Quote For The Day III

"[Giuliani] knows so little about foreign policy he confuses terrorists cells and organizations with countries. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before this war. Al-Qaeda became a Bush-fulfilling prophecy. It didn’t exist until Bush went to war. Even our own intelligence community says that. But these guys buy into this silliness that if you don’t fight them in Baghdad you’re going to fight them in Boston. Give me a break," – Joe Biden, to CBN.

Quote For The Day II

"I supported the President when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," – Bill Clinton, May 18, 2003, in commencement remarks at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. Hey, it was Mississippi. Oliver Willis:

As one of President Clinton’s strongest supporters and biggest fans, it pains me to point out that what he’s saying here is a load of bull.

Yeah, but it’s always good bullshit with the Clintons.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Here you go again:

With the human sparkle of a female East German shot-putter.

We loyal readers know you hate HRC, and accept that. OK. But give her a break, will you?

When she’s open and charming, the pundits rage about the fact that ‘she laughs too much.’ If she warms up to her audience, they spend literally hours wondering ‘why she claps so much.’

If she deploys a tone that allows her personality to show, perhaps especially the tones that are real (the bubbling laughter, etc.), are pretty viciously attacked. So, her response is to not show ANYTHING at all. She imitates an automaton because, finally, that’s less trouble that fighting the ‘authenticity’ battle. Same with her positions.  Doesn’t make any difference how she chooses them, how she occupies them.  She gets slammed.

This is not an easy task for her, nor for the pundits. It begins to look like she’s pandering, and she might be; but she’s also trying to find ground on which to stand that won’t be the subject of debate, ridicule, jeering.

Politics, these days, ain’t for sissies. She’s no sissy, and my hat is off to her, and to all the other people willing for the sake of ambition and service who are willing to undergo the grueling, unkind, vicious furor and attack that a campaign these days entails.

Romney’s Muslim-Free Cabinet

Reading both Mansoor Ijaz’s account of the exchange and Romney’s version, I’d say I believe Ijaz – because Ijaz has a detail that Romney misses. That detail is that Ijaz interrupted and clarified his question. My guess is that Romney was – surprise! – trying to calculate what his audience wanted to hear. Now we have evidence that he has given a similar answer before. Soren notes:

A combination of hypocrisy and implausible repeated non-denials is good material for a feeding frenzy.

You think?

The Price Of Permanent Occupation

One of the emerging memes of the past couple of weeks is a slow resignation to the fact that, whatever the American people want, Washington will not reduce troop levels in Iraq below 100,000 for the indefinite future. If casualties are down, some argue, Americans will buckle under and hang in there for the duration. For what? Some glimmer of normalcy somewhere down the road. No one likes to admit defeat or futility – especially after so much money, so many lives, so much human wreckage. But here’s one factor that needs to be placed into this equation as well: even the best-run occupation will have constant casualties. Yesterday, several Iraqi civilians were killed in incidents that are understandable if obviously awful. Vehicles that don’t stop as ordered; a sudden flare of violence; a fallible soldier under insane stress: mistakes happen, innocents die, resentments build. Sure: Arabs seem to be able to generate resentments regardless of cause. But occupying a Muslim country for ever is not, it seems to me, a way to reduce tensions between Islam and the West, to defang the appeal of Islamism, to erase the notion that the US in Iraq is now indistinguishable from Israel in the West Bank in the Arab mind. Maybe this is a price we have to pay to save face and avoid wider catastrophe. But it is a price. And, as time goes by, more and more people will pay it.