Probably the closest thing the US Army has experienced prior to this in its history occurred in July 1867 when Captain Thomas Custer, acting under orders from his brother, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, tracked down three deserters, wounding two and killing one. Where Lieutenant William Calley and Captain John Compton participated in mass murders (347 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai on March 16, 1968 and 40 Italian prisoners of war at Biscari, Sicily on July 14, 1943, respectively) the victims were not their own troops.

The murderous rampage of Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan has entered the annals of military history as a unique betrayal of the traditional relationship between an officer — and a physician — and the men entrusted to his care by virtue of his rank.

Did it have to happen?

The past six years have been a watershed for the American military. It has demonstrated conclusively that it can match insurgents on the battlefield, develop civil infrastructure out of whole cloth, and recruit a volunteer force while embroiled in two wars. Unfortunately, it has also failed.

The virtue of the American military has always been its ability to take whatever manpower that was available and make from it a soldier (used here generically to describe a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine) loyal to the republic even when the individual loyalty of the individuals might have been nebulous. Confederate prisoners became “galvanized Yankees” on the frontier freeing up Federal troops to fight their own kinsmen. German immigrants fought in France in World War I and II. We are all familiar with the 442 Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Battalion formed from Japanese-Americans and their courageous service in Europe. Native Americans, with no great reason to love the American government, did love the Army and fought with as scouts, line infantrymen, and Code Talkers.

What has happened in the past 6 years is that assurance that the men in uniform were if not loyal Americans at least loyal to their comrades has been shattered.

The tip of the iceberg appeared in 1998 with the arrest of former Special Forces sergeant Ali Mohammed, a former major in the Egyptian army before immigrating to the United States and joining the US Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, NC.

In September 2004 SFC Abdullah Webster was sentenced to prison for refusing to deploy to Iraq. Testifying on behalf of Sergeant Webster was Air Force Chaplain (Captain) Hamza Al-Mubarak who claimed it was better for Webster to die than to fight fellow muslims.

In 2003 Army Chaplain (Captain) James Yee was arrested and charged with espionage and sedition based on his dealings with al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo. He avoided court martial because the government was concerned with classified information that might come out at trial. His assistant, Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, was convicted by a court martial. Civilian translator Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, also stationed at Guantanamo, was arrested and convicted at the same time.

In 2004 Army Specialist Amir Abdul Rashid was arrested, and eventually sentenced to life in prison, for providing sensitive information to al-Qaeda.

In 2008 Navy Signalman Hassan Abu Jihaad was sentenced to ten years for divulging classified information to al-Qaeda.

And no one can forget that on March 23, 2003, the eve of our invasion of Iraq, Army Sergeant Hasan Karim Akbar tossed a hand grenade into the command post of 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division killing two officers and wounding fourteen others including the brigade commander. He is now on death row at the US Disciplinary Barracks and presumably will soon have the services of his own private shrink.

This list doesn’t include the numerous John Walker Lindhs and Adam Gadahns out there. They, at least, made their sympathies plain.

Obviously, it is unfair to tar all muslims in the military through association with this short, yet impressive, list of muslims who have betrayed their uniform and their country. There is no doubt that many muslims serve this nation in uniform and do so honorably.

But at some point a frank conversation needs to take place on what it means when the nation can no longer rely on one identifiable demographic to uphold the oath they have taken. More importantly it calls into question the impact on combat readiness when there is a perception that muslim soldiers in your unit are as likely to kill you as they are to kill the enemy.

Clearly it is a very touchy subject. One of our most enduring myths is that America was founded on the idea of religious freedom and religious discrimination is one of the vices that we’ve largely abandoned as a people.

During World War II we didn’t commission Japanese nationalists or ardent Nazis. During th Cold War we did our best to not commission members of the Communist Party. The reasons were obvious. Holding a commission confers certain privileges, while the odd Nazi or commie in the ranks might not be a threat a commissioned officer who took his oath “with purpose of reservation and evasion” is a significant danger. Oddly enough, in the case of Major Hasan, Article IV Section 3 of the US Constitution would allow him to serve as a commissioned officer in the military even if a decision were made to bar muslims from enlisting in the Armed Forces.

One of the enduring fallacies of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the War on Terror was the refusal to admit that islam was neither peaceful in nature nor a disinterested observer in the war. This is not to say that all muslims are members of al-Qaeda, but to blithely ignore the religious dimension of the war was simply wrongheaded. To continue to ignore the particular vulnerability of muslim troops and officers to the propaganda on the grounds and label that very unremarkable observation as being racist or xenophobic is a fatal error. As we saw yesterday at Fort Hood.

Major Hasan’s rampage simply brings an issue which should have been addressed years ago back to center stage. Knowing what we know, how to we make sure these incidents of murder and sedition stop? Forever.

President Obama and national security team discuss Afghanistan

As we’ve discussed before, President Obama is on the horns of a dilemma. He campaigned on the idea that the “real” war on transnational terrorism is being fought in Afghanistan and has since demonstrated that, true to his roots in the far left, he can’t bring himself to pursue any policy which might strengthen US influence abroad. In the process he has carried out a series of metaphorical terrorist attacks of his own, using surrogates to attack General Stan McChrystal. discredit the general notion of winning, and, of course, blame President Bush.

Today more of Obama’s Afghan strategy becomes apparent.

The broad outlines of the strategy and the means can be found in the Washington Post

Theme 1. It isn’t worth the effort.

Today’s front page is dominated by a story called US Official Resigns Over War in Afghanistan. The slug tells you what you need to know:

Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting war, which he believes simply fueled insurgency.

The thrust is one we’ve heard since 2003, the insurgency is a reaction to the presence of US troops so the answer is to remove US troops. We heard that in Iraq and we saw there the utter futility of attempting to suppress an insurgency while ceding control of much of the population to the insurgency. In this story the hero, former Marine captain Matthew Hoh, a rising star in the Foreign Service, had his faith in our Afghan strategy destroyed:

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn’t want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him “how localized the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away.” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

I don’t have access to Hoh’s report but at this distance I could offer an equally plausible alternative scenario. The outpost in question might be obstructing a key Taliban route or activity and the leadership of that organization has decided that it is worth whatever price they have to pay to get rid of the outpost. The locals are afraid of the Taliban and of being on the wrong side and therefore tell Mr. Hoh what is most expedient.

Unlike the way the Post and other papers used every disaffected soldier from Iraq to attack the administration, here we find nothing of the kind. The article concludes:

This week, Hoh is scheduled to meet with Vice President Biden’s foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, at Blinken’s invitation.

If the United States is to remain in Afghanistan, Hoh said, he would advise a reduction in combat forces.

He also would suggest providing more support for Pakistan, better U.S. communication and propaganda skills to match those of al-Qaeda, and more pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to clean up government corruption — all options being discussed in White House deliberations.

“We want to have some kind of governance there, and we have some obligation for it not to be a bloodbath,” Hoh said. “But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve.”

Blinken, you will recall is in favor of a minimalist US strategy followed by a US defeat in Afghanistan:

Blinken, speaking for his boss, argued that trying to build an Afghan state strong enough to withstand the Taliban would take more time and resources than the American public would be willing to tolerate. If the goal is defeating al-Qaeda, he said, the United States should pursue a more focused strategy, targeting terrorists who seek to set up operations in Afghanistan.

Theme 2. McChrystal is wrong.
Kerry says McChrystal’s troop request ‘reaches too far, too fast’. John frikkin Kerry. I thought he was out burning up his weekly allowance from Theresa windsurfing or something. Now I find out that he’s drawing upon his experience in forcing a US loss in Vietnam to help develop a strategy for Afghanistan.

Kerry (D-Mass.) spoke in what was billed as a major address at the Council on Foreign Relations, after he returned from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan. His remarks have particular weight because he heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is a key ally of President Obama’s.

When one cuts to the chase, one finds that he’s in agreement with McChrystal in what needs to happen in Afghanistan but his experience derived from years of bloviating in the Senate trumps General McChrystal’s years of experience in killing our nation’s enemies.

Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Kerry’s tone differed from that of McChrystal, whose recent assessment warned that the war could be lost without an infusion of troops. But Biddle noted that the two men’s analyses had a lot of overlap.

“They both think governance reform is essential, they both think economic development is essential, they both think the security of the people of Afghanistan is the center of gravity,” said Biddle, who has advised McChrystal. “Both think the Afghan security forces should be expanded and we should put an Afghan face on the war.

“When you tick down the list of things Kerry said were very important, almost all of them were at the heart of General McChrystal’s report.”

Where they differ is this: if we are serious about building the capacity of the Afghan government to control its own territory it needs space to develop institutions and to train an effective military and police force. It can do neither if it’s survival is not assured. It’s survival can only be assured, in the short run, by US troops. Institutions can only be built when a majority of the people become convinced that paying government taxes and cooperating with those institutions won’t get you killed. This really isn’t hard to understand and one would think that people who allegedly followed the happenings in Iraq could readily grasp the concept.

