Still More About Bad Bets

Assuming this poll is correct the Democrats may well be heading for a disaster of their very own for trying to force a disastrous outcome in Iraq. Investor's Business Daily has the results of a poll they sponsored that shows the conventional wisdom the Dems seem to be trying to follow may be a phenomenally bad bet.

I have been saying ever since the election that the Democrats did NOT get a mandate to lose a war. They might really want to reconsider the path they have taken.

Thimpk Progress Smears Smears

Ian over at Hot Air has the must see video of the day, Brit Hume talking about John "Unindicted Co-Conspirator" Murtha. It is brutally honest and enormously entertaining. Ian also notes the hysterical outraged claims by the lefty site Thimpk Progress (and yes, I misspelled it intentionally) over the "smear" Hume made. Which of course shows the raging double standard of the left where Saint John of the Asshats must never be disparaged by the likes of Chimpy McBushliburton jackbooted thug types. Or something equally inane.

They have actually succeeded in smearing the meaning of the word smear.

Robots Hunt For Imaginary Bird

The search for the nonexistent Ivory Billed Woodpecker continues apace, now with robotic cameras!

Recent sightings have revived hope of the survival of the large and dramatically marked bird, with its characteristic white beak and red crest.

Now the search is on for proof — something scientists hope the robot video cameras can provide.

The cameras are part of a new project funded by the National Science Foundation to create automated observatories that can capture natural behaviour in remote settings.

"Our idea is that robots can be useful for advancing science," said University of California Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Goldberg and a colleague at Texas A&M University have joined forces with researchers at the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University to look for the bird in the Cache River Refuges of Arkansas, where a kayaker reported spotting it in 2004.

Recordings of what sounds like its distinctive hammering have also been made.

Before that, there had been no confirmed sightings of ivory-bills for half a century.

A few seconds of jerky video footage is the strongest evidence the bird is still alive, but some experts who have seen it say it could be showing a pileated woodpecker — a similar-looking bird that is fairly common.

The cameras have been at it for three months now. In that time they have not spotted the woodpecker. They have, however, caught some lovely shots of Elvis and Bigfoot doing the tango.

(Earlier posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Look, it would be lovely if this were true, but there are a lot of resources being wasted on what appears to be an agenda-driven wild goose - er, woodpecker - chase. The first reported sighting just happened to occur just when it would block a Corps of Engineers project. Nothing suspicious about that timing, is there?)

Forward Into The Past

Charles Schumer has flat-out promised that the Democrats fully intend to drag America into a defeat.

WASHINGTON - After Republicans blocked a Senate debate for a second time, Democrats said Saturday they'll drop efforts to pass a non-binding resolution opposing President Bush's troop buildup in Iraq and instead will offer a flurry of anti-war legislation "just like in the days of Vietnam."

The tough talk came a day after the House of Representatives passed its own anti-Iraq resolution and as the GOP used a procedural vote to stop the Senate from taking a position on the 21,500 troop increase.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would be "relentless."

"There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam," Schumer said. "The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he will have to change his strategy and the vast majority of our troops will be taken out of harm's way and come home."

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said: "We're going to move on to other things."

But with Democrats divided over whether to restrict funds for the Iraq war, and with the Senate unlikely to have the votes right now to buck President Bush, the immediate success of the Democrats' plan seems difficult. Reid also declined to say exactly what the strategy might include.

Decision '08 Says this:

The gloves are off, that’s clear…and the mask is falling off, too.  The ‘moderate’ Democrats who won the 2006 midterms are nowhere in sight.

This is not what the Democrats were elected to do and this will backfire on them. The question is, how much damage will they do to the United States in the process?

America’s War

Mark Steyn examines the war in Iraq and the political responses to it.

According to a report by the New York Sun's Eli Lake last month, Iran is supporting Shia insurgents in Iraq and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. In other words, it's on both sides in the so-called civil war. How can this be? After all, as the other wise old foreign-policy "realists" of the Iraq Study Group assured us only in December, Iran has "an interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq.''

Au contraire, the ayatollahs have concluded they have a very clear interest in fomenting chaos in Iraq. They're in favor of Sunni killing Shia, and Shia killing Sunni, and if some vacationing Basque terrorists wanted to blow up the Spanish Cultural Center in Mosul, they'd be in favor of that, too. The Iranians don't care who kills whom as long as every night when Americans turn on the evening news there's smoke over Baghdad. As I say in my book, if you happen to live in Ramadi or Basra, Iraq is about Iraq; if you live in Tehran, or Cairo, or Bei-jing, Moscow, Pyongyang or Brussels, Iraq is about America. American will. American purpose. American credibility.

