The irony of the day award belongs to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Congressional Democrats who refuse to meet with President Bush to discuss the Iraq War funding bill. The irony lies in the fact that the Democrats have thus far refused to present President Bush with a “clean bill” that does not set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Iraq, while at the same time the heads of state in Iraq and Jordan are urging the U.S. not to abandon Iraq prematurely or set timetables for withdrawal. Apparently the Democrats' "alternative foreign policy" mandates that traveling to and counseling with Syria and Iran (terror sponsors extraordinaire) is good, but listening to Jordan (an ally) and Iraq (democratically elected Prime Minister and ally) is bad.
President Bush is often vilified by the left for his “unilateral” decision to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, and for ignoring French and German leaders who opposed military action in Iraq. This “cowboy diplomacy,” the left claims, hurt America’s image among Europeans and, to use a Kerry-ism, made America “an international pariah.” In an effort to address this criticism of his political personality, President Bush has frequently engaged Iraqi leaders and solicited their opinions as well as those of regional heads of state (except for Syria and Iran, who are waging war on the U.S. within Iraq). In these open discussions with world leaders, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has a much better view of what is occurring in his country than Democratic Congressmen, has advised President Bush since last October not to set timetables for withdrawal.
The King of Jordan, Abdullah II, echoed this sentiment, warning America that early withdrawal from Iraq and setting timetables “without preparing the necessary conditions that would ensure a strong central government able to run the affairs of the state and an Iraqi force able to ensure security and stability, may only worsen the problem and contribute to increasing violence and conflict among Iraqis.”
Prime Minister al-Maliki, clearly frustrated by the timetable issue, stated that a timetable was not necessary because his government “is working as fast as we can.” The impatience for Iraqi progress displayed by the Democratic Congress has been shameful. In reality, the Democrats are attempting to set a timetable for a sovereign foreign democracy that we have committed to preserving until its government can fully defend itself to achieve self-reliance.
The timetable issue is a prime example of President Bush being “darned if he does and darned if he doesn’t” when it comes to counseling with world leaders. When he counseled too little with Europe before Operation Iraqi Freedom, he was roundly criticized as a “cowboy.” When he counsels now with Middle Eastern leaders who oppose a timetable, Harry Reid and Congressional Democrats refuse to meet with him unless he accepts their imposed timetable regardless of the fact that Iraqi and Jordanian leaders advise against it.
As Americans, our commitment to defending democracies should be open-ended. It has been with Israel, another Middle Eastern democracy, so why are the Democrats so eager to shorten or completely end our commitment to Iraq? Is it because it is a Muslim democracy and Democrats do not believe Muslims capable of living within a democratic society? If it is not the soft bigotry of low expectations, what fuels the maniacal timetable frenzy? We committed to defending European democracies imperiled by Nazi fascists in WWII, but for some reason Democrats refuse to commit to defending a Muslim democracy from Islamic Fascists sworn to quench the flame of freedom in the Middle East.
Imagine if after Hurricane Katrina a foreign nation provided thousands of men and heavy machinery to rebuild the city along with New Orleans residents, but after a few years the foreign nation’s leaders decided that since the local residents were not rebuilding fast enough, the reconstruction was no longer worthwhile and imposed a timetable on the storm ravaged citizens of New Orleans or help would be withdrawn because of the high violent crime rate. What was once a compassionate and generous offer of mutual assistance would have become the stick in a carrot and stick approach to diplomacy. Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi have been holding that proverbial stick over free Iraqis for selfish personal political motives.
The mixed messages sent by Democrats on this issue would confuse any president. Should he listen to the counsel of world leaders or not? The President is right to reject any attempt to include a timetable for withdrawal in the war funding bill. Perhaps if Speaker “For Assad’s House” Pelosi visits the Middle East again, she should take Senator Reid along and together they could look Prime Minister al-Maliki in the eye and tell him they just do not believe Iraqis will ever be capable of sustaining a democracy and are thus not worth defending. Then they could jet to Amman and explain to King Abdullah II that they know better than he does and he is wrong about timetables and their influence on a war being waged across his border.
The left claims that President Bush is arrogant, but the Democrats’ efforts to micromanage the war, impatiently criticize Iraq’s courageous and fledgling government, and conduct their own foreign policy have set a new standard of arrogance.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
CNN: Bitter Dems Target Electoral College
On Monday, a reader submitted a comment on my post “Electoral College in Crosshairs of 39 States,” in which the reader disagreed with my assertion that the impetus behind the current push to abolish the Electoral College was President Bush’s controversial victory over Al Gore despite Gore’s winning the popular vote. I wrote that liberal bitterness over that incident was driving the current movement.