And Richard Cohen weighs in with “General fallibility.”

The other thing I know about generals is that they do not ask for less — less equipment or less personnel. They ask for more, just as Westmoreland did in Vietnam before reality — otherwise known as domestic politics — forced Lyndon Johnson to rein him in. If Sorley is right about Abrams, the war could have been won with fewer men. As it turned out, South Vietnam was ultimately defeated because Congress turned its back on it — not pretty or necessarily honorable, but effective.

This might be true, but I’d rather risk winning with too many than losing with too few.

Theme 3. I’m not dithering I’m thinking, I’m thinking, dammit.
Former vice president Dick Cheney obviously drew blood last week with his statement that Obama was “dithering” on Afghanistan. The Obama Administration acted with the moral outrage of a liar who has just been called on a whopper.

On Monday, Fareed Zakaria, weighed in on the “no rush” side:

Dick Cheney has accused Barack Obama of “dithering” over Afghanistan. If the president were to quickly invade a country on the basis of half-baked intelligence, would that demonstrate his courage and decisiveness to Cheney? In fact, it’s not a bad idea for Obama to take his time, examine all options and watch how the post-election landscape in Afghanistan evolves.

President Obama, himself, coincidentally took a similar position on the same day.

President Obama fired back Monday at critics who accuse him of taking too long to review war strategy in Afghanistan, telling an audience of military personnel he will not rush his decision on whether to send additional troops there.

Before 3,500 members of the military and their families in a hangar at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Obama said U.S. troops deserve a clear strategy and full support to fulfill their mission.

“I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm’s way. I won’t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary,” Obama said to loud applause. “And if it is necessary, we will back you up to the hilt.”

Without taking time to parse the true meaning of the ominously Clintonian “And if it is necessary (???), we will back you up to the hilt” someone really has to point out to the president that the decision has already been made to send our men and women into “harm’s way” and to “risk their lives” and he owes it to them to decide to 1) win the war or 2) get the hell out and simply write off their sacrifice thus far.

Any increase of troops in Afghanistan is reversible. The prudent course of action would be to provide General McChrystal with the resources to implement the plan that Obama agreed to back in March while additional review is underway. This would give the administration time to weigh the evidence of the efficacy of a higher number of troops rather than rely on a sophomoric analysis by a junior Foreign Service officer, the meanderings of John Kerry’s room temperature IQ, or Joe Biden’s quest for relevance.

If the evidence shows that more troops do nothing to stabilize the situation then would be the time to reconsider a strategy that has yet to be tried.

His critique laid bare the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of this administration and served as a clarion call that American foreign policy is being grossly mismanaged by the administration.

Predictably the administration countered by blaming the Bush administration.

They trotted out their Care Bear, press secretary Robert Gibbs, to deliver this response:

“What Vice President Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform,” Gibbs said Thursday. “I think we’ve all seen what happens when somebody doesn’t take that responsibility seriously.”

Calling Cheney’s comment “curious,” Gibbs attacked the Bush administration for allegedly taking years to provide the support necessary for the war effort in Afghanistan.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that the vice president was for seven years not focused on Afghanistan,” Gibbs said. “Even more curious given the fact that an increase in troops sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president’s, for more than eight months.”

This is really a non-response to a very serious allegation.

It is also a profoundly stupid response which should have been called out by reporters. Unfortunately, the major news organizations have been to engrossed with Obama’s basketball game to cover what the administration is doing.

Gibbs’ comment ignores several salient issues. First, the Bush administration was fighting a must-win war in Iraq at the same time it was fighting the war in Afghanistan. Now we can argue about the rightness of the decision to go to war in Iraq, I happen to think it was one of the rare examples of political courage we’ve seen in American foreign policy since the end of World War II, but be that as it may a war was underway and that war was deemed to have a priority over the war in Afghanistan.

What the Bush Administration handed off to Obama in January 2009 was a win in Iraq – which is being frittered away even as we speak, a new plan based on proven counterinsurgency doctrine to implement in Afghanistan, and the ability to flow troops previously scheduled for an Iraq deployment into Afghanistan. The Politico article cited above notes that Gibbs did not deny that they inherited a plan which closely resembled the much ballyhooed but unexecuted Afghanistan strategy Obama announced in March 2009.

Even casting Gibbs’s remarks in the most charitable light they are an abdication of responsibility. Not only as Obama not executed his own strategy, he has expressed doubt that the war can be won, and done nothing but continue to under resource US troops in combat, undercut their morale by casting into doubt whether the administration even desires to prevail in Afghanistan, and allowed his lickspittles to belittle the advice of General Stan McChrystal.

Yet the Obama administration’s only answer to this damning sequence of events is the equivalent of nanny-nanny-boo-boo, only with less substance.

Let me digress for a moment. One of the wonderful things about a career in the Army is the stories you pick up. Bear with me on this.

A young captain is sent down from headquarters to replace another captain who is being relieved of his command. There isn’t much time to discuss people and training and so on because the old guy is under pressure to leave quickly.

The old guy says to his replacement, “The outfit is in pretty bad shape and you’re going to face some challenges ahead. To help you out I’ve left three envelopes in the company safe. They’re numbered one through three and when anything bad happens just open the envelope and follow the instructions and you’ll be fine.” He hops in his car and leaves.

A few weeks later a weapon comes up missing from the arms room, the new commander knows the crap is going to hit the fan. There is a moment of panic then he opens the safe, pulls out envelope number one and opens it. It says, “Blame the last guy.” He’s called in to the general’s office but resolutely follows the advice and leaves the meeting with his career intact.

Fast forward another few weeks and one of his vehicles is totaled by a soldier driving it while drunk. He doesn’t panic this time. He is supremely confident as he opens envelope number two. It says, “Blame the last guy.” Again he’s called on the carpet, he follows the advice and after a couple of anxious moments leaves with his skin.

Another few weeks go by. Another major incident happens. He’s sort of laissez faire about it. He finishes his coffee, goes outside has a cigar, comes back in and opens his best friend, envelope number three. It says, “Fill out three envelopes and pack your sh**.”

For nine months this administration has done nothing substantive in foreign policy. It has been too engrossed with placing communists, Maoists, and pedophile apologists in charge of domestic policy, creating a list of domestic enemies to punish, and using tax dollars to buy businesses and votes under the guise of an economic policy. The only response ever given when they are called to account in even a small way is to blame the Bush administration.

One day, soon, they will open envelope number three.

Truly pernicious ideas, however, seem benign at first glance but in truth strike at the heart of our system of government. The “Oath Keeper” movement is one of those ideas.

At first blush, who can object to the 10 orders they say they will not obey. Until you start examining each of them in detail (we’ll put aside for now the mindboggling assertion in Lexington/Concord was precipitated by an attempt to “disarm” Americans).

1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects — such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.

3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control” during any emergency, or under any other pretext. We will consider such use of foreign troops against our people to be an invasion and an act of war.

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever.

10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

In the case of a smallpox, or similar, outbreak it would not be unreasonable for any government to direct that a municipality or geographic area be put under quarantine. I would think most everyone would agree that would be a good thing. If there was an armed insurrection in some area of the country, I’d find it hard to object to warrantless searches of homes and the disarming of persons in the area of operations. We need look no farther than the actions of Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to see the utter imbecility of the federal government waiting for a state governor to declare an emergency before intervening. The nonsense purveyed by this group would have prevented Lincoln from opposing Secession and, more recently, it would have prevented Eisenhower from integrating public schools in Little Rock.

These principles, if they deserve to be called that, are nonsense and against the American tradition of government as it has been understood since the Whiskey Rebellion was suppressed by George Washington.

Were flogging bad history the only issue at hand, I wouldn’t be writing this. I’d be encouraging them to get a degree in education and teach civics in junior high. But it isn’t. On one hand the oath these people take is meaningless as they seem to be people who aren’t currently bound by an oath anyway. But as a career infantry officer I am gravely offended that they could be encouraging some number of military members to break rather than keep their oath of office. As a conservative I am offended that anyone on my side of the political spectrum would support such un-American nonsense.

When you take the oath of office as a member of the Armed Forces you do not take on the character of a freelance constitutional scholar.

As a commissioned officer you are appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate (yes, this is true for even second lieutenants), and you serve at the pleasure of the President.

Your oath reads:

“I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God.”

Read the oath carefully. There is not an Obama Exception to the oath. There isn’t a proviso that this oath is subsidiary to some grander more important oath you’ve taken. You agree to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.” To men of honor and integrity — which, in an ideal world, should be the minimum requirement to hold a commission — your word is your bond, if you’ve taken this oath with mental reservations about the intentions of the President, you’ve already violated your oath. So you aren’t an “oath keeper” but an “oath breaker.”

