, recorded what she considered a grand bon mot for that embarassment-to-the-Republic Richard Durbin.

Right before we break for lunch in Alberto Gonzales’ star turn before the Senate judiciary committee, he repeats, for about the fifth time, some crazy hokum about how anyone who criticizes the actions of the Justice Department folks involved in the recent unpleasantness is in fact “attacking the career professionals.” At which point Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., about loses it. “That’s like saying anyone who disagrees with the president’s policy on the war is attacking the soldiers,” he bellows.

No, Dick, it’s more like saying politicians on the homefront (like you) trying to negate the goal of the efforts and sacrifices of US soldiers fighting a war are stabbing them in the back.

Arianna Huffington has an interesting, and oh, so valid criticism of all of the contenders for the democrat party nomination.

There is a major disconnect in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.

While all the top candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed War on Drugs, a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

Consider this: according to a 2006 ACLU report, African Americans make up 15 percent of drug users, but account for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: America has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70 percent) are black or Latino.

Such facts and figures have been bandied about for years. But what to do about the legion of nonviolent — predominantly minority — drug offenders has long been an electrified third-rail in American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by our political leaders, who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

Supporting ending Prohibition did not win Al Smith the election in 1928, but Smith’s politics certainly played a key role in the national political realignment which swept FDR into power and gave the democrat party political dominance from 1932 to 1966.

I think Arianna is on to something.

Comedian Evan Sayet, last March 5th, delivered this analysis of Modern Liberalism at Heritage Foundation in Washington.

47:56 video

Arthur Herman, in Commentary, finds defeatism shaping our outlook on the war at home.

To the student of counterinsurgency warfare, the war in Iraq has reached a critical but dismally familiar stage.

On the one hand, events in that country have taken a more hopeful direction in recent months. Operations in the city of Najaf in January presaged a more effective burden-sharing between American and Iraqi troops than in the past. The opening moves of the so-called “surge” in Baghdad, involving increased American patrols and the steady addition of more than 21,000 ground troops, have begun to sweep Shiite militias from the streets, while their leader, Moqtada al Sadr, has gone to ground. Above all, the appointment of Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the author of the U.S. Army’s latest counterinsurgency field manual, as commander of American ground forces in Iraq bespeaks the Pentagon’s conviction that what we need to confront the Iraq insurgency is not more high-tech firepower but the time-tested methods of unconventional or “fourth-generation” warfare.

In Washington, on the other hand, among the nation’s political class, the growing consensus is that the war in Iraq is not only not winnable but as good as lost—Congressman Henry Waxman of California, for one, has proclaimed that the war is lost. Politicians who initially backed the effort, like Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden, and Republican Congressmen Walter Jones and Tom Davis, have been busily backing away or out, insisting that Iraq has descended into civil war and that Americans are helpless to shape events militarily. A growing number, like Congressman John Murtha, even suggest that the American presence is making matters worse. The Democratic party has devoted much internal discussion to whether and how to restrict the President’s ability to carry out even the present counterinsurgency effort.

In short, if the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis still continues and is showing signs of improvement, the battle for the hearts and minds of Congress, or at least of the Democratic majority, seems to be all but over.

But the war is not yet lost, and a new approach to dealing with the insurgency is actually underway, and it is still possible for America to win.

on August 1, 1956, a French lieutenant colonel of Tunisian descent named David Galula had taken command of the mountainous and rebel-infested Aissa Mimoun area of Kabylia. To the FLN’s unconventional mode of warfare, Galula responded with unconventional methods of his own. These proved so successful so quickly that they were soon adopted by French commanders in other parts of Algeria. …

By January 1960, the war that many had considered lost three years earlier was virtually won.

Galula’s subsequent book, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, laid out the blueprint for success in this form of warfare. From the start, Galula had discarded the assumptions governing conventional conflicts. A decisive battlefield victory of the kind familiar from World War II, he saw, would never work against indigenous, loosely organized, but deeply committed insurgencies …

Galula grasped that the new form of warfare had reversed the conventional relationship in war between combatant and civilian. No longer bystanders or useful adjuncts to the war effort, as in World War II, civilians were the critical determinants of success or failure. Without the help or at least the passive acquiescence of the local population, the government would be doomed. In a crucial sense, it did not matter how many guerrillas were killed, or how many regular soldiers were on the ground; the center of gravity was the opinion of the local community.

Thus, the key to success lay in bringing to the surface the portion of the populace that hated the guerrillas, and then turning that minority into a majority by a combination of political, social, and cultural initiatives …

As recently as two years ago, Galula’s book was virtually unknown in Pentagon circles. Today it has become the bible of American counterinsurgency thinkers like General Petraeus.

Highly recommended. Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to John R. Finch.

Even the Washington Post draws the line at the shameful conduct of the democrat house leadership using bribes funded by the US Treasury to buy votes in favor of unconditional and irresponsible withdrawal.

