THURSDAY,  FEBRUARY 14,  2008

•   It's hardly a secret that this space has been tough on Barack Obama.  And why not?  He's a candidate for the most important job in the world, with the exception of the tech guy at the Apple Store. 

The presidency is not a gift.  It's not an honorary office.  The president isn't a "rock star."  He, or she, is a president.  We cannot dump a president by slipping a CD of his speeches back in the rack.  You would never know that from the way this race is being covered.

Two articles today superbly portray the Obama problem.  In The New York Sun, Kenneth Blackwell urges us to get beyond "Obama's Beauty."  The key quote: 

Some pundits are calling him the next John F. Kennedy. He's not. He's the next George McGovern. And it's time people learned the facts.

Because the truth is that Mr. Obama is the single most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate. He is more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, or Mrs. Clinton.

Never in my life have I seen a presidential frontrunner whose rhetoric is so far removed from his record. Walter Mondale promised to raise our taxes, and he lost. George McGovern promised military weakness, and he lost. Michael Dukakis promised a liberal domestic agenda, and he lost.

Yet Mr. Obama is promising all those things, and he's not behind in the polls. Why? Because the press has dealt with him as if he were in a beauty pageant.

One NBC reporter actually said that it was hard for him to remain impartial about Obama.  The reporter should have been removed immediately.  He was not.  Hey, it's just the presidency.

In The American Spectator, George Neumayr writes:

Senator Barack Obama rejects the "politics of the past" while borrowing from its phoniest chapters. His promised caravan toward a new Camelot, with Teddy Kennedy bringing up the rear, may generate feelings in Chris Matthews' leg and cause women to swoon, but over time it is likely to pall and bore.

Obama's speeches are like cotton candy, sweet but substanceless and dangerous to one's health if turned into a steady diet. Is he saying nothing? Unfortunately not. Glimpsed through the haze of his sophistical rhetoric is something, and it is tiresomely false, namely, the dogmatic assertion that "hope" and liberalism are synonymous.

And this:

Obama talks about moving beyond the "false promises" of the past, then delivers a handful of new ones, none of which appear any more promising than the claims of the Great Society. He talks about serving "one nation," then proposes programs that exclusively benefit the special interests of the left.

I'm glad someone noticed.  Obama talks grandly of unity, of transcending politics.  But, and I've asked it here before, how can the most left-leaning man in the Senate achieve unity?

Well, there is one way, and it's chilling:  Just shut down the opposition and pretend it doesn't exist.  And that process starts by cursing partisanship, portraying it as something evil.  Do you disagree with our crusade?  You're an old partisan, a practitioner of failed ideas.  You must be quiet, lest you hurt your country.

No, Mr. Obama, partisanship isn't evil.  It's the heart of a democracy.  In our 1944 election, at the height of World War II, Thomas E. Dewey got almost 47 percent of the vote against the consummate commander-in-chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  The country survived.  It fought.  It won.  To his enormous credit, Roosevelt didn't talk about "transcending partisanship."  He knew the election had to be contested on his record, and he contested it.

•   We go from emptiness to substance.  As we are running our political beauty contest, real adults are doing real things in the real world.  The great Michael Ledeen has the best analysis of the assassination of Hezbollah master terrorist Imad Mughniyah in Syria.  While reported in the American press, the event hasn't gotten nearly as much attention as it deserved, for Mughniyah was a terror impresario, a candidate for Hell's hall of fame.  Ledeen writes:

His bloody arms reached into South America, both in the creation of Hezbollah bases and in the murderous operations in Buenos Aires in the mid-nineties that led to his indictment by the Argentine Government. And I have no doubt that he was involved in setting up terror cells in the United States. Remember that he was both the operational chieftain of Hezbollah and a high-ranking officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force.

His death would be a major blow to the ability of the terror masters to wage war against us; while there are always evil people eager to kill us, it will not be easy to replace Mughniyah.

There will be a lot of speculation about his killers. Hezbollah has already accused the Israelis, which is what you’d expect them to say. But there are many others who hated Mughniyah, ranging from various Lebanese and Saudi groups who held him responsible for the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, to anti-Iranian and anti-Syrian groups, especially some of the Kurds, to our very own spooks and soldiers, who have long yearned for revenge against the man who organized the brutal murder of Robert Stethem, the suicide bombings against the U.S. Marines in Beirut, similar acts against U.S. diplomats and spooks at our Embassies in the same city, and of course Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the dreadful death-by-torture of our top spy in Beirut in the mid-1980s.

Read the whole thing for Michael Ledeen's views on who might have pulled off this critically important anti-terrorist act.