For enlisted men the rules are even more clear.

“I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

Read it again, slowly and carefully:

I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me

You’ll note there aren’t ten exceptions here. The Uniform Code of Military Justice places a significant burden off proof on anyone who disobeys an order on the grounds that the order wasn’t lawful. And once you’ve made the effort, the system doesn’t treat full-time soldiers and part-time constitutional scholars like Michael New with great deal of respect.

As a conservative I’m truly offended by this nonsense. This type organization, seemingly equal parts Walter Mitty and the black helicopter crowd, enables the left to lump all opponents of Obama together into a lunatic fringe that will then be studiously ignored. The Tea Parties were taken seriously by lots of members of Congress precisely because they were not lunatics. Polls show we are winning people over to our ideas. Why would anyone opposed to the Obama regime think this organization is a good idea?

In 1783, we were at a critical point in our struggle for nationhood. We had won independence but the form of government which would succeed the British monarchy was clearly up for grabs. There were calls for General George Washington to lead the nation either as a monarch or military dictator. In response, Washington went before the Continental Congress on December 23, 1783 and resigned his commission. That action, captured in a painting by John Turnbull on display in the Capitol Rotunda, paved the way for our republican system of government and our tradition of the civil supremacy in civil-military relations.

My advice to the “oath keepers” is just that. Keep your oath. If you want to make political decisions about how the military and police are used in this country, resign your position and agitate to your heart’s content. If you remain in uniform your oath binds you to the government and absent clear reason to the contrary, and none of the ten reasons set forward by the Oath Keeper organization meet that standard, you have a legal and moral obligation to faithfully carry out the duties given to you.

We are in a tough fight with this administration for very high stakes. The stakes, however, do not justify us checking our brain and our sanity at the door and signing onto truly bizarre and un-American ideas like those set out by the Oath Keepers.

I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.

Shortly after dusk on October 16, 1859 a party of eighteen heavily armed men, the self-styled Provisional Army of the United States, departed the Kennedy farm house in Washington County, Maryland. They made their way south, crossed the Potomac into Virginia at Harper’s Ferry. In short order they seized the B&O Railroad trestles crossing the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, the US Armory and Arsenal, the US Rifle Works, cut all telegraph access, and took hostage two prominent citizens.

Their objective was to ignite a slave rebellion in Virginia which would spread and destroy the institution of chattel slavery in the South.

John Brown’s Raid was as much a signal event in the nation’s inexorable slide towards civil war as Edmund Ruffin’s firing the first shot on Fort Sumter. It should be viewed as the death knell of the non-violent anti-slavery struggle in the United States.

The raid on the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry in effect acknowledged that the long series of compromises between pro- and anti-slavery factions, beginning with the Constitution, itself, and sequentially addressed in the Northwest Ordinance, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had reached a logical impasse. The slave states had expanded to the geographical limits of financially viable slavery, assuming, arguendo, that slavery was ever truly financially viable, while the westward expansion of the United States made it inevitable that new free states would enter the Union and that eventually the South would not only be outvotedin the House but in also in the Senate.

Unfortunately, issues of fundamental justice don’t lend themselves to compromise. This series of compromises on the spread of slavery failed not because they were flawed, per se, but because they were generally the product of bad faith negotiations. Abolitionists were determined that slavery be abolished. Slavery proponents, while realizing that slavery would never be permitted in all states, were insistent that slavery be recognized as a legal institution even in abolitionist states. These bad faith compromises led to violence which ended slavery as an institution.

The civil war gave way to another conflict, this one over civil rights. It was every bit as expansive in scale as the slavery controversy and many of the same phases are recognizable. A series of compromises negotiated between adversaries acting in bad faith, violence, and collapse of an unjust legal regime. The violence was obviously more muted than the Civil War but violence or the promise of imminent violence underscored the era of civil rights protests.

Which leads me to the pro-life struggle in this nation.

Conservatively, a fifth of all pregnancies in this nation since Roe was declared to be law instead of a cruel parody on legal thinking have ended in abortion. At a minimum 40 million American children have been summarily executed. By any standard of morality this is a travesty. If the era of legal slavery saw 12 million Africans arrive in the New World in chains, leaving the bodies of as many as 4 million more in the Middle Passage, surely the deaths of over 10 million black children in just 36 years must count for something.

We see, today, the same pattern emerging. An unjust institution has led to bad faith compromises. Those compromises, in turn, frustrate both parties.

I’ll be the first to admit that I participate in this debate in bad faith. Abortion is unalterably and irredeemably evil. As long as it exists I will oppose it. Having said that, I am willing to accept abortion on a state-by-state basis because I know, just as the opponents of slavery knew, though the institution is unassailable nationally it is extraordinarily vulnerable locally. So, when I accept compromises that permit abortion, even abortion with strict limits, I do so only with a view towards ending abortion not achieving a modus vivendi with the supporters of infanticide.

As we’ve seen over the years, when the power of the state in used in defense of the indefensible, whether dogs and water cannon at Selma or the noxious, if comically named, Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, neither does the injustice become just nor do those opposing it go away.

We haven’t yet entered a phase of this struggle where violence is generally viewed by those of us who oppose abortion as either the only way, or even an acceptable way, to move forward. Even at its upward bounds, you are safer as an abortionist or living in an abortion clinic than you are in most of Washington, DC, Baltimore, Atlanta, Philadelphia, St. Louis, etc. Though one would have to be totally dishonest if one denied that even this low level of violence has probably contributed as much to the shortage of abortionists and the reduction of the number of abortion clinics as had any social opprobrium associated with the act of killing infants in utero.

And so the struggle continues.

Many of us, however, have long since passed the point of denouncing or even being concerned by the death of a Bernard Slepian or a George Tiller but haven’t yet reached the point of holding up their killers as heroes. We haven’t yet reached the point where a man like Paul Hill receives the kind of eulogy that sparks others to emulate him.

All historical analogies are somewhat forced as the human condition is anything but a static one. One could argue, I suppose, that our present day struggle be seen by future generations as the equivalent of Bleeding Kansas. And there is no doubt that the political compromises on slavery which foreshadowed the Civil War, however flawed they were, at least kept the hope of both sides alive while this present great moral question has been “settled” by a perversion of the judicial process and a bastardization of the Constitution leaving it festooned with penumbras and emanations hardly envisioned by neither the Founding Fathers nor anyone capable of reading English. This formula has made negotiation useless and requiring the appearance of some deus ex machina for our side to win the day.

Will we, metaphorically, reach the stage of a John Brown’s raid? Or will we be able to keep the movement within the bounds of civil disobedience? It took both the slavery and civil rights struggles a century to play out. We’ve only been at the ramparts for 36 years. The bitterness and aggravation haven’t had time to effervesce.

Seventy years hence I hope the pro-life movement can look back with pride on the fact that it never had to produce a John Brown to win the day.

Having flogged the nothingburger story of the 20-year-old master’s thesis of VA Attorney General Bob McDonnell to bloody rags, the Washington Post does and abrupt volte face today and blames the lackluster campaign of Democrat candidate Creigh Deeds on flogging Bob McDonnell’s 20-year-old master’s thesis to bloody rags.

Republican Robert F. McDonnell has taken a commanding lead over R. Creigh Deeds in the race for governor of Virginia as momentum the Democrat had built with an attack on his opponent’s conservative social views has dissipated, according to a new Washington Post poll.

McDonnell leads 53 to 44 percent among likely voters, expanding on the four-point lead he held in mid-September. Deeds’s advantage with female voters has all but disappeared, and McDonnell has grown his already wide margin among independents. Deeds, a state senator from western Virginia, is widely seen by voters as running a negative campaign, a finding that might indicate that his aggressive efforts to exploit McDonnell’s 20-year-old graduate thesis are turning voters away.

Nowhere in the story does it mention that the thesis that is turning away voters in Virginia is the same thesis that generates 572 Google hits within the Washington Post and was regularly featured on the front page and editorial pages of that paper.

If the old saying “success has many fathers while failure is an orphan” is applied here, one could say that Creigh Deeds has just been stuck with paying child support for the Washington Post’s bastard.

I’m not celebrating a victory yet. Election day is still a ways off and as we’ve learned from past experience if anyone can turn a sure win into an abject defeat it is a Republican candidate. Hopefully, regardless of the outcome of this election, the takeaway is that if you use an incident manufactured by the editorial board of the Washington Post as the centerpiece of your campaign, you have no one but yourself to blame when you fail. And the Washington Post will have no but you to blame either.

