Welcome, everyone, to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble
- SITYS #7216:Fox News, yesterday [2]:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that the Bush administration had developed a new strategy on the war in Afghanistan before leaving office — a strategy that he said “bears a striking resemblance” to the one announced by President Obama in March.
In a speech to the Center for Security Policy, Cheney said the Bush administration handed Obama’s transition team a policy review of the Afghan war conducted last fall to meet the new challenges posed by the Taliban.
“They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt,” Cheney said.
Cheney’s comments countered a recent claim by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that the Obama administration had to form an Afghan war strategy from scratch because the Bush administration hadn’t asked any key questions about the war and left it “adrift.”
Well, now, let’s look at Pajamas Media and see what I said about that before Obama even took office? [3]
I dare to suggest that Mr. Bush is going to be vindicated over the next four years by President Obama himself. Vindicated not in rhetoric, since left-wing rhetoric is always and forever vitriolic against any successful Republican. No, Bush will be vindicated thanks to the policies sure to be adopted by Mr. Obama and the Democrat-run Senate, House, and State Dept.
I make this assessment based on the proposition that President Obama is a pragmatist at heart. He goes with what works to keep himself in power. One cannot, after all, be such an astute manager of his own spectacle without being in large part a pragmatist.
If we accept the lessons of history, in this case the Clinton administration, Democrats have learned how to change political reality. They have learned how to alter the perception they are on the run from an unruly mob, into one that suggests what is really going on is that there is a parade — one that they are leading. Finding in their pragmatism something that works and that someone else has offered, and then getting out in front of it as if it was their plan to begin with. This has been their big talent for the last 20 years or so.
Indeed, it is Obama who apparently is doing the most in terms of recognizing (the far left’s bleeding anti-Bush vitriol notwithstanding) that Mr. Bush didn’t do that bad of a job after all. He’s adopting the vast majority of his anti-terrorism and economic policies (i.e., the bailout plans).
Jules Crittenden looks at this whole thing and quips [4]:
Funny, I was just reading Steve Huntley’s Chicago Sun-Times column [5] about all the things Obama and his people keep saying they inherited from Bush. A viable Afghan war strategy … never mind a pacified, Saddam-free Iraq … is not one of them.
Yeah, well… did you really expect them to admit such things? No, instead we’ll see claims that the Republicans didn’t care about Afghanistan. [6] Are you starting to understand this yet, America?
- THE DOLLAR AS RESERVE CURRENCY: [7]Drezner thinks the dollar isn’t going to be leaving that role. [7] I have my concerns, but in the near term I think he’s right. Of course, there is still the possibility of a second term for Obama, right?
- “CASH FOR CLINKERS” AND THE LAW OF UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES: Looks like the only real effect of that misbegotten mess was to create a situation where good used cars are hard to find. [8] Billy was right when he talked about such destruction. Of course getting you out of good cheap cars and onto government run mass transport was the very nub of the thing, wasn’t it?
- OATH ON THE CONSTITUTION NOT ON A MAN: Speaking of Billy, here he goes: [9]
“We swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a man, even if he makes a thrill run up your leg when he talks.”
Allegedly cracked upon the appalling nitwit Chris Matthews by one Stewart Rhodes.
Even accounting for the goddamned nonsense in the United States Constitution (listen up, kids: the Commerce Clause does not describe a condition of freedom — can you bloody understand that?), that’s well done. I’ll be interested to see the video.
- CAN YOU SPOT THE RACISTS? All MSNBC has to do is look in the mirror. [11]
- BITSBLOG BUMPER STCKER OF THE DAY: Today’s visual giggle has a point to make, and comes to us by way of Don Surber:
[1]
[12]