Last night, CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider published an article on this issue, and although writing for a liberal-biased network, he acknowledged that Democrats are championing the Electoral College’s demise and recognized that while the movement did not begin with the 2000 election, that event created a sense of urgency that generated action. He also supported the conclusion that the current movement as described in my Monday post is in fact a legislative method to avoid amending the U.S. Constitution. Schneider wrote:
While there may be a need to engage in national discussion and debate over this issue of a national popular vote, that debate should occur BEFORE states act to circumvent the Constitution because “their man” did not win in 2000. The debate should focus on the merits of the Electoral College and if the support for a national popular vote is as broad as its proponents claim, then advocates should initiate the Constitutional amendment process.
The fact that they are quietly passing state legislative bills to avoid amending the Constitution should be a warning flag that the anti-Electoral College movement is pushing for something not explicitly approved of by a majority of Americans. If it were popular and much needed, a Constitutional amendment would pass smoothly. Advocates are avoiding that process because most Americans do not want to abandon a system established by the Founding Fathers at the request of smaller states to make sure their interests were not completely negated by the largest population centers.
The arguments that a national popular vote would improve campaigns because candidates would be forced to spend more time in “safe” cities and states, are specious at best. The idea of Democrat candidates campaigning hard in liberal Philadelphia to increase their margins of victory to offset losses in the popular vote elsewhere, is as ludicrous as the old “margin of victory” formula used by the BCS in college football. Teams like Florida State would post 77-0 victories over small patsies offering no competition because it was safe, and then BCS poll voters would be impressed by the margin of victory and boost a team’s rankings. A national popular vote would create a BCS system for electing U.S. presidents, a system in which 6-7 large metropolitan areas would determine a winner (just like the self-proclaimed 6 “major” college football conferences dictate participation in the BCS), and smaller states and cities would have little to no influence on national policies that directly affect them (just like the “mid-major” conferences have no opportunity to play in the BCS championship game).
Fortunately for America, the Founder’s wisdom foresaw the need to protect rural and suburban communities from being swallowed by the political domination of a few large cities concentrated in certain regions. The Electoral College assures that Philadelphians, who through no fault of their own know nothing about the needs of ranchers in the west or farmers in the Midwest, are not selecting our president simply because they outnumber the residents in less densely populated areas. A national popular vote would concentrate power too narrowly, and like the BCS, once power is obtained, it is stingily, if at all, shared.
Despite token BCS appearances by the University of Utah and Boise State (both resounding victories for the "mid-major"), the current BCS system still assures that no team outside of the 6 self-proclaimed "major" conferences will ever receive enough votes to play in the BCS "Championship" Game. It is not difficult to predict that America's 6-7 largest cities would operate in a similar fashion, choosing election participants and eventual winners with no regard to the needs or preferences of "mid-major" states and regions. We can do better than a BCS or American Idol popularity contest. The stakes are too high for such sophomoric and cavalier selection processes.
If you missed Monday’s post on this topic and the reader comments, I encourage you to take the time to examine the issue and make your voice heard by your local legislators. With 39 states debating bills similar to Maryland’s, chances are high that your legislators may be pondering an end run around the Constitution. We have a Constitutional amendment process for a reason. I urge readers to make your local representatives adhere to it.
Last night, CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider published an article on this issue, and although writing for a liberal-biased network, he acknowledged that Democrats are championing the Electoral College’s demise and recognized that while the movement did not begin with the 2000 election, that event created a sense of urgency that generated action. He also supported the conclusion that the current movement as described in my Monday post is in fact a legislative method to avoid amending the U.S. Constitution. Schneider wrote:
Those states would agree to appoint presidential electors who would vote for the winner of the national popular vote, no matter who wins the vote in each state. It would be a way to turn presidential elections into a nationwide popular vote without having to amend the Constitution. . . .
The problem is what happened in 2000. George W. Bush got elected by winning the Electoral College, even though Al Gore got more votes. That's happened four times in the country's history.(Watch Schneider talk about the Maryland law )
In our current system, the president is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the people. The number of electoral votes each state receives depends on its population and representatives are chosen to vote on behalf of the people in the state. To win, a candidate has to win 270 electoral votes, which is a majority. If neither candidate gets that, Congress determines who wins. A few times, the American people's choice for president hasn't actually moved into the White House.
It's mostly Democrats who are behind this move. They're still angry over how Bush got elected, even though in 2004, a shift of about 60 thousand votes in Ohio would have elected John Kerry despite Bush's popular vote margin of over three million.