Right now we have the economy, cap and tax, global warming, and socializing health care as front burner issues. Did I forget anything? Oh, yeah, there are a couple of wars being fought, two rogue states about to acquire nukes, and Russia casting covetous eyes on any number of small nations.

Add to this dog’s breakfast yet another priority. Urban renewal.

President Obama is putting a new emphasis on revitalizing U.S. cities with a coordinated effort that involves stimulus funding and getting multiple agencies to work together to improve schools, housing and neighborhoods.

The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning the most ambitious new policy for the nation’s cities since the Great Society programs of the 1960s. But the plan involves fundamental changes in the way federal agencies dole out assistance to urban areas, making its success uncertain.

But this isn’t going to be Lyndon Johnson’s demolish-the-slums-move-the-poor-people-out-and-bring-in-white-liberals urban renewal, this is going to be environmentally and ethnically sensitive urban renewal.

In Kansas City, stimulus funding has galvanized a project called the Green Impact Zone, led by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), a former mayor of the city. About $200 million in mostly federal money will be invested in the project, which aims to transform an economically depressed 150-square-block area east of Troost Avenue. About half of its residents live in deep poverty, with numerous vacant houses, high crime levels and unemployment rates approaching 50 percent.

The project involves a coordinated rush of federal money. Stimulus funding will be used to weatherize the 2,500 homes in the community. Block grants from the Energy Department will be used to hire residents and train them to do energy audits. Meanwhile, the local power company will build a “smart grid” in the area, using $25 million in stimulus money and $25 million of its own. More than $30 million, mostly from the Transportation Department, will be used to build a 13-mile rapid-transit line through the community to downtown that will feature solar-powered stations and buses that run on biodiesel fuel. There also will be job training in environmental cleanup and community policing funded by various agencies.

If there is anything we should have learned from the “war on poverty” it is that government intervention only rarely improves the lot of people in poor neighborhoods. When one looks at the scheme described above one can’t help but notice that there is absolutely nothing here that is going to change the lives or economic conditions of the people in this neighborhood.

Weatherizing homes is nice, but you still need money to heat them. Ever researched the job market for “energy auditors?” A “smart grid” in a slum? How does a 13-mile rapid transit system running “through” the community help anyone? Do they expect commuters to get off the train to enjoy ambiance of a high crime neighborhood? Or do they expect to use eminent domain to clear a path for the rail and create premium commercial and residential construction around the rail stop? Solar powered stations? Biodiesel buses?

So if there is little to nothing in this package to benefit the residents of the “renewed” area, who benefits?

The city government benefits because it is able to attract large quantities of state and federal money for a project which would have been funded with city dollars and then use the city dollars to fund good old pork barrel spending to the benefit of local pols.

Mr. Cleaver benefits because he gets a lot of free publicity from the deal and a lot of major contractors will owe him favors… and contributions… in the future.

President Obama benefits because under the guise of a newly recognized national priority he is able to divert large sums of cash to areas which went heavily for him in 2008. That cash will enrich the Democrat machines that control so many of our cities and return to him as campaign contributions and votes in 2012.

An unemployed citizen of the area gets a roll of weather stripping for their doors and an eviction notice when the developers move in.

The protesters met Monday morning in McPherson Square, a slab of grass in downtown Washington named after a war hero. They had hoped to fill the park, but instead 176 protesters gathered in one corner. The crowd was all familiar faces from the antiwar movement, except for a homeless man sleeping on a bench, a bicyclist eating a scone and a Street Sense newspaper salesman who saw a business opportunity in the gathering.

If there was ever any doubt that the anti-war movement was nothing more or less than an adjunct of the Democrat party, that doubt has been swept away. One would think that with the war in Afghanistan at a critical stage and the administration drunkenly reeling from strategy to strategy apparently in search of a magic elixir or silver bullet that will make the war just go away that the anti-war movement would have been in fine form. If there was ever a time when their presence might have actually made a policy difference this was it.

However, now that Obama is in the White House the anti-war movement is curiously silent. The noxious Code Pink organization which was more than willing to consign 25 million Iraqis to rule by al Qaeda has decided that the war in Afghanistan, also against al Qaeda, doesn’t require an immediate withdrawal (h/t, Gateway Pundit):

“We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline,” says Benjamin. “That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left the country, would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.”

The evidence is in and it is damning.

The anti-war movement we were afflicted with over the past eight years was essentially a rent-a-mob that never had any larger objective than damaging President Bush. The outrage about the war in Iraq was driven not by any opposition to war, itself, but by the hatred President Bush attracted by refusing to let Al Gore steal the 2000 election. The internal contradiction so glaringly apparent in the movement, that of supposedly being against war while supporting a genocidal madman as the ruler of Iraq, is easily explicable when you view that movement as nothing more than street theater designed to weaken the president.

While the Washington Post covers the protest with a bit of amusing snark they miss the larger picture by not examining why the anti-war movement has evaporated with a Democrat in the White House and what it says about a political party that is perfectly willing to sacrifice American blood, treasure, and national security interests for electoral advantage.

At issue, of course, is Barack Obama’s rather obvious intention to abandon any pretense at winning the war in Afghanistan. As I’ve noted before, Obama comes from a political tradition that is in equal parts deeply suspicious of American power and hostile to American strategic interests. He has stated that his is uncomfortable with the idea of victory in Afghanistan (though not as uncomfortable as I am with him thinking Emperor Hirohito signed the surrender document on the USS Missouri) and already his minions have started to walk back from the Afghan strategy he inarticulately articulated (in all seriousness, this speech would have passed as a computer generated hoax had he not been seen reading it) on March 27.

The administration has begun a whispering campaign, a campaign that will inevitably result in the ousting of General McChrystal, to lay the ground work for a withdrawal of US combat forces from Afghanistan for no other reason than Afghanistan is a distraction from what Obama really wishes to do to us.

This brings me to Eugene Robinson and his pair of working synapses.

How to proceed in Afghanistan will be among the most difficult and fateful decisions that President Obama ever makes. But he’s the one who has to decide, not his generals. The men with the stars on their shoulders — and I say this with enormous respect for their patriotism and service — need to shut up and salute.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is entitled to his opinion about the best way forward. But he has no business conducting a public campaign to build support for his preferred option, which is to send tens of thousands more troops into a country once called the “graveyard of empires.”

McChrystal’s view — that a strategy employing fewer resources, in pursuit of more limited goals, would be “short-sighted” — is something the White House needs to hear. He is, after all, the man Obama put in charge in Afghanistan, and it would be absurd not to take his analysis of the situation into account. But McChrystal is out of line in trying to sell his position publicly, as he did last week in a speech in London.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was right to lay down the law. Gates said Monday that it is “imperative” that military and civilian leaders “provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately.” I believe that’s Pentagon-speak for: “Put a sock in it, Stan.”

Generals have a duty to the men they command to do a lot more than “shut up and salute.” To have a puss like Robinson tell a man like McChrystal his duty makes one want to gag. American generals, with some sad exceptions, have never been shrinking violets and have routinely dabbled in politics. Who, after all, was the Democrat candidate for president in 1864?

If Robinson had bothered to discuss his rather twisted views of current events and history he might have discovered that he was fulminating over the talking points spoon fed him by the White House rather than what happened. I refer you to Walter Pincus writing on page A-24 of today’s Washington Post. His story has the headline: Critics Don’t See the Nuance in McChrystal’s Comments on War

Commentators who say Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is pressuring the White House to accept his ideas or else didn’t pay close attention to his remarks last week in London. [eh?? I guess they’ve fired the editors in an attempt to stop bleeding cash because this paragraph is incoherent.]

“I’m certainly not going to circumvent any political leadership, because at the end of the day the political leadership are the people who I work for, and I’m proud to do that,” McChrystal told the International Institute for Strategic Studies last Thursday. Once a decision on troop levels is made, he said, he will carry it out.

Acknowledging that the White House and others are reexamining “our goals and objectives” in the Afghanistan war, McChrystal called the process “a very detailed policy-level debate” that is “incredibly important and incredibly healthy.” He said resources, including troop levels, should be based on goals: “I don’t think that if we align our goals and our resources that we’ll have a significant problem.”

And the impeccably coiffed Michael O’Hanlon, also writing on today’s op-ed page, further amplified on the subject, pointing out that McChrystal’s comments, to which Robinson so vociferously objects, were actually defending Obama’s own announced strategy:

The Obama/McChrystal plan is classic counterinsurgency and focuses on protecting the Afghan population while strengthening Afghan security forces and government. McChrystal was asked about a “counterterrorism” strategy that would purportedly contain al-Qaeda with much lower numbers of American troops, casualties and other costs. McChrystal did not try to force the president’s hand on whether to increase the foreign troop presence in Afghanistan. The general critiqued an option that is at direct odds with Obama’s policy and conflicts with the experiences of the U.S. military this decade. That is not fundamentally out of line for a commander.