TODAY THE House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.

Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill — for whatever reason — will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next 17 months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.

The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget.

Dick Morris offers a little advice that George W. Bush, his White House team, and the Justice Department would be wise to take to to heart.

When will the Bush administration grow some guts? Except for its resolute — read: stubborn — position on Iraq, the White House seems incapable of standing up for itself and battling for its point of view. The Democratic assault on the administration over the dismissal of United States attorneys is the most fabricated and phony of scandals, but the Bush people offer only craven apologies, half-hearted defenses, and concessions. Instead, they should stand up to the Democrats and defend the conduct of their own Justice Department.

There is no question that the attorney general and the president can dismiss United States attorneys at any time and for any reason. We do not have civil servant U.S. attorneys but maintain the process of presidential appointment for a very good reason: We consider who prosecutes whom and for what to be a question of public policy that should reflect the president’s priorities and objectives. When a U.S. attorney chooses to go light in prosecuting voter fraud and political corruption, it is completely understandable and totally legitimate for a president and an attorney general to decide to fire him or her and appoint a replacement who will do so.

The Democratic attempt to attack Bush for exercising his presidential power to dismiss employees who serve at his pleasure smacks of nothing so much as the trumped-up grounds for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Back then, radical Republicans tried to oust him for failing to obey the Tenure of Office Act, which they passed, barring him from firing members of his Cabinet (in this case, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton) without Senate approval. Soon after Johnson’s acquittal, the Supreme Court invalidated the Tenure of Office Act, in effect affirming Johnson’s position.

But instead of loudly asserting its view that voter fraud is, indeed, worthy of prosecution and that U.S. attorneys who treat such cases lightly need to go find new jobs, the Bush administration acts, for all the world, like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. All Republican supporters of the administration can do is to point to Bill Clinton’s replacement of U.S. attorneys when he took office. Because the president and the attorney general insist on acting guilty, the rest of the country has no difficulty in assuming that they are.

Bush, Rove, Gonzales and Co. should explain why the U.S. attorneys were dismissed by emphasizing the importance of the cases they were refusing to prosecute. By doing so, they can turn the Democratic attacks on them into demands to go easy on fraudulent voting. A good sense of public relations — and some courage — could turn this issue against the Democrats for blocking Bush’s efforts to crack down on the criminals he wanted prosecuted.

Read the whole thing.

From Scrappleface:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, said today that the Nevada State Democrat Party’s decision to pull out of a scheduled presidential debate co-hosted by Fox News is “actually a strategic redeployment, not a cut-and-run retreat.”

“There’s no reason to put our brave Democrat presidential candidates in harm’s way,” Sen. Reid said. “We were lured into this debate due to faulty intelligence, and the prudent thing to do is redeploy.”

The majority leader who initially backed the Fox News debate, said he began to question the intelligence that drew him to support the contest when he read the following joke made by Fox News Channel Chairman Roger Ailes at an industry awards ceremony:

“And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’

Sen. Reid said, “I cannot condone mocking the intelligence of a sitting president in time of war.”

The Democrat presidential hopefuls will redeploy to a casino on the Las Vegas strip for a non-partisan debate co-hosted by MoveOn.org and The New York Times.

The democrats are stuffing their military appropriations bill mandating withdrawal from Iraq with billions of dollars in pork to buy votes.

AP:

Democrats seeking votes for their Iraq-withdrawal plan have stuffed the bill it’s in with billions of dollars for farms, flu preparedness, New Orleans levees, home heating and other causes.

Some critics say the Democrats are simply being opportunistic — using a must-pass measure for funding U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry items that can’t advance as easily on their own.

At the same time, Democratic leaders are trying to increase support for setting deadlines for ending U.S. military combat in Iraq, which they’ve made part of the larger legislation.

It’s plain that Democrats are unwilling to approve the bill’s $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan without devoting considerable sums of money to the home front.

“The president wants to make sure we take care of Iraq, but I think we also have to make sure that we don’t lose sight of what we have to do here at home,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

Already, money in the bill not directly related to the war exceeds $20 billion.

Norman Podhoretz is unkind enough to give Arthur Schlesinger the obituary he deserves.

There are three things to say about the work of Arthur Schlesinger, who has just died at the age of eighty-nine: (1) He was an exceptionally good writer, commanding a lucid, vivid, and often elegant prose style. (2) He was an exceptionally bad historian: incapable of doing justice to any idea with which he disagreed, and so tendentious that he invariably denigrated and/or vilified anyone who had ever espoused any such idea. Like the so-called “Whig interpretation of history” in England, Schlesinger’s voluminous work as a historian amounts to the proposition that the story of freedom in America is the story of the Democratic party, and specifically of its never-ending struggle against the sinister bastions of privilege, oppression, and ignorance represented by the Republicans of the modern era and their forebears. (3) This unshakable conviction not only made his wonderfully readable accounts of the past unreliable and in many cases even worthless; it also warped his political judgment in the present, leading him in the last forty years of his life to support the forces that were pushing the Democratic party to the Left. In becoming an apologist for these forces, he betrayed the liberalism that he himself, in The Vital Center, had earlier espoused and whose banishment from the Democratic party has been, and will continue to be, a calamity for this country.