While there may be a need to engage in national discussion and debate over this issue of a national popular vote, that debate should occur BEFORE states act to circumvent the Constitution because “their man” did not win in 2000. The debate should focus on the merits of the Electoral College and if the support for a national popular vote is as broad as its proponents claim, then advocates should initiate the Constitutional amendment process.
The fact that they are quietly passing state legislative bills to avoid amending the Constitution should be a warning flag that the anti-Electoral College movement is pushing for something not explicitly approved of by a majority of Americans. If it were popular and much needed, a Constitutional amendment would pass smoothly. Advocates are avoiding that process because most Americans do not want to abandon a system established by the Founding Fathers at the request of smaller states to make sure their interests were not completely negated by the largest population centers.
The arguments that a national popular vote would improve campaigns because candidates would be forced to spend more time in “safe” cities and states, are specious at best. The idea of Democrat candidates campaigning hard in liberal Philadelphia to increase their margins of victory to offset losses in the popular vote elsewhere, is as ludicrous as the old “margin of victory” formula used by the BCS in college football. Teams like Florida State would post 77-0 victories over small patsies offering no competition because it was safe, and then BCS poll voters would be impressed by the margin of victory and boost a team’s rankings. A national popular vote would create a BCS system for electing U.S. presidents, a system in which 6-7 large metropolitan areas would determine a winner (just like the self-proclaimed 6 “major” college football conferences dictate participation in the BCS), and smaller states and cities would have little to no influence on national policies that directly affect them (just like the “mid-major” conferences have no opportunity to play in the BCS championship game).
Fortunately for America, the Founder’s wisdom foresaw the need to protect rural and suburban communities from being swallowed by the political domination of a few large cities concentrated in certain regions. The Electoral College assures that Philadelphians, who through no fault of their own know nothing about the needs of ranchers in the west or farmers in the Midwest, are not selecting our president simply because they outnumber the residents in less densely populated areas. A national popular vote would concentrate power too narrowly, and like the BCS, once power is obtained, it is stingily, if at all, shared.
Despite token BCS appearances by the University of Utah and Boise State (both resounding victories for the "mid-major"), the current BCS system still assures that no team outside of the 6 self-proclaimed "major" conferences will ever receive enough votes to play in the BCS "Championship" Game. It is not difficult to predict that America's 6-7 largest cities would operate in a similar fashion, choosing election participants and eventual winners with no regard to the needs or preferences of "mid-major" states and regions. We can do better than a BCS or American Idol popularity contest. The stakes are too high for such sophomoric and cavalier selection processes.
If you missed Monday’s post on this topic and the reader comments, I encourage you to take the time to examine the issue and make your voice heard by your local legislators. With 39 states debating bills similar to Maryland’s, chances are high that your legislators may be pondering an end run around the Constitution. We have a Constitutional amendment process for a reason. I urge readers to make your local representatives adhere to it.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
From War to Warming: Senators Seek to Divert Attention
One of the left’s sharpest criticisms of President Bush’s handling of the War on Terror has been the argument that after routing the Taliban in Afghanistan, he turned his focus away from Bin Laden and al Qaeda in that region in favor of waging war on Saddam Hussein. The needless war in Iraq, liberals and Richard Clarke claim, shifted resources and priorities away from pursuing Bin Laden and the Taliban further, and this stretched our military too thin to effectively achieve its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Additionally, the 9/11 Commission determined that our intelligence agencies possessed thousands of seized terrorism related Arabic documents yet to be translated and analyzed due to inadequate budgets and staffing. The burdens of a War on Terror, the President’s critics claim, are too heavy for our military and intelligence agencies to bear.
Now global warming hysteria has moved members of Congress to propose a bill that would tie a millstone to the neck of our military and intelligence agencies by diverting their attention further from the War on Terror and sink them in a quagmire of studies, strategic planning, and war games to prepare for, drum roll please: global warming. That’s right, a normal cyclical global weather pattern is in line for being awarded status as a “national defense issue,” if a bill cosponsored by Sen. Chuck (Cut and Run) Hagel, R-NE, and Sen. Dick (our troops in Guantanamo act like Nazis) Durbin, D-IL, passes in Congress. The Boston Globe reported that the bill would order the National Intelligence Director to conduct a “National Intelligence Estimate” on global warming, and would likewise order the Pentagon to engage in war games exploring possible national security scenarios that could allegedly result from extreme weather.