[…]

Some might agree with all this yet say that McChrystal still had no business wading into policy waters at this moment. It is true that commanders, as a rule, should not do so. But when truly bad ideas or those already tried and discredited are debated as serious proposals, they do not deserve intellectual sanctuary. McChrystal is personally responsible for the lives of 100,000 NATO troops who are suffering severe losses partially as a result of eight years of a failed counterterrorism strategy under a different name. He has a right to speak if a policy debate becomes too removed from reality. Put another way, we need to hear from him because he understands this reality far better than most in Washington.

All of this leads Robinson to simply lie about his own record.

For the record, this would be my position even if McChrystal were arguing for an immediate pullout — or even if George W. Bush, rather than Obama, were the president whose authority was being undermined. In October 2006, when the chief of staff of the British army said publicly that Britain should pull out of Iraq because the presence of foreign troops was fueling the insurgency — a view I wholeheartedly shared — I argued that he ought to be fired. I wrote that I didn’t like “active-duty generals dabbling in politics, even if I agree with them.” If military officers want to devise and implement geopolitical strategy, they should leave their jobs and run for office.

While it is true that he said that, it is equally true that he did not apply that standard across the board.

The British general Robinson was criticizing was advocating abandoning Afghanistan back in 2006 when the American left, or rather the leftists who live in America, were declaring Afghanistan to be the only really important war. These are the same leftists who are now hopping on board Obama’s helicopter leaving the roof of the US embassy in Kabul.

He criticized General Petraeus for going for the win in Afghanistan:

Hello, everybody. Today’s the day we hear from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on why things are so bad in Iraq that we have to “pause” withdrawal of the troops sent in the “surge” — but so peachy that we should be proud of this open-ended occupation and continue it indefinitely. Maybe that makes sense in some parallel universe.

He also thought the infamous Betray-Us ad was fine:

That said, all this Republican blather is ridiculous. Rudy Giuliani said this an “unprecedented” attack on an active-duty U.S. general; he should go back and read, for example, what was said in the press and elsewhere about Lincoln’s generals, who were called cowards and worse. There’s never been a prohibition about criticizing U.S. generals, who are assumed to be big boys and girls.

He supports the testimony by General Shinseki, so beloved of the anti-warriors:

George W. Bush and his aides cited dead-wrong intelligence to convince the American people of the need to go to war. They botched the invasion of Iraq by creating a power vacuum that insurgents were happy to fill. They sent only a fraction of the number of troops needed to occupy the country, scoffing at professional soldiers who told them of their error in advance.

Clearly, Robinson believes generals should be heard outside the chain of command, like Shinseki, when he agrees with them and he believes they should be quiet when they speak with the authority of the administration, like Petraeus, or, in Robinson’s twisted little mind, against the administration like McChrystal.

Not only was Robinson happy to cheerlead for a US defeat in Iraq, now, shill that he is, he’s decided to change his view of the war in Afghanistan and shamelessly shill for a defeat there even if it requires him to personally attack men who have actually achieved something in life.

In her speech in Copenhagen today, First Lady Michelle Obama said her trip to Denmark, along with the travel of her “dear friend” and “chit-chat buddy” Oprah Winfrey, as well as tomorrow’s visit by President Obama, is a “sacrifice” on behalf of the children of Chicago and the United States. “As much of a sacrifice as people say this is for me or Oprah or the president to come for these few days,” the first lady told a crowd of people involved in the Chicago project, “so many of you in this room have been working for years to bring this bid home.”

The first question that comes to mind is “which freakin’ people are saying that spending several days in luxurious accommodations in Copenhagen is a sacrifice?” Because you need to get the Secret Service to keep them away from the president because they are seriously psychotic.

The level of self absorption in this administration is simply mind boggling and is probably exceeded only by their sense of entitlement.

And if you stopped to wonder why the president felt this is the best use of his time, you can stop worrying.

Mrs. Obama said bringing the Olympics to Chicago is especially important right now because “athletics is becoming more of a fleeting opportunity.” “Funds dry up so it becomes harder for kids to engage in sports, to learn how to swim, to even ride a bike,” she said. In addition, with childhood obesity on the rise, “it is so important for us to raise up the platform of fitness and competition and fair play,” the first lady said.

Oh well, I’ve got to go apply for my government grant to teach my daughter to ride her bike.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats rejected a proposed a requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs.

Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that current law and the healthcare bill under consideration are too lax and leave the door open to illegal immigrants defrauding the government using false or stolen identities to obtain benefits.

Grassley’s amendment was beaten back 10-13 on a party-line vote.

Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) says of Senator Grassley’s amendment, “The way I see the amendment, it’s a solution without a problem.”

This is simply another exercise in the Democrats attempting to not only nationalize the US health care system but use it as a magnet to attract a dedicated Democrat voting bloc, illegal aliens.

The mind boggles at what possible reason could exist to <b>not</b> require the possession of a photo ID to enroll in Obamacare when right now I have to present a photo ID when I visit my HMO.

I’d like to add two additional occupations to the banned list: law enforcement officials and prosecutors. Now our system of government can only survive morons in those positions if chance doesn’t intervene and we end up with morons holding both those positions in the same jurisdiction. If you want a case study in what happens when you run afoul of a moron cluster, look no farther Vermillion County, Indiana.

When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs.

Now, Harpold is trying to clear her name of criminal charges, and she is speaking out in hopes that a law will change so others won’t endure the same embarrassment she still is facing.

“This is a very traumatic experience,” Harpold said.

Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week’s time.

Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period.

Point six grams. If Ms. Harpold had continued on this crime spree for a year she would have accumulated 30 grams, just a bit over an ounce, of illegal pseudophedrine, which is so illegal it’s sold legally over the counter at pharmacies all across Indiana. Thankfully, the county sheriff, Bob Spence, and the county prosecutor, Nina Alexander, were able to nip this developing drug lord in the bud and bring her career of criminality to a quick close.

Inarguably, meth is bad. I don’t think anyone, even fans of legalized drug use, disagrees with that premise. And the laws passed in the past few years limiting the legal purchase of cold medicines containing pseudophedrine serve a legitimate need. When rural Oklahoma convenience stores are selling tens of thousands of doses of cold medicine each week, logic tells you that something not quite kosher is going on.

The law, however, is not well served when a combination of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau set out on an jihad to literally interpret a particular law.

Let’s start with the misuse of resources.

[Sheriff Bob Spence] explained that the process leading to Harpold’s arrest involved an officer checking area pharmacy purchase records, and coming up with about 40 purchases that violated the law.

Unless crime has been eradicated in Vermillion County, one would think that the sheriff’s department has other tasks it could be reasonably carrying out other than collecting pharmacy sales receipts, adding them up, and going all the way to the bottom of the list. How many purchases of potentially illegal cold medicine took place in the county? Who was the mathematical whiz entrusted with plotting all the purchases on a timeline and toting up the grams of pseudophedrine?

How about a lack of freakin common sense or sense of proportionality?

Harpold said she did go talk to the prosecutor about the situation, and Alexander offered her the deferral program, in which Harpold is required to pay the court costs, abide by all laws and not be arrested for 30 days. At the end of 30 days, the class-C misdemeanor will be erased from her record.

Alexander said she is working with Harpold about the charge, but the prosecutor asserts that Harpold did break the law with her purchases and is being held accountable.

Even stipulating the righteousness of the law, there has to be a sense of proportion in its enforcement if from no other standpoint than to simply demonstrate sanity. The reaction Harpold’s purchase generated from the criminal justice system (motto: there is no system, there is no justice, but it is criminal) is simply lunacy. You literally break the law when you go 66 in a 65. I’d be willing to bet good money that speeding laws aren’t usually enforced like that.

Now that she’s been arrested, Sheriff Bob has sympathy for her.

“If there’s any way we can help her, we will,” Spence said.

Probably a bit late for that, Sheriff. She’s been arrested and publicly humiliated.

And, of course, when one set of morons gets caught up in its self constructed web of imbecility, you know another moron in training is going to weigh in.

And Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel, who recently renewed efforts to track pseudoephedrine sales in the Wabash Valley, understands Harpold’s arrest is embarrassing for her.

“Sometimes mistakes happen,” Marvel said. “It’s unfortunate. But for the good of everyone, the law was put into effect.

No, Sheriff Marvel, there is a difference between a “mistake” and “premeditation.” A “mistake” would be arresting the wrong person. And what happened here wasn’t “for the good of everyone,” it was for the good of one sheriff’s department and one prosecutors office.