A dead accurate summation, I’d say.

says Gerard Baker in the London Times, who also echoes the Jonah Goldberg thesis that it would serve the democrats right to win in 2008. The theory that the burden of responsibility would sober the democrat leadership is an interesting one, I think, but it is obviously not necessarily right.

Somewhere, deep down, tucked away underneath their loathing for George Bush, in a secret place where the lights of smart dinner-party conversation and clever debating-society repartee never shine, the growing hordes of America-bashers must dread the moment he leaves office.

When President Bush goes into the Texas sunset, and especially if he is replaced by an enlightened, world-embracing Democrat, their one excuse, their sole explanation for all human suffering in the world will disappear too. And they may just find that the world is not as simple as they thought it was.

It’s been a great ride for the past six years, hasn’t it? George Bush and Dick Cheney and all those pantomime villains that succour him — the gay-bashing foot soldiers of the religious Right, the forktailed neoconservatives with their devotion to Israel, the dark titans of American corporate boardrooms spewing their carbon emissions above the pristine European skies. Having those guys around for so long provided a comfortable substitute for thinking hard about global challenges, a kind of intellectual escapism.

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes.

AP reports: House votes to “support troops,” but opposes sending additional troops to complete the mission.

Hat tip to Roger de Hauteville at Maggie’s Farm.

Investors Business Daily condemns the House democrat leadership’s “slow bleed” strategy

As chairman of the House panel that oversees military spending, (John) Murtha plans to advance legislation next month attaching strings to the additional war funds Bush requested on Feb. 5.

Murtha plans to stop the Iraq War by placing four conditions on combat funds through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. The Pentagon would have to certify that troops being sent to Iraq are “fully combat ready” with training and equipment, troops must have at least one year at home between combat deployments, combat deployments cannot be longer than a year, and extending tours of duty would be prohibited…

It’s not that the Democrats think we’re losing or that the war is unwinnable. They simply don’t want to win it. As House Minority Leader John Boehner said of Murtha’s proposals: “While American troops are fighting radical Islamic terrorists thousands of miles away, it is unthinkable that the United States Congress would move to discredit their mission, cut off their reinforcements and deny them the resources they need to succeed and return home safely.”..

Neville Chamberlain’s naivete may have helped bring on World War II, but at least he supported his country when war began. Norway’s Vidkun Quisling and France’s Vichy government under Marshal Petain may have collaborated with the Nazi enemy, but after their countries’ defeats, not before.

We’d have to go back to Benedict Arnold to find Americans as eager as Murtha & Co. to see an American defeat on the battlefield.

Read the whole thing.

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But Robert Farley argues that these kinds of accusations have serious implications.

IBD seems to be claiming that the vast bulk of the Democratic Party (and no small part of the Republican) are the equivalent of the most notable traitor in American history, a man who undoubtedly would have been hanged or shot if he had been caught. The editorial has been linked to approvingly by Captain’s Quarters, Powerline (sic), Instapundit, and the Gateway Pundit. Reynolds further notes:

To some people, Vietnam wasn’t a defeat, but a victory. To them, the right side won. And lost. Naturally, they’re happy to repeat the experience.

Undoubtedly, the Perfesser and his ilk will claim that they aren’t actually calling for treason trials and executions of members of the Democratic Party. But why not? If Democrats really are the equivalent of Benedict Arnold, and if opposition to the war and the Surge is traitorous, then why shouldn’t we be tried and executed, or at least imprisoned? The rhetoric leads only one place. Either Glenn Reynolds believes that Democrats are traitors, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, he should tell us why, and should explain why he so often suggests that Democrats have committed treasonable offenses. If he does believe that Democrats are traitors, then he ought to step up and start calling for arrests. Treason is a capital offense; there’s not really a middle ground. We’re guilty, or we’re not.

Sadly, but perhaps fortunately, Reynolds et al are too gutless to pursue the logical consequence of their accusation. So far, anyway..

The problem is that the current administration has tried to make war while neglecting this particular line of logic. America’s Vietnam experience demonstrated the capacity of the radical peace movement to use its relations with the academic clerisy and the media to turn treason and defeatism into a de rigeur fashion statement of membership in the American elite.

During WWI and WII, the wars which America won during the last century, preaching defeatism and rendering aid and comfort to the enemy were simply not tolerated.

The US Government has the obligation to the members of its armed forces whom it sends into harm’s way to prevent their service and sacrifices being made futile by the domestic demoralization of the American public by a defeatist minority of radical leftists and pacifists.