Apparently some members of Congress, with the urging of the National Academy of Sciences, have become so spooked by wildly exaggerated films such as “The Day After Tomorrow” and “An Inconvenient Truth,” that they determined global warming poses a danger to national security so grave that it warrants their recommending that the military divert its attention away from the War on Terror to focus on hurricanes and climate change. I find it ironic that the President’s critics feel that diverting military and intelligence attention from the War on Terror is acceptable for global warming, but it was not acceptable in the case of deposing a dictator who had used chemical weapons on his own people and failed to comply with 14 UN resolutions demanding WMD inspections.
When I go to sleep at night, I am far more worried about a rogue nation in possession of WMDs than I am of a cyclical and temporary melting of polar ice fields. Severe weather was such a threat to national defense in 2006 that we had 0 (none, zero) hurricanes make landfall in the U.S.
The motive behind the bill is more insidious. The White House has apparently not embraced the questionable science behind the global warming frenzy, and this has frustrated those who have staked their professional reputations on the issue. Consider this excerpt from the Boston Globe’s coverage of the proposed bill:
Will this be the new trend, to declare every pet issue a “national defense” issue because the White House is more likely to read and take action on military and intelligence reports than climate change “science?” Like the boy who cried wolf’s exaggerated warnings, the more causes that are given national defense status, the more difficult it will become to properly assign highest priority to those that pose the greatest immediate threat. Worse, diverting resources from military and intelligence operations to alleged global warming while we are fighting a real War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom, is a shoddy approach to national defense that reeks of political opportunism.
Senators Hagel and Durbin should cut out some of that shameful pork attached to the armed service appropriation bill drafts and divert it to hire more translators and intelligence staff to sift through the mountain of documents seized in Afghanistan and Iraq instead of demanding national intelligence estimates on global warming. We need better intelligence on Iran more than we need intelligence estimates on severe weather. We can assert far more control over one than the other.
Now global warming hysteria has moved members of Congress to propose a bill that would tie a millstone to the neck of our military and intelligence agencies by diverting their attention further from the War on Terror and sink them in a quagmire of studies, strategic planning, and war games to prepare for, drum roll please: global warming. That’s right, a normal cyclical global weather pattern is in line for being awarded status as a “national defense issue,” if a bill cosponsored by Sen. Chuck (Cut and Run) Hagel, R-NE, and Sen. Dick (our troops in Guantanamo act like Nazis) Durbin, D-IL, passes in Congress. The Boston Globe reported that the bill would order the National Intelligence Director to conduct a “National Intelligence Estimate” on global warming, and would likewise order the Pentagon to engage in war games exploring possible national security scenarios that could allegedly result from extreme weather.
Apparently some members of Congress, with the urging of the National Academy of Sciences, have become so spooked by wildly exaggerated films such as “The Day After Tomorrow” and “An Inconvenient Truth,” that they determined global warming poses a danger to national security so grave that it warrants their recommending that the military divert its attention away from the War on Terror to focus on hurricanes and climate change. I find it ironic that the President’s critics feel that diverting military and intelligence attention from the War on Terror is acceptable for global warming, but it was not acceptable in the case of deposing a dictator who had used chemical weapons on his own people and failed to comply with 14 UN resolutions demanding WMD inspections.
When I go to sleep at night, I am far more worried about a rogue nation in possession of WMDs than I am of a cyclical and temporary melting of polar ice fields. Severe weather was such a threat to national defense in 2006 that we had 0 (none, zero) hurricanes make landfall in the U.S.
The motive behind the bill is more insidious. The White House has apparently not embraced the questionable science behind the global warming frenzy, and this has frustrated those who have staked their professional reputations on the issue. Consider this excerpt from the Boston Globe’s coverage of the proposed bill:
"If you get the intelligence community to apply some of its analytic capabilities to this issue, it could be compelling to whoever is sitting in the White House," said Anne Harrington , director of the committee on international security at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. "If the White House does not absorb the independent scientific expertise, then maybe something from the intelligence community might have more weight."
Will this be the new trend, to declare every pet issue a “national defense” issue because the White House is more likely to read and take action on military and intelligence reports than climate change “science?” Like the boy who cried wolf’s exaggerated warnings, the more causes that are given national defense status, the more difficult it will become to properly assign highest priority to those that pose the greatest immediate threat. Worse, diverting resources from military and intelligence operations to alleged global warming while we are fighting a real War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom, is a shoddy approach to national defense that reeks of political opportunism.
Senators Hagel and Durbin should cut out some of that shameful pork attached to the armed service appropriation bill drafts and divert it to hire more translators and intelligence staff to sift through the mountain of documents seized in Afghanistan and Iraq instead of demanding national intelligence estimates on global warming. We need better intelligence on Iran more than we need intelligence estimates on severe weather. We can assert far more control over one than the other.
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