Do I really believe Spence and Alexander are diagnosable as morons? No. I believe they are a couple of bureaucrats who have set out to scab arrest statistics in order to make a case for more resources for their offices. Not much happens in a county the size of Vermillion County, Indiana and if you can turn it, on paper, into the Costco of meth production you’re sure to get a lot more money. To do this they have devoted time and effort to analyzing even minute purchases to make arrests. There is no doubt this is a conscious strategy because otherwise any responsible prosecutor would have decided that arresting a grandmother for purchasing 0.6 grams over the legal limit was idiocy.

What this kind on nonsense does in the long run is it discredits the law and it discredits the hard working non-morons in law enforcement and prosecutors offices nationwide.

We don’t know or care what party Sheriff Spence and Nina Alexander belong to we do know they owe the nation as well as Ms. Harpold an apology

Madam Speaker, in terms of the political tone, the tone of the debate, Hoyer said earlier this week he thought it was the most vitriolic since ‘93-’94. And around that time we also saw acts of domestic violence, domestic terrorism. How concerned are you about the tone of the political debate, in terms of people talking about anti-government rhetoric and so on and the possibility of violence?

To which she responded:

Well, I think we all have to take responsibility for our actions and our words. We are a free country, and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we have to carefully balance.

I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this, myself, in the late ’70s in San Francisco. This kind of rhetoric was very frightening, and it created a climate in which violence took place.

So I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, so that understanding that some of the people — the ears that it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume.

But, again, our country is great because people can say what they think and they believe. But I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement that they may cause.

After noting, that based on the question it would seem that Steny Hoyer’s grasp on reality is fairly tenuous also, one can’t help but observe that 1) this certainly wasn’t the set of rules Pelosi was playing by in 2001-2008 when, by this standard, she actively encouraged the vandalization of ROTC and recruiting offices and the killing of American soldiers in Iraq, 2) there are laws against inciting violence and if she thinks these are being broken she should have the courage to point out the instances, and 3) her interpretation of the entire Moscone-Milk-White episode in San Francisco is just deranged.

Were Pelosi, or for that matter Hoyer, possessed of something that even vaguely resembled a sense of shame they would be locked in a cheap motel room right now with a cellophane bag, a roll of duct tape and a bottle of Muscatel. That the Speaker of the House can equate disagreeing with the horrendous policies of the Democrat party with an incitement to violence only indicates the moral degeneracy of the leadership of that party.

My analysis was flawed because I failed to take into consideration the chutzpah required to break out of this binary scenario. We are on the cusp of a campaign by the White House to convince us that Afghanistan simply isn’t important.

Fareed Zakaria, writing in the Washington Post’s Newsweek magazine, takes the position that our objective in Afghanistan should be to reduce it to a suppurating wound. He takes the position that we need to buy the Taliban to convince them to stop fighting, a rather stunning misreading of what we accomplished in Iraq with the Sons of Iraq movement, and accept that their dominance of a substantial part of Afghanistan is something we just have to deal with.

At least he concedes that keeping al Qaeda out of Afghanistan is a goal though how he plans on accomplishing that in an environment of warlordism is more than a little unclear.

In today’s Washington Post, former CIA weenie Paul Pillar argues that Afghanistan as a terrorist haven is a mistaken presumption that threatens to make Afghanistan [cue ominous scary music] another Vietnam.

For those of you who don’t remember, Paul Pillar is the CIA official who attempted to aid the election of John Kerry by attacking the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy shortly before the 2004 election in what was billed as an “off the record” address. Thankfully he was outed by Bob Novak. He also claimed that secular Ba’athists in Iraq would never cooperate with al Qaeda and defended the CIA’s gross shortcoming in Iraq intelligence pre-2003 by saying, in essence, so what?

Rationales for maintaining the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan are varied and complex, but they all center on one key tenet: that Afghanistan must not be allowed to again become a haven for terrorist groups, especially al-Qaeda. Debate about Afghanistan has raised reasons to question that tenet, one of which is that the top al-Qaeda leadership is not even in Afghanistan, having decamped to Pakistan years ago. Another is that terrorists intent on establishing a haven can choose among several unstable countries besides Afghanistan, and U.S. forces cannot secure them all.

The debate has largely overlooked a more basic question: How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland? The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.

When one gets belong the historical illiteracy in this statement, I’d refer Mr. Pillar to read the 9/11 Commission Report. According to that document the plan for the attack originated in Khandahar (page 155), the leaders were recruited in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan (page 160), and the “muscle” for the hijacks were talent scouted and recruited in Afghan camps (page 248).

He asserts that the internet is the new battleground

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens.

By utilizing networks such as the Internet, terrorists’ organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters. A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States persists, but that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaeda’s role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless.

While one would be ill advised to deny that use of the internet, one would be an utter moron to argue that the internet is a substitute for a safe haven or that jihadi use of the internet goes back two decades.

A victory in Afghanistan, no matter how distasteful the idea is to Obama, is critical for several reasons.

First, terrorists do require a national actor to provide safe haven. Contrary to what some would have us believe, 9/11 was not produced in Adobe Flash and it did not use the internet to any appreciable degree. Terrorists require safe areas in which to train, safe areas in which to house their infrastructure, they need valid passports to allow them to legally cross borders, they need embassies to receive shipments of money, documents, or weapons. While the internet is important, the internet is no substitute for a safe haven.

Second. Even were Pillar correct winning in Afghanistan is vital because winning is all that is important. Any analysis of the war in Iraq will show that the Sons of Iraq movement came into being when it became obvious that the United States was not going to go away. Warfare is actually a series of cliches, success begets success, nothing wins like a winner, etc. Our withdrawal from Somalia in 1993 and our lack of response to the bombings of our embassies in East Africa, the bombing of our facilities in Saudi Arabia, and the bombing of the USS Cole all sent the message we were an easy mark. It has taken 8 bloody years in Afghanistan and Iraq to put the lie to that message. And the fact is, unless we choose to lose in those two wars we cannot lose.

Third. Given the importance, Mr. Pillar’s opinion notwithstanding, of sanctuaries to transnational terrorist organizations, it is vital that no country believes it can pick up the pre-9/11 policy of hosting terrorist organizations hostile to enemy nations and maintaining the fiction that you aren’t supporting them.

Fourth. Lots of young men have died in Afghanistan. The have died there for as good a reason as any nation has ever had for sending it’s young men in harm’s way. They deserve better than to have their families told that it didn’t matter.

Lastly, this Administration must be held accountable for something. To date it has delivered on only one promise, that Barack Obama would be elected president. The man in the Oval Office lambasted President Bush on the subject of Afghanistan and he must be held accountable for his words.

Since January we have been treated to the spectacle of the office of the President, in the person of his spokesman and personal staff, directly attacking private citizens who oppose them. Everyone is familiar with Gibbs’ assault on Rush Limbaugh and Erick writes today of yet another instance where Gibbs has launched a personal attack on a private citizen.

The Washington Post reminds us today that it is going to get worse, a lot worse.

Facing a near-daily barrage of attacks from conservative opponents, White House officials are engaged in an internal debate over how hard to hit back, even as they have grown increasingly aggressive in countering allegations they deem to be absurd.

[...]

But at a tactical level, administration officials are taking seriously the potential for damage and are attempting to respond forcefully. In early August, officials stepped up their efforts to link the “birther” movement — with its contention that Obama was not born in the United States and is thus not a legitimate president — to Republican leaders.

Incredible, you might say. The White House is involved in a scheme to link the leaders of the Republican party to a fringe movement that, one has to be at pains to point out, is fueled entirely by the White House’s own secretiveness. Of course, you shouldn’t be amazed at this considering Bill Clinton tried to link Republicans to the Oklahoma City bombing and his current Chief of Staff was a force in that operation.

According to the story, the White House is using its allies in the media to make its case

When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording. They then reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience.

The controversy escalated, but by the time it was over, White House advisers thought they had emerged with the upper hand. The speech, they said, was the most-viewed live video on any government Web site in history, and they were pleased with the media coverage of the event.

One can’t help but note that the reporter, Anne Kornblut, is undoubtedly part of this “friendly audience” because she seamlessly weaves in the White House’s various messages into this story:

Obama had been accused of wanting to kill people’s grandparents (through health-care reform), expose their children to political re-education (through an expansion of community service programs) and use health care to make reparations for slavery (by expanding coverage).

No one is taking the position that the White House cannot defend itself. Of course it can, and it must. If you want to see what happens when a White House ignores the opposition you need look no farther than what happened to the Bush Administration. But this is on a totally different and much more vulgar level.

It is one thing to call on your pet reporters and bloggers to get them to transcribe your talking points memo (he, he) for their readers. That is fair enough. It is a totally different set of facts when you set out to personally vilify individual persons, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Rick Scott, and the list goes on, using the office of the President to carry out those attacks. It is simply against our political tradition to try to tie the leadership of a political party to a belief they simply do not hold. We are merely a half step removed from an enemies list and IRS audits of political opponents. We may even be there and just not know it.