•   While we're spotlighting the work of Michael Ledeen, I urge you to return to the same address cited in the previous story.  Go down below Ledeen's comments on Mughniyah.  There you'll see two pieces, "Marine Valentine" and "Marines."  One is about the return of Marines, to Hawaii, from combat in Iraq.  The other is about a Marine commandant and his well-deserved Medal of Honor.  Both pieces are well worth reading, and will make your day.  On the return of the Marines, Ledeen writes:

It’s a scene that’s reenacted with some frequency in this country at this time, but it is not broadcast, and rarely reported. It’s quite a scene. And we owe these kids a big debt, which we are not eager to repay. Don’t you think that the G.I. Bill should guarantee four years of higher education to every returning vet? It doesn’t; it pays less than twenty thousand dollars a year for three years, if I have the numbers right. Maybe Senator McCain would like to make such repayment of our debt to our soldiers and marines part of his campaign?

Excellent thought.  Senator McCain, take note.

•   Remaining in the real world, and reminding us of why we need those great Marines, it appears that Iran (remember Iran?) has begun processing the kind of gas used in nuclear warheads.  The key quote:

Iran's new generation of advanced centrifuges have begun processing small quantities of the gas that can be used to make the fissile core of nuclear warheads, diplomats told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The diplomats emphasized that the centrifuges were working with only minute amounts of the uranium gas used as the feed stock for Iran's uranium enrichment program. And one of them said Teheran had set up only 10 of the machines - far too few to produce enriched uranium in the quantities needed for an industrial scale energy or a weapons program.

Still, the information revealed previously unknown details of the state of the Islamic Republic's experiments with its domestically developed IR-2 centrifuges, which can churn out enriched uranium at more than double the rate of the machines that now form the backbone of its nuclear project.

There are always attempts to play down the importance of these Iranian advances, but, once the advance occurs, it does not reverse itself.  Iran is moving forward.  Whether it will have the capacity to produce a warhead in one year or seven is almost beside the point.  It will have it, probably sooner than many expect, and that will change the Middle East, and perhaps the lands beyond.

But President Obama will reply with hope, and reject the politics of fear, and all will be okay. 

Pinky promise.

•   There's trouble in River City.  All right, make that Copenhagen.  In a gutsy act, Danish newspapers are reprinting those cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that caused all that bother a few years ago.  You know, bombs thrown, embassies torched - the kind of thing one does when one doesn't like a cartoon.  Why the reprint?  Here it is:

Leading Danish newspapers have reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a gesture of solidarity after police revealed a plot to kill the creator of the caricature that sparked deadly riots across the Muslim world.

Danish Muslims said Wednesday they would seek to avoid a repeat of the
violence two years ago - but with a rightwing Dutch lawmaker planning to air a movie that condemns Islam as fascist, Europe pondered the possibility of a new cycle of ethnic and religious turmoil.

"I just don't want go through this again," said Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim educational group in London. Shafiq said he had already written a protest letter to the Danish ambassador in London.

Well, you know, Mr. Shafiq, you don't have to go through it again.  You can teach your students about freedom of the press, about restraint, about tolerance.  It's a neat way to spend your time.

The point of the whole thing:

The papers said they wanted to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after Tuesday's arrest in western Denmark of three people accused of plotting to kill Westergaard (the cartoonist).

"We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to
unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper will always defend," said the Copenhagen-based Berlingske Tidende.

Now, in this country, if we can only move the press to get up the courage to ask Barack Obama a single tough question...  Anyone?

•   We conclude with exciting news from Boulder, Colorado.  No, no, they haven't solved the JonBenet Ramsey case.  But the city may move to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney.  After all, the attention of the entire world is on Boulder, and what its City Council does in this matter may affect the future of mankind.  Yes, yes, I know, it may seem a little late, and the administration only has 11 months left, and by the time Congress gets around to it...

Oh, would you stop these grown-up objections.  Don't you understand the importance of self-indulgence, of living the sixties dream?  One activist makes the case:

Liz Robinson, one of the organizers of the effort, said people hoping to see impeachment proceedings have given congressional Democrats -- who won a majority in the fall of 2006 -- plenty of time to act.

But since they haven't, she said, locally elected officials should take up the slack."Whether or not it's the city's business directly, like potholes, I feel this affects all of us," she said. "We're the ones who are paying the taxes to support this administration's depredations, especially the war."

Impeachment proceedings would be worth doing even if they only put the last few months of Bush's eight years in office at risk, Robinson said.

"We need to send a message that this all matters to us, whether it's last-minute or not," she said.

Of course you do.  We understand.  Oh, how about a new investigation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?  A lot of people think it was the Israel lobby.  Come on, Boulder, let's look into it.

And we'll be back later with the latest impeachment news.

Posted on February 14, 2008.