TOBY PETZOLD

David Ignatius, who is a respectable man and reporter, has some interesting observations on how America will end its time in Iraq:

The presidential campaign debate about Iraq, so far, has been a sterile one — implying that the choice is between an Obama solution of pulling out the troops and a McCain solution of staying the course and winning military victory. Neither alternative is realistic.

The right way out is something in between — ambiguous, messy, occasionally in the shadows — a course that recognizes Iraqi sovereignty but also works with care and cunning to protect America’s interests.

The purpose of our being in Iraq is to be in Iraq. There are many great rewards for our military’s sacrifices there in terms of diplomacy, intelligence, and commerce. Oh, and liberty and representative government for millions. This isn’t some colonial scheme. This is how we extend and sustain the Pax Americana. As long as the West has its dick in the Mohammedans’ mashed potatoes, everything will be fine.

McCain knows how to use Obama’s support for terrorist civil rights:

Let me be clear, under my administration Osama bin Laden will either be killed on the battlefield or executed. Senator Obama’s failure to comprehend the implication of the Supreme Court decision he embraced and the historical precedent of Nuremberg raise serious questions about judgment and experience and whether Senator Obama is ready to assume the awesome responsibilities of commander in chief.

Now that Obama’s changed the game on campaign finance, it won’t be enough for McCain to be right on the facts; Big Media will bury that stuff every time. He will, in addition, need to scandalize Obama’s brand. If he doesn’t do it himself, others who love their country just as much will need to stand up and keep neo-Marxism and identity politics out of the White House.

Know how you can tell Olbamamann’s crazier than a shithouse rat? Because he only poses these tedious, self-regarding, and clause-laden questions —Germanically long and so leading that you’d have to hire a lawyer to object to them all— in which he pretty much gets the answer he was looking for: the one that echoes his own. And along the way of these huge bursts of rhetorical slurry are inferences and associations and outright lies, linking any two or more of his enemies on that day in any sort of libtard-Leftist strokefest he wants. Such spluttering extravagance of what must pass for thought with him is a sure sign of mental decay.

Moreover, there’s no question, if you’ll simply look, that Olbamamann’s head occupies more of the screen than any other propagandist on TV. This isn’t an ad hominem point to make, but to point out that he has this done deliberately because it’s all part of his performance artist’s homage to Big Brother and the Two Minute Hate. He’s an utter moran. I hope some day to hear the low-down on what Russert thought of this clown. I’ll bet Russert thought he was an asshole.

What happened to all of the Democrats’ tough talk on making the President cry uncle on the War for Iraq? I don’t know, but opposing the war there must not be as important as it used to be:

WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) - Democrats in the U.S. Congress, who came to power last year on a call to end the combat in Iraq, will soon give President George W. Bush the last war-funding bill of his presidency without any of the conditions they sought for withdrawing U.S. troops, congressional aides said on Monday.

Lawmakers are arranging to send Bush $165 billion in new money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enough to last for about a year and well beyond when Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

What’s changed their minds? Is it the same thing Obama doesn’t want to have to acknowledge, but must, anyway?

Don’t forget that the War for Iraq has made us safer. International jihad was drawn to Iraq because we made that country the primary venue for taking on the Great Satan. After five years of fighting our best and bravest, what is the opinion of martyrdom now? As they continue to reject al-Qaeda and even Osama himself, the Muslim world is beginning to see that Uncle Sam’s judgements are altogether righteous.

ABC’s Jake Tapper recently asked Barry Obama (emphases mine):

The Bush administration says, no matter what people think about other programs, other policies they’ve initiated, there has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11. And they say the reason that is, is because of the domestic programs, many of which you opposed, the NSA surveillance program, Guantanamo Bay, and other programs.

How do you know that they’re wrong? It’s not possible that they’re right?

Notice that Obama never answers the question:

Well, keep in mind I haven’t opposed, for example, the national security surveillance program, the NSA program. What I’ve said that we can do it within the constraints of our civil liberties and our Constitution.

TAPPER: They disagree, though.

OBAMA: Well, but the fact that they disagree does not mean that they’re right on this. What it means is, is that they have been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution, that our founders put in place.

And it is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. And there has been no evidence on their part that we can’t.

And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. 

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, “Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.”

So that, I think, is an example of something that was unnecessary. We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws.  

Remember how the elites howled when Bush the Younger referred to terrorists in the days after the atrocities of 11 September 2001 as “these folks”? Remember how that was inappropriate and cowboyish? Well, now such constructions are acceptable because someone else is making them.

And when you look at how Obama evades Tapper’s question, he does so by dashing into the thicket of the Bill Clinton-John Kerry approach to America’s defense in the post-Cold War world: these terrorists can be handled through the judicial system. And why is that? Because anti-war liberals apparently believe that American Constitutional jurisprudence extends itself throughout the world and even into our combat theaters. Mo may be Mirandized —even though Mo would slash a hippie’s throat as soon as he would mine.