What we are seeing in this administration is a combination of paranoia, pettiness, and lack of a sense of proportion that marks it as a profoundly dangerous regime. It is like the Nixon Administration without any of the competence or sense of propriety.

Many of us noted back during the ‘08 primaries and general election that the Obama camp would cry racism at the drop of a hat. He performed poorly in Pennsylvania because of racism. He was trounced in WV because of racism. In August 2008, Jacob Weisberg wrote that the only reason McCain could win the election was because of racism. They could never quite fathom that there were lots of reasons to oppose Obama other than race. Being the least qualified presidential contender since Wendell Wilkie and choosing convicted terrorists, terrorist who would have happily murdered Americans were it not for their epic levels of incompetence, and racist hatemongers as BFFs and mentors certainly popped on my radar as reasons why even Hillary Clinton was preferable to Barack Obama.

We predicted that should he win, the climate would only get worse.

Up until this weekend the accusation that only racists opposed Obama had been made sotto voce with the real criticism being directed at cartoonists. Now that criticism is being directed at all of us.

On Saturday, The New York Times’s aging spinster Maureen Dowd opined:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

Leaving aside the fact that many of the charges in Dowd’s first paragraph are actually true to one degree or another it is breath taking to see a columnist in a major paper, albeit one lurching slowly towards bankruptcy, paint something over half the registered voters in the nation as crazies simply because they don’t support Obama’s various lunatic schemes.

On Monday, the Washington Post, which studiously ignored the march on the Mall on 9-12 at least in comparison to every pissant antiwar demonstration it covered since 2003, ran this story, a half-page above the fold in the Metro section, which begins:

Seeking Healing, Seeing Hostility
Some at Black Family Reunion Criticize Protests Against Obama

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters thronged to the U.S. Capitol to angrily accuse President Obama of taking the country in the wrong direction.

A day later, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, many participants at a much smaller gathering — the 24th annual Black Family Reunion — said the level of hostility toward the nation’s first African American president had little to do with policy differences over health care or taxes and everything to do with race.

“It’ s not conducive to the coalitions we need to build in this country,” said Vera Hope, 60, of Mount Rainier as she left a booth promoting health prevention. “I’m disgusted and upset by the hostility. Let’s call it was it is — it’s just a disguise for right-wing racists. They are fomenting a climate of violence to provoke people.”

My first thought was that the comment here and those of Dowd was probably related to something 60-ish women had in common but then in today’s Washington Post columnist Petula Dvoark takes up the subject:

We will never know if Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) would have screamed “You lie!” at a white president. Or if Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. would have been arrested at his home if he were white. Or if the parents who feared that President Obama was going to deliver a political address to America’s schoolchildren would have felt the same way if Hillary Rodham Clinton or John McCain were giving that speech. Or if the tens of thousands of overwhelmingly white protesters on the Mall on Saturday would have assembled against a president who looked more like them.

Many black people, who have endured experiences I can’t begin to imagine, would say the answer to those questions is painfully obvious.

“Take a look at the Joe Wilson incident. There are a number of members on the Democratic side who believe George W. Bush should have been in prison, that he is a criminal, yet they didn’t disrespect him that way,” said Michael Fauntroy, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who specializes in race relations. “The disrespect that’s going on with President Obama has race woven into it.”

There is plenty about Obama for a great number of Americans to oppose that has nothing to do with his race. He has squandered a gazillion, with a G, dollars that we do not have on projects which seem devoted to enriching those who supported him in the election. He has taken a sure victory in Iraq and turned it into a closely run thing through actions which seem designed to minimize American influence while maximizing both internal dissent in Iraq and Iranian influence. His actions to date in Afghanistan can best be described as flaccid. He has attempted to destroy US industry through his disastrous cap-and-trade initiative. Etc. etc.

What we are seeing is simply a campaign to silence those of us who fervently believe that this Administration is both dangerous and incompetent. They have had their ideas savaged every time they have been brought to the attention of the American people. It should be illustrative that each and every one of Obama’s policies could be law by now, Cap and Trade, Card Check, Health Care, you name it, with Democrat votes alone. The fact that he can’t even get his party to vote for his policies should be the story, not some nonsense about opposition to Obama being linked to racism.

The reason why Obama will fail in Afghanistan and manage to create defeat out of victory in Iraq rests as much in his Hyde Park neighborhood and his close friends, terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, as it does on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq or in the embassies of nations with interests there.

Obama carries deep within his psyche the left’s disdain for the military and a conviction that military power is, if not irrelevant, at best some kind of a brutal Western Union best used to send a message. This is coupled with a deep seated suspicion of US motives and hostile to anything that builds US prestige. Paradoxically, these feelings persist even while in power so now you have the spectacle of Obama taking rather Carteresque actions like apologizing for the US left-right-and-center and treating all manner of pissant despots as the moral, economic, and political equals of the United States.
If there is any statement that has best summarized Obama’s feelings on Afghanistan it was his interview in which he proclaimed that he was worried about using the word, “victory.”

“I’m always worried about using the word victory because it evokes the notion of Emperor Hirohito [Editor’s note: who knew this happened?] coming down and signing the surrender with MacArthur. We’re not dealing with nation states at this point, we’re concerned with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s allies. So what you have is a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like al-Qaeda. Our goal is to make sure they can’t attack the United States.”

Actually, victory evokes the notion of winning. Numerous insurgencies have failed, e.g. the communists in Greece and El Salvador, non-communists in post-war Soviet Union, and none of these occasions have given rise to a formal surrender ceremony. A defeated insurgency simply withers away and disappears. How any person with pretensions to even the most modest level of intelligence would believe that a non-state actor can’t be vanquished they won’t show up at a surrender ceremony (or given Obama’s level of familiarity with American history he could have meant because the battleship USS Missouri has been decommissioned and Emperor Hirohito is dead), and why that wouldn’t be a “victory” simply leaves one reeling with disbelief.

So President Obama is confronted with a winnable war in Afghanistan. He has an experienced, combat hardened military which has demonstrated that it can not only defeat the enemy on the battlefield but deliver civil action projects to strengthen governance. He has resources available to devote to the war that President Bush did not have. He has a cadre of leaders at all levels who understand counterinsurgency like perhaps no other military in the history of warfare.

Progress is not being made because it is not in the interests of Obama’s politics that progress should be made if that progress is driven by military success. Such success would forever discredit the left’s fatuous notion that you can negotiate with killers and madmen.

We should also prepare ourselves for Obama to begin blaming his failures in Afghanistan and Iraq on the negligence of President Bush in order to set the stage for him to run against Bush again in 2012.

The latest from self avowed communist revolutionary and all around bon vivant, Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar”, Van Jones.

“You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, ‘We can’t believe it happened here. We can’t believe it’s these suburban white kids.’ It’s only them. Now, a black kid might shoot another black kid. He’s not going to shoot up the whole school.”

One would think in the universe inhabited by Van Jones, that universe where “white polluters” haul semi trucks load of toxic waste into neighborhoods occupied by “people of color”, where killing cops is a matter of civic duty, and where adhering to a political philosophy responsible for, conservatively, 100 million deaths is a logical response to LA police beating a PCP addled motorist, that some subjects would be beyond The Pale, to use that, I’m sure, racially insensitive term. Making light of school kids, regardless of their race or ethnicity, being gunned down in cold blood should probably be one of those subjects.

But a person possessing what would be thought of as a normal sense of decency would be wrong in this regard.

Ever eager to point out whitey’s misfeasance and malfeasance Van Jones thinks that school shootings say something, though heaven knows what, about white kids.

Now his statement is true as far as it goes. On the other hand this seems like a rather technical point and something of a cold comfort considering homicide is the leading cause of death among African Americans of school age and shooting up a school one kid at a time doesn’t strike me as something worth bragging about.

Speaking of Hope and Change, the Change came through in August with average hourly wages increasing by six cents, or $124.80 a year. Woo hoo, time to party like it was 1979.

Sometimes, however, things give the appearance of having gone just too far.

Such is the case with the tussling on Capitol Hill over whether or not the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) should be fielded with the engine manufactured only by one company or whether there should be an alternative engine available for the JSF. This is the type of struggle that goes on everyday on Capitol Hill and naturally the single producer, in this case the estimable firm of Pratt & Whitney, would prefer a monopoly while the competing team of G-E/Rolls Royce, also great engine manufacturers in their own right, would prefer that they had a piece of the pie. Both motivations are perfectly understandable.

What follows is a cautionary tale which illustrates the damage that can be done the reputation of a group which either actually sells its brand or casually dismisses the dangers of perceptions of conflicts of interest. This story is about a high stakes Defense procurement, the engine maker Pratt & Whitney and the watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste.

