Politics Blog

Claudia Rossett does a great job in the Wall Street Journal, comparing the nations of the world as organized under the UN to a family. Unfortunately,the family resembles the Sopranos.

There’s no question that for Iraq there are rough times ahead, and much yet hangs in balance. Recovering from decades of hideous abuse takes time, as any family counselor can tell you. But for all Iraq’s troubles, at some point in its absence these past 15 months from Mr. Annan’s household, Iraqis acquired a free press, a pluralistic government, and the first hope in generations of freedom. If that is what leaving the U.N. fold for 15 months can do for a nation, maybe more of Mr. Annan’s U.N. family should go AWOL.

— Lorie Byrd

If you didn’t see James Taranto’s Best of the Web yesterday, read it now. The bizarre behavior of Jimmy Carter strikes me as just plain pathetic. Someone needs to tell the man that bashing Bush might make him more popular among today’s “wild-eyed” Democrat crazies, but it will do nothing to revise what will have to be recorded as one of the most miserable failures in U.S. Presidential history.

— Lorie Byrd

So, I’m reading, with glee, the web report of my beloved Yankees’ latest demolition of the hated Boston Red Sox.

But then I stopped.

Stopped dead … in … my … tracks.

The Associated Press’ story on the game recounted the highlights and the lowlights. And it also made reference to the fact that Vice President Dick Cheney was in attendance.

Okay, fair enough. What’s the problem, Javitz?

Um, after referencing the fact that Cheney sat with New York Gov. George Pataki and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the AP writer penned the following:

“Cheney was booed when he was shown on the right-field videoboard during the seventh-inning stretch.”

THEY’VE LITERALLY GONE IN-FREAKIN’-SANE!!!!!!!!!!!!

— Jayson

There are only 18 weeks left to the presidential election. If you want to make a difference in the election results, you still can.

Today is Wictory Wednesday. Every Wednesday, I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush 2004 campaign.

If you’ve already donated and volunteered for the Bush campaign, then talk to your friends and enlist them in this battle for America’s very soul.

If you’re a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesdays simply by putting up a post like this one every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign. And do e-mail me at wictory@blogsforbush.com so that I can add you to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which will be part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

— PoliPundit

Some of the left’s egregious lies about America’s past relationship with Iraq are just crying out to be debunked. For instance, take the commonly-mentioned Rumsfeld visit to Iraq:

Anonymous42321: If recall correclty, Saddam was a friend of the US during Regan’s administrtion and was paid a number of visits by Rumsfeld!

The left specializes in compound lies. The implication here is that the Rumsfeld visit was somehow an extraordinary event. The reality is that that visit (with Rumsfeld in his capacity as a private citizen drafted as an envoy) was preparatory to the US resuming full diplomatic relations with Iraq, long after just about every UN member had recognized the government (and the reality of Baath Party supremacy) in Iraq, including China, the Soviet Union and France, all of which scrambled to recognize (and arm) the new dictatorship pretty much as soon as it took power in the early 1970’s. The US, by contrast, held out on recognition until the mid-80’s, resuming diplomatic ties (and re-establishing an embassy in Iraq) only when it appeared that Iran was on the verge of overwhelming Saddam’s armies.

Even if the US were a friend of Saddam (which is not the case), as the anti-American left and America’s enemies insist, let me quote Lord Palmerston’s adage: Britain has no permanent friends, only permanent interests. If I recall correctly, Stalin was a friend of the US during Roosevelt’s administration and was paid a number of visits by Hull, the actual Secretary of State, rather than a semi-official envoy like Rumsfeld*. (And this is after Stalin had killed millions of Russians in recurrent purges, and more importantly, made a side deal to divide up Poland with the Nazis via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, not to mention hosted and supplied the Nazi military during the interwar years, when Germany was rearming, out of sight of prying Western eyes). Actually, the US was much more of a friend to Stalin than it was a friend of Saddam’s. The US sent tens of billions of dollars in food and material aid to the Soviets, back when billions of dollars actually meant something.

And the Soviets repaid this friendship by spending hundreds of billions of dollars to finance, train and supply Communist insurgencies around the world and preventing free elections in liberated Eastern Europe, just as Saddam repaid American friendship by invading Kuwait. It just goes to show that ingratitude runs among both Russians and Arabs. Of course, Saddam’s greatest friends were the Soviets, the French and the Chinese, as evidenced by the fact that most of his armory came from these three countries - he had no American weapons systems at all, not even the M-16.

* The reason private officials are drafted as envoys prior to the restoration of full diplomatic ties (and the reopening of the American embassy) is not to make secret deals, but to allow for a graceful retreat if the conditions for the resumption of ties are not met.

– Zhang Fei

Howard Kurtz uses some of the best blogger comments about Fahrenheit 9/11 to put together a pretty interesting review of the movie.

— Lorie Byrd

This commentary by Cheryl Rhoads in the Washington Times is tougher on the Reagan children than I ever dreamed of being. I will have to admit that most of the things she writes are things I have at least thought to myself.

The baby of the Reagan family apparently can’t stomach folks who wear their religion on their sleeve, so he immaturely chose his father’s funeral service to make his contempt known.

While wearing his own smugness on his sleeve, young Ron preached to us all that though his father believed God had a plan for him, his dad was certainly not like other politicians regarding religion. Ron assured us that “there is a difference!” That was the moment when I recalled Bonnie Hunt’s line about “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Yet, everyone knew that Ron Reagan didn’t mean Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. No, it was clearly a slam at President Bush, even though he had been most gracious in his own remarks to young Ron and his family, earlier that day. So, Ron’s timing was both ungracious and unnecessary to say the least. I felt like his dad must have felt at that last 1980 campaign stop when soon-to-be President Reagan snapped at a persistent heckler” OH SHUT UP!”

— Lorie Byrd

The mainstream media has gone out of its way to misrepresent the findings of the 9/11 commission regarding the link between Saddam and al Queda, and has been taken to task for it by the Vice President and many others, even causing the NYT to offer regrets over their choice of headline to describe the findings. It appears that Tom Brokaw was not told that the public was onto their ploy. He is continuing to use it, here with the new Iraqi leader, Allawi (link via Betsy’s Page). At least the MSNBC website gets the headline right.

— Lorie Byrd

Here’s one zinger:

“This is typical of small-minded individuals who have to create controversy.”

And here’s another:

“They are trying to find scapegoats for their incompetency.”

Okay, team, pray tell, who is the speaker and about whom are they speaking?

Tom Daschle and Bill Frist?

No.

Al Gore and George Bush??

Nope.

Robert Torricelli and federal investigators???

Um, no. At least not that I’m aware.

Bill Clinton and Ken Starr and his team of prosecutors????

Well, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

Actually, it was the Democratic Mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, speaking about the Junior Senator from Tax-a-chu-setts, John Forbes (”I don’t cross picket lines”) Kerry!

Hat tip: Hedgehog Report (davidwissing.com).

— Jayson

The title of this post is what I plan to be saying on Friday when the latest jobs report is released, as long as expectations of most economists, as reported by Reuters, are realized. The Nancy I am referring to is Pelosi. Her remarks following the record economic growth at the end of last year was to ask, “Where are the jobs, Mr. President”.

A variation of the following from the Reuters story would make for a great bumper sticker:

The shift in political rhetoric from the “jobless recovery” lament of the Democrats to “nearly a million jobs in 100 days” of the Bush administration appears to have reached consumers, whose confidence levels hit the highest level in two years in June, according to a Conference Board report this week.

Is Bush’s timing great, or what?

— Lorie Byrd