There was a TV station somewhere — was it Thunder Bay, Ontario? — that used to show a continuous loop of a roaring fireplace all night, and thousands of viewers would supposedly sit in front of it for hours because it was such a reassuringly comforting scene. The networks could save themselves a lot of money by adopting the same approach: Run a continuous loop of a smoking building in Baghdad all night while thousands of congressmen and pundits and think-tankers and retired generals run around Washington shrieking that all is lost. America is way out of its league! A dimwitted tourist in a fearful land of strange people who don't watch "American Idol." Iraq is so culturally alien that not a single Sunni, Shia or Kurd has come forward claiming to be the father of Anna Nicole's baby!

The reporting of the war by the media is uniformly slanted so that literally nothing that happens is a good thing. As Steyn points out, when Mookie Sadr was reported to have briskly walked over the horizon into Iran, the New York Times called that a bad thing.

Steyn's point here is that the politicians in Washington are trying to play political games with Iraq. The media is helping with those games. The Democrats right now are doing everything in their power to inflict John Murtha's execrable "slow bleed" policy that will inevitably, regardless of how they try to dress the pig, lead to additional deaths of American Soldiers. All in hopes of making this war a political defeat for their opponents.

So "the Murtha plan" is to deny the president the possibility of victory while making sure Democrats don't have to share the blame for the defeat. But of course he's a great American! He's a patriot! He supports the troops! He doesn't support them in the mission, but he'd like them to continue failing at it for a couple more years. As John Kerry wondered during Vietnam, how do you ask a soldier to be the last man to die for a mistake? By nominally "fully funding" a war you don't believe in but "limiting his ability to use the money." Or as the endearingly honest anti-war group MoveCongress.org put it, in an e-mail preview of an exclusive interview with the wise old Murtha:

"Chairman Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president's foreign and national security policy."

But the war is not the Republican's war. It is America's war. And if we lose, it will be America's defeat. And all Americans, regardless of political affiliation, will pay the price for that defeat.

House Of Cards

Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, pens an op-ed in today's Opinion Journal that examines the non-binding bit of bad political theater that has been playing out in Washington. To say he's a bit hard on the Democrats is to vastly understate the case. In careful, measured tone, he applies a scalpel an dismembers the politics of the whole charade. But he also takes a hard look at the goals of the war and passes a harsh judgment. But not on the Republicans.

The Democratic opposition went through a similar process, but in the reverse. It is true that liberals are keenly aware of difference, and lovingly celebrate difference. That is what multiculturalism is about, and moving toward open borders too. But they do not like to see the virulence of diversity–the historical persistence of the enmity of one element of the crazy quilt for the other, even one seemingly quite akin to the other. The liberal appreciation of the hateful dimensions of tribal and clannish identity generally extended no further than the blood rituals of "The Sopranos." Now they are so much wiser, and sagely lecture everyone within earshot about the permanent hatreds between Sunni and Shia, although their House chairman of intelligence oversight had not the foggiest notion of who was in discord and what the discord was about. In any case, they counsel smugness, since none of these inter- and intra-sectarian hostilities will ever come to our shores.

Where, then, are we in the war? No one knows exactly what to do about it. Everybody knows that we are in trouble. Even those of us who are skeptical about the ideological inclinations of many Democrats cannot but dignify the national anxiety that they represent. The House has passed a nonbinding resolution supporting our troops already in Iraq and disapproving the dispatch of 20,000 more. The measure is, strategically speaking, pointless: The new troops are already on their way. The Senate will figure out how to make its own sense of the politically fraught perplexity. Now, both houses of Congress are perfectly entitled to debate anything of this magnitude. Indeed, they have a responsibility to do so. A war should not shut down free opinion, or–worse yet–informed opinion. So the attempt of the House minority leader, John Boehner, to scare them away from a serious debate with demagogic references to the American Revolution is unseemly. This is a weighty war, very weighty. The absence of a serious debate about its ends and its means would rightly earn the national legislature the contempt of all Americans.

But the formula that the House Democratic leadership fixed on was a charade. It allowed each of the 435 representatives five minutes at the podium, enough for them to posture for local television but not so much that anybody can say anything serious, let alone deep or even brave. And the resolution's text itself is rather cowardly. For, since it purports to be a declaration of support for American soldiers actually fighting in Iraq–whatever "support" actually means–why does it criticize the only help that can possibly enable the military in the war: more soldiers and more weapons? And, if the Democrats do not want the war to be continued, then they should bring forth legislation either cutting funds or setting a date for withdrawal, in the manner of George McGovern. There is no rationale for troops in terrible danger to be held hostage to the political expediency of nervous Democrats, who are not prepared to do what they really mean to do and to say what they really mean to say.

Peretz is no fan of the administration and not at all happy about the direction the war has taken. Yet he also is honest about pointing out that downside of a failure in Iraq to the nation and to liberalism in general. He is brutally honest about the empty showboating that the posturing politicians are indulging in right now. There is no courage involved in the theatrics, only smugness and opportunism.