Down The Slippery Slope

Even though the Democratic leadership has declared all-out war on the war in Iraq, they always have insisted that the war in Afghanistan was a "good" war. Even though they have played games with a funding bill that was not just for the Iraq war but for the "good" war as well, they have demanded we refocus on the "good" war.

Yeah, right.

When they won control of Congress in November, Democrats pressed their case to withdraw troops from Iraq and refocus on Afghanistan, but some are growing impatient with U.S. operations in Afghanistan as well.

A few congressional Democrats go so far as suggesting that the Pentagon should pull out of Afghanistan now, while others say that troop withdrawal will be addressed after the military is out of Iraq.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a senior defense authorizer, wants the U.S. out of Afghanistan immediately, calling operations there “futile” in trying to effect political change in a country with a tangled history. 

Most other Democrats want to focus on Afghanistan, with the goal of withdrawing the military down the road after the country is stabilized and any new Taliban resurgence quashed. 

With a few exceptions, congressional Democrats no longer show any hesitation about withdrawing the military from Iraq. But they are more circumspect about Afghanistan, saying that the Bush administration let the situation worsen by shifting attention onto a protracted conflict in Iraq.

“We should have never gone to Iraq, because we would have been out of Afghanistan [by now],” Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) said in a brief interview.

Murtha, the chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee and a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, said that by September, when he takes up the fiscal 2008 war supplemental funding, he would have a better sense of how to handle Afghanistan. 

Yet making the argument that the U.S. needs to get out of Iraq and stay in Afghanistan can be politically challenging. While Democrats regularly note that the war in Iraq has now gone on longer than World War II, the U.S. has been in Afghanistan longer than it has been in Iraq. And arguments that Iraqis need to take control of their own country can be applied to Afghanistan as well.

The Afghanistan effort enjoys much more support among the American public, and Democratic leaders have sought to burnish their homeland security credentials by presenting an unwavering backing of the war there.

They are out in the open now. It's full retreat as soon as they can arrange it. This is the trial balloon, make no mistake.

(Via AllahPundit)

New Alpine Troops

Alert citizens of Italy have given early warning about a new menace from the Animal Uprising™. Fresh alpine troops are being prepared for a winter offensive against Europe.

MILAN, Italy - Forest rangers in the northern Italian Alps have confirmed for the first time the existence of an albino mountain goat — and named him "Snowflake."

Rangers took photos of the albino capra ibex climbing with its mother Sunday at about 10,000 feet above the Les Laures valley in the northwestern Val d'Aosta region, said Christian Chioso, a regional wildlife official.

"This is the only one ever documented, the only one ever seen," Chioso said by telephone on Monday. He said albinism is rare in any species and has not been previously documented among the capra ibex, a type of wild mountain goat with large curved horns that lives in mountainous areas.

Chioso estimated the albino animal is about a year old.

This is like rats or roaches. If you see one, you have thousands! Come winter, there will be white clad goats butting their way across Italy.

Senatorial Suicide

Rasmussen Reports informs us that the immigration "reform" now back in front of the Senate will be tantamount to political suicide for any Senator up for reelection next year. Only 22% of the public supports it.

As the Senate prepares to resume debate the “comprehensive” immigration reform bill, the legislation continues to face broad public opposition. In fact, despite a massive White House effort, public opinion has barely moved since the public uproar stalled the bill just over two weeks ago.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 22% of American voters currently favor the legislation. That’s down a point from 23% a couple of weeks ago and down from 26% when the debate in the Senate began. Fifty percent (50%) oppose the Senate bill while 28% are not sure.

Among the public, there is a bi-partisan lack of enthusiasm for the Senate bill. It is supported by 22% of Republicans, 23% of Democrats, and 22% of those not affiliated with either major party. It is opposed by 52% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats, and 48% of unaffiliateds.

From an ideological perspective, the bill is opposed by 59% of conservatives, 54% of liberals, and 45% of political moderates. Among those for whom none of the traditional ideological labels apply, just 20% are opposed.

Support is found from 20% of conservatives, 32% of liberals, and 18% of moderates.

This is the best indication that the Senators who vote for this thing better be ready for serious repercussions at the ballot box. Voters are mad as heck about this. And a few folks on Capitol Hill might really want to get their resumes up to date if they pass this.