I’m a big fan of the F-35 JSF. It looks like Lockheed Martin has produced yet another winner in the tradition the F-35’s namesake, the P-38 Lightning. Unfortunately, with the election of Barack Obama a decidedly Defense-unfriendly environment has settled in on Washington. Large procurements have been slashed and smaller procurements have been canceled while astronomical sums of public money have been force fed into industries and jurisdictions that supported the Obama’s candidacy.

The F-35 is probably the most profitable new aircraft in production. Unlike the F-22 Raptor, there are no legal barriers to export sales and foreign buyers are lining up to replace aging F-16, and similar, fleets. The real money maker in the project will be the engine. Engine repairs, overhauls, and replacements will guarantee a hundred billion dollar income stream over the decades the F-35 will be in service.

Personally I am agnostic on the virtues of the Pratt & Whitney engine versus the G-E/Rolls Royce competitor. Pratt has delivered their engine on time while the G-E team is a little ahead of schedule in developing theirs (if you have an objection to a company press release as a source, the same info can be found in this Congressional report). On the other hand, the history of Pratt rushing to production with an inferior engine in the F-16 is pretty well documented and the current failures occurring in their F-135 engine leaves one wondering. I don’t make enough money to own stock in either of these companies and am merely pointing out that you have two high-end engine manufacturers competing for a crapload of money and claims on both sides need to be examined critically.

Back on March 23, 2009, Pratt & Whitney hired the advertising agency of Sullivan Higdon & Sink (SHS) as its “integrated brand experience agency of record.” According to the agency release:

SHS will begin work immediately on a series of branding efforts for Pratt & Whitney. The agency’s work will focus on the company’s space propulsion, commercial engine, military engine and power generation businesses.

On July 15, 2009, CAGW announced it was undertaking an ad campaign to kill the alternative engine and weighed into the fray with this YouTube video:

Nice ad. Or rather, nice production values.

But then something untoward happened. Intake Studio, the production house contracted by Sullivan Higdon & Sink to produce some fluff videos about the F-35 and Pratt & Whitney’s involvement updated their YouTube channel with the CAGW video. It shows the client for the CAGW as Pratt & Whitney.

Not cool.

Even by the rather malleable ethics one finds in advertising agencies (full disclosure, I was a senior VP in an agency for seven years), this leaves the salty tang of sleaze heavily in the air. It gives the impression that CAGW is participating in the advocacy equivalent of payola where a corporate donation can result in your opponent’s product or service being highlighted as waste.

And of course there is past history.

Back in 2006, the St. Petersburg Times Washington bureau chief, Bill Adair, ran a series of fairly harsh articles contending that Citizens Against Government Waste, among other groups, routinely took money from client groups, e.g. tobacco companies, Mexican avocado growers, etc., and then lobbied on their behalf under the guise of fighting government waste (the images are available at the St. Petersburg Times archives, search string “Citizens Against Government Waste”). The series is heavy on post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies and guilt by association with every third word seemingly “Abramoff”, but still it does ask some unpleasant questions.

Anyway, Bloomberg reported on the faux pas or mistake concerning the parentage of the CAGW ad and Intake Studios immediately tossed the obligatory intern under the bus.

All of this could be a series of egregious, though innocent blunders. Or not. On June 29, Pratt & Whitney issued a press release patting itself on the back for hiring SHS and puffing up their new slogan, “It’s in our power.” (Yawn.) Typical though benign corporate propaganda with little to interest anyone except for this one paragraph:

The next phase of the campaign will break in July. It will be a multimedia effort addressing a key issue in one of Pratt & Whitney’s business units, Bertels said. This phase is still in development, and Bertels was unable to provide further details.

July is when the CAGW ad was released, July is when CAGW launched its ad campaign, and not a lot of other activity is apparent on the part of SHS in July. Larger questions, however, remain hanging.

The history of the F-35 program is crystal clear. The original contract called for there to be two competing engines for the airframe. The idea was that a competition between manufacturers would drive down the cost of engine procurement and provide a more reliable and cost effective source of engines than giving one manufacturer a sole source. Some of this was probably based on the unhappy experience the Air Force had with the original Pratt & Whitney engine in the F-16. The former director of the Joint Strike Fighter program, Lieutenant General Michael Hough, and the Heritage Foundation both support the idea of a competition for the JSF engine. Given the support for this competition in the development of the JSF contract, from the program director, and from a well respected conservative think tank it is difficult to see how this has fallen into the category of “government waste” much less having risen to the level of a poster child for the practice.

To be clear, I like CAGW and the last thing I want to be accused of is producing an unfair hit piece so I contacted their Vice President for Policy, David Williams for comment.

In my view, the issues are 1) how did the development of the alternative engine for the JSF become the top priority for CAGW, 2) when and how did SHS, a smallish midwestern ad agency, become the agency of record for CAGW and 3) has Pratt & Whitney contributed money to CAGW through its corporate philanthropy program. I don’t find really adequate answers to any of the questions.

According to Mr. Williams the alternative engine program first came to the attention of CAGW in 2004 with two appropriations for the F-136, or alternative, engine program. (See the 2004 Pig Book database, select Defense, keyword F-136). It made it’s appearance again in 2008 with a $240M appropriation (See the 2008 Pig Book database, select Defense, keywords Joint Strike Fighter). While the 2004 amounts are miniscule on the scale of Defense appropriations, a concern is raised in my mind, anyway, as to why a $240M appropriation did not make the highlights in the 2008 Pig Book when it would have been the largest project listed by an order of magnitude.

Williams says that CAGW met with representatives of Pratt & Whitney and G-E/Rolls a “couple of months” after the 2009 Pig Book came out to ensure they were accurately portraying the controversy. A look at the timeline, though, shows that by June CAGW was already heavily invested in its campaign against the F-136 engine. The Pig Book was released on April 14. On April 30, CAGW issued its first press release on the controversy. By that time the ad in question would have been well on the way to completion and a decision would have already have been reached on launching the ad campaign. Any conversation between CAGW and GE at that juncture has much more the feel of a pro-forma-going-through-the-motions exercise than a real inquiry.

The reasoning behind choosing the F-136 program as an example of government waste can certainly be argued either way. As I understand their rationale, the Obama Administration and Secretary of Defense Gates have asked that the program be killed and if ever a Defense appropriation could be killed this one looked very vulnerable. While this project may put CAGW uncomfortably close to the Administration, Jack Murtha is on the other side of the argument so a lengthy shower is going to be necessary regardless of which position you support. One should also point out the fact that Secretary Gates advocates killing the alternative engine does not mean that it isn’t needed. In fact, it looks like the program director for the JSF, Marine Corps Major General David Heinz,  has been told by Gates to shut up about the perfomance of the Pratt & Whitney engine.

CAGW’s choice of a rather smallish midwestern based ad agency for their flagship advocacy campaign strikes me as strange. One thing that Washington, DC is awash in is ad and PR agencies who know lobbying and advocacy. I asked Williams about this choice and he said that CAGW had asked around and SHS was recommended to them. They were, he said, cognizant of the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest as SHS was already the agency of record for Pratt & Whitney but they felt they SHS’s familiarity with the F-136 issue would enable them to get more for their money. Certainly getting value for your dollar is on the mind of anyone who hires an ad agency and the most expensive part of the process is getting the agency up to speed on your product or issue. Having said that, signing on with Pratt & Whitney’s agency opens the door, as this case proves, to making your own credibility and veracity the issue.

The real question, of course, concerns CAGW’s financial links, if any, to Pratt & Whitney. In that regards we have no answers. Pratt & Whitney has issued a blanket “we don’t comment on our donations to advocacy groups” statement and when I asked Williams about donations from Pratt he said that CAGW respects the privacy of their donors and will not disclose them. While CAGW’s position is understandable, except arguably there is a difference between disclosing the identity of a donor and the identity of a non-donor, Pratt & Whitney’s, as a publicly traded company, is less so. I contacted GE and they have stated that GE has not made contributions to CAGW other than observing their corporate policy of matching employee contributions to valid non-profits.

The issue here is much larger than the fate of the F-136 engine program. Our movement is in crisis. We need everyone in the fight and we don’t need excess baggage weighing us down. CAGW does yeoman’s work in reporting on the misuse of our tax dollars but this particular case calls into question their strategic thinking, their priorities, and, unfortunately, their candor.

This tendency towards self-immolation by conservative groups is troubling. Some weeks back Erick reported on an pay-to-play allegation against David Keene of the American Conservative Union, and the response to Erick’s post, if I were to take it seriously, would have made me a member of the Flat Earth Society.

We paid a huge price in 2006 and 2008 for the venality of our politicians. We simply can’t afford a repeat of this in 2010. Groups who look to the conservative movement for monetary and political support must not make themselves liabilities through their own actions.