So where do liberals come by this imperialist belief in the United States Constitution? I have no idea. That they do, though, is an indication of their essential childishness. These are not the spiritual descendants of Wilson or FDR or Truman making the world safe for democracy or making us an arsenal of such a world; these are incoherent people, now isolationists and then, some other day, globalists. These miserable hippie bastards deem America’s military sacrifices only worthwhile if there’s no discernible strategic interest at stake. They do not support the troops because they cannot understand the value in winning the War for Iraq. They also do not support the troops because they reflexively charge anyone who supports the war, but has never served, as a chickenhawk who deserves the punishment of military service himself. You could ask Obama this very hour whether this war should have been waged and he would say no because he has never been anything more than a gainsayer on that point. He believes that that is his answer and trump card in one. That he has supposedly opposed the war from the start is asserted to be the final proof of his superior judgement and, yet, neither part of that equation is true. When does he have to start making sense? Shouldn’t it have happened by now —or is the intoxication of charisma too much for such concerns?

Why are the greens and libs opposed to high gasoline prices? I thought that breaking our economy on the wheel of petro-slavery was the surest way to post-Amerikkkan heaven and the just death of the combustion engine. When the bottom-feeders start losing their asses to exorbitant fuel costs and food staples, it will make this fourth and final reich ripe for the picking and clear the way for Obamessiah’s socialist paradise. People should be walking and biking more often, anyway.

Or maybe this is the Left’s dream: let Big Oil fatten itself like a Thanksgiving bird and then Obama will just nationalize everything and seize all their assets.

You never know, man. You never know.

Then again, life is everything more than wondering about when you are going to die. Because that is the end of the annihilatory mind of Litmoid Man —not the ultimate aspiration to the well-examined life of Thinking Man, who has something to show for his own turn at the Great Wheel of Being and Nothingness.

I left scratches and scratchings. I left beauty and joy. I left ambivalence and hatred. Because I did live them. And do —even now— though it is all indifference. But, as with the vast majority of human beings, I was neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm and, thus, was spewed out of the maw of permanence.

Whom the gods would save they first make to forget.

Only two months ago, Tim Russert asked Barack Obama:

“What has the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright done to your campaign?”

To which the junior Senator from Illinois said:

Well, obviously it’s distracted us.  I mean, we ended up spending a lot of time talking about Reverend Wright instead of talking about gas prices and food prices and the situation in Iraq.  And so it, it’s, it wasn’t welcome.

The attention that’s been paid to the issue of Jeremiah Wright is a function of how little we know about this man who presumes to seek the Presidency before his time. There’s no actual reason to suppose that Obama would have anything specific to say about energy or food inflation or a war he doesn’t understand, anyway, so where else should the country’s curiosity run?

But, you know, I think that the American people understand that when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ, I was committing not to Pastor Wright, I was committing to a church and I was committing to Christ.

I don’t know how to believe this statement. Where would one begin, Senator? The American People don’t “understand” anything about your religious choices because they don’t even know you. Do you understand that? The American People’s understanding of you as a religious person of any kind consists of watching you get busted belonging to a radical anti-American church and then —subsequent to Russert’s question here, having owned and disowned Wright— leaving that church altogether when it became too much of a “distraction.” What kind of man abandons his church for political gain? Why, the very same kind of man who would join a church for political gain.

And it is a wonderful church.  It’s a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that dates back to the battles around abolition.  It has lived out, I think the, the social gospel by dealing with poverty and providing shelter to the homeless and, and working on critical issues that make me very proud.  And, as a consequence, when Reverend Wright, who married me and baptized our, our children, when he made those statements, or I learned of those statements that I found so objectionable, I, I felt that they didn’t define him. 

“Or I learned of those statements”? This is a subliminal word-tool he’s using to provide a temporal space between all of the bigoted crap Wright was spewing and himself. See, he’s absolved of any responsibility for adhering to such rhetoric because he just happened to have become informed of these “objectionable” outbursts only later. Is this a lie that he really hopes to sustain? If it is ever shown that Obama was in attendance when Wright was holding forth on the evils of America —which would be pretty much any time, I suspect— then the baptist will have drowned his messiah right there on the Chicago River.

And so I spoke in Philadelphia about these issues and tried to construct, you know, a, a conversation about issues of race.  But when I saw, this week, him come out and speak in a way that was just as divisive, that didn’t explain or apologize, but rather worsened some of the comments that he had made previously, I felt it was very important to make clear that that’s not who I am, that’s not who I stand for.  I don’t think it represented well the church or the African-American church.  And I had to make a clear statement.  Hopefully we’ve been able to put it behind us.

Not a chance, gasbag. Then again, now that NBC’s integrity quotient has sustained a devastating loss, it’s possible that your abettors on that network —as well as similarly-minded hacks elsewhere in Big Media— will help to paper over your despicable lack of religious authenticity and keep marketing you as a religion unto yourself.

John McCain could do himself a world of good with conservatives in this country if he will just make it a point to use this Boumediene v Bush decision handed down by the Supreme Court yesterday like a two-dollar whore. The very real possibility of an overwhelmingly liberal —and young— Supreme Court is staring us in the face if Obama wins this thing. Conservatives need to shut the fuck up for a while and do what they know they must: impeach Earl Warren.

What can I say? I’m heartbroken. One of my first thoughts after I heard the awful news was that he’d been cheated out of the blessing we all have as Americans, which is to witness and participate in this next great quadrennial challenge called the election of our President.

I depended on him to ask the questions I can’t ask. I expected to be enlightened and/or enraged by him any time I saw his face or heard his voice. Tim Russert was a great guide through American politics and a staple of my every Sunday morning. I send his family and his friends and loved ones my deepest sympathies.