When The Circus Comes To Town

There are always clowns. But in this case, the clown lost. The judge who filed a $54 million lawsuit over a pair of pants not only lost, but he is getting hit with the legal fees for the people he sued. And he may lose his job as a judge over the ridiculous lawsuit.

In a verdict that surprised no one, except perhaps the plaintiff himself, a D.C. Superior Court judge denied Roy Pearson the big payday he claimed was his due.

Delivering her decision in writing, Judge Judith Bartnoff wrote 23 pages dissecting and dismissing Pearson's claim that he was defrauded by the owners of Custom Cleaners and their "Satisfaction Guaranteed" sign.

"A reasonable consumer would not interpret 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' to mean that a merchant is required to satisfy a customer's unreasonable demands or to accede to demands that the merchant has reasonable grounds to dispute," the ruling said. " . . . The plaintiff is not entitled to any relief whatsoever."

It was a pointed rebuke of Pearson's claim, and came with an order to pay the cleaners' court costs. But even bigger troubles may loom for Pearson.

Financially, he could soon be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees incurred by the owners of Customer Cleaners. Attorneys for the Chungs have said they will seek such payments, as well as sanctions against Pearson for bringing the lawsuit. Bartnoff said in her ruling that she would decide those issues after both sides have filed their motions, counter-motions and legal briefs.

Professionally, Pearson could find himself out of his $96,000-a-year job as an administrative law judge for the District government.

All that is certain right now is that he won't be getting the multi-million dollar payout he demanded when he filed suit in 2005 against Soo Chung and her husband, the owners of Custom Cleaners.Originally, Pearson had asked for $65 million, but by the time the case went to trial two weeks ago, Pearson had lowered his demand to $54 million.

Frankly, I hope he does lose his job. This guy is  disgrace to the legal profession. Even trial lawyers are seriously angry with this guy according to reports. He's giving an already loathed profession an even worse name - and that really takes some doing.

Paving The Road

The old saying 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' has been around for a long time. Nobody appears to be quite sure where is came from, however. (Many old sources put it as 'hell is paved with good intentions'.) Regardless, it captures a real truth. Bad things can and do happen even when people don't intend anything but good come from their actions. Joshua Muravchik take up that very topic today in the Opinion Journal.

Several conflicts of various intensities are raging in the Middle East. But a bigger war, involving more states–Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the United States and others–is growing more likely every day, beckoned by the sense that America and Israel are in retreat and that radical Islam is ascending.

Consider the pell-mell events of recent weeks. Iran imprisons four Americans on absurd charges only weeks after seizing 15 British sailors on the high seas. Iran's Revolutionary Guard is caught delivering weapons to the Taliban and explosives to Iraqi terrorists. A car bomb in Lebanon is used to assassinate parliament member Walid Eido, killing nine others and wounding 11 more.

At the same time, Fatah al-Islam, a shady group linked to Syria, launches an attack on the Lebanese army from within a Palestinian refugee area, beheading several soldiers. Tehran trumpets further progress on nuclear enrichment as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats his call for annihilating Israel, crowing that "the countdown to the destruction of this regime has begun." Hamas seizes control militarily in Gaza. Katyusha rockets are launched from Lebanon into northern Israel for the first time since the end of last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war.

Two important inferences can be distilled from this list. One is that the Tehran regime takes its slogan, "death to America," quite seriously, even if we do not. It is arming the Taliban, with which it was at sword's point when the Taliban were in power. It seems to be supplying explosives not only to Shiite, but also Sunni terrorists in Iraq. It reportedly is sheltering high-level al Qaeda figures despite the Sunni-Shiite divide. All of these surprising actions are for the sake of bleeding the U.S. However hateful this behavior may be to us, it has a certain strategic logic: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."………

……The apparent meaning of all of this pointless provocation and bullying is that the axis of radicals–Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah–is feeling its oats. In part its aim is to intimidate the rest of us, in part it is merely enjoying flexing its muscles. It believes that its side has defeated America in Iraq, and Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. Mr. Ahmadinejad recently claimed that the West has already begun to "surrender," and he gloated that " final victory . . . is near." It is this bravado that bodes war.

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. Often democracies have fed such beliefs by their own flaccid behavior. Hitler's contempt for America, stoked by the policy of appeasement, is a familiar story. But there are many others. North Korea invaded South Korea after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Korea lay beyond our "defense perimeter." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after our ambassador assured him that America does not intervene in quarrels among Arabs. Imperial Germany launched World War I, encouraged by Great Britain's open reluctance to get involved. Nasser brought on the 1967 Six Day War, thinking that he could extort some concessions from Israel by rattling his sword.

Read the whole thing. I have said for a long time that the current actions (or inactions) of the West are making a general war more, not less, likely in the Middle East. And yet the good intentions continue to be laid out, paving more and more of the superhighway. The media is locked in their mutually beneficial spiral of death with the terrorists and the extremists and are exacerbating the problem even further. The political pandering to the left fringe is sending exactly the wrong message to the extremists in Tehran. As Muravchik puts in in his closing sentence: "In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war."

Scare Tactics

Emily Yoffe, writing in today's Washington Post, takes a look at the scare tactics employed by Al "Gorezilla" Gore and his sycophant true believers from the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming™ and sees the seeds of the movement's own destruction in their campaign to terrorize children.  

Usually we want to protect our children from awful events, adjusting the message to suit their age. Certainly we tried to do that after Sept. 11. But an essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change. Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one.

And a recent New York Times profile of Gore tells that we are to be flooded with "An Inconvenient Truth." It is going to be shown in schools; book versions for children and young adults and a children's television show are planned. The global Live Earth concerts scheduled for July 7 are expected to raise millions, going to a three-year public relations effort, headed by Gore, to deluge us with bad news.

All this is not to say that it's not getting warmer and that curbing our profligate environmental ways is not a commendable and necessary goal. But perhaps this movement is sowing the seeds of its own destruction — even as it believes the human species has sown its own. There must be a limit to how many calamitous films, books and television shows we, and our children, can absorb.

It doesn't seem sustainable to expect people to remain terrified by such a disinterested, often benign — it was so nice eating out on the patio! — and even unpredictable enemy. (I understand we're the enemy, but the executioner is the weather.) Recall that the experts told us last year would be a record-setting hurricane season, but the series of Katrinas never materialized.

Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: "NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer." But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I'm oddly reassured. We've seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.

Yoffe points out the irony (we'd call it hypocrisy) of Al Gore denouncing the politics of fear in his new book while using the politics of fear to promote his own agenda. This is nothing new for the Gores of the world, however. Gore preaches conservation while using obscene amounts of energy himself. He preaches respect for the earth while strip mining it.

A Soldier Replies

Pete Hegseth, a first lieutenant in the Army National Guard and an Iraq war veteran writes a reply to the recent op-ed by Senator Carl Levin in the Washington Post.

As an Iraq war veteran who participated in combat operations and political reconciliation efforts, I take issue with some of the arguments repeatedly being made on Capitol Hill. Most recently I was bothered by statements from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who cited three common antiwar arguments in his June 21 op-ed, " Lincoln's Example for Iraq," all of which run counter to realities on the ground in Iraq.

· A deadline for withdrawal is an incentive for Iraqi political compromise. Levin thinks we ought to pressure Iraq's government with a warning tantamount to saying: "You better fix the situation before we leave and your country descends into chaos." He should consider the more likely result: an American exit date crushing any incentive for Iraqi leaders to cooperate and instead prompting rival factions to position themselves to capitalize on the looming power void.

My experience in Iraq bore this out. Only after my unit established a meaningful relationship with the president of the Samarra city council — built on tangible security improvements and a commitment to cooperation — did political progress occur. Our relationship fostered unforeseen political opportunities and encouraged leaders, even ones from rival tribes, to side with American and Iraqi forces against local insurgents and foreign fighters.

Read the rest. He's trying to point out a lot of the same arguments that a lot of people have made, myself included. Maybe coming from a soldier and a war veteran will make someone like Levin listen. But I doubt it. Many of the people cheerfully pandering to the left fringe of the Democratic party voted for the war when it was politically popular. Hence they approved the appointment of general David Petraeus with a new mission and promptly tried to pull the rug out from under him. They think they can avoid political consequences if they blame everything on Bush. But the judgment of history will be harsh, the damage to this country very real. The bloodbath that will ensue if we just pull out doesn't even register with the posturing politicians. Levin can try to make all the historical analogies he likes, but he isn't apparently smart enough to compare himself to the proper historical figure in the debate. He's playing the role of McClellan, not Lincoln. His party platform in 1864 called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a negotiated settlement with enemies. Sound familiar?*

* McClellan actually repudiated his party platform, incidentally. But that is the platform the Democrats campaigned on.