The White House sent Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton out on Sunday morning to do a set of joint interviews on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and This Week. (Fox had to settle for Gen. Petraeus. CNN got Jim Jones.) After his address to the nation on healthcare reform, Obama himself made the rounds on Sunday morning. I’m inclined to think that the President didn’t want to face the music this time, since there are so many contradictions in his policy and public statements for the interviewers...

If you don’t read Shadow Government, you should. It’s a blog written by a lot of very smart people who held significant positions in the Bush administration. (No, that isn’t a contradiction, wiseguy.) Shadow Gov’s recent posts focus (naturally) on Afghanistan. One very interesting question comes from Peter Feaver — Did Obama’s speech give us any sense of why it took him three months to come up with any Afghanistan policy that was barely different from the one...

AFGHANISTAN: A GOP TWOFER? David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee has introduced a war tax bill. “As presidential historian Robert Dallek reminds us, ‘war kills off great reform movements’,” Obey said, noting that World War I ended the Progressive Era, Korea ended Harry Truman’s Fair Deal and Vietnam ended Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Now, I know that’s supposed to be an argument against sending more troops to Afghanistan, but if you’re a Republican,...

As if you need me to say what I think about this. Almost the equal of MoveOn’s “General Betray-us”. Original image here. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Live-blogging below. Bottom line here: The President was crystal clear about why we are sending more troops to Afghanistan. We were attacked on 9/11. If the Taliban take back Afghanistan, Al Qaeda will come back with them. America’s security is directly at stake. Right now, we only have enough troops for a stalemate, not for success. How will our military strategy change in Afghanistan? What will the mission be of our 30,000 additional troops? The President offered a couple of nods to...

The front page of the Washington Post has already announced that 34,000 new troops will deploy to Afghanistan. The front page of the NY Times says “about 30,000″. So tonight’s speech isn’t about the decision Obama has made. It’s about how he will justify it to his own party and to the American people. Here are five things to listen for: 1. “A war of necessity” Obama made those words famous. Will we hear them again tonight? If it is a war of necessity,...

Kagan & Kristol: Some conservatives are arguing that President Obama’s weakness and indecision forecast American failure–and that, if we’re going to fail, we should just get out now… Some Republicans are understandably dismayed at the prospect of supporting a war they worry this president is incapable of prosecuting with sufficient vigor or conviction. They argue that keeping faith with the troops requires rejecting any halfhearted approach. They are right that Americans...

Moore has penned an open letter to President Obama, begging him not to send more troops to Afghanistan. And just in time — with all the talk about Lou Dobbs and the rest, the heartland was beginning to forget that the left bows to no one in its willingness to anoint an ignorant loudmouth as its beloved champion. Here’s some of my favorite passages from Moore’s letter: Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are...

Andrew Exum, aka Abu Muqawama, has announced that he will be dramatically scaling back his blogging. Exum is a very serious analyst of military issues and his daily presence will be missed. From the comments on his post, you can get a sense of how much he is respected. So why is Exum quitting? He writes: Blogging forces me into more or less split-second reactions to complicated policy events before I have had the opportunity to research and weigh opposing views. In addition, the AD/HD nature of...

I told you I was Going Rogue and going to write about it. The story of Sarah Palin’s political life begins in Wasilla. Last fall, adversaries mocked her as a one-year governor and two-term mayor of a small town in Alaska. But what did being mayor of Wasilla mean to Palin? How it did shape her politics? Reading a political memoir, you don’t expect to get much more than one side of any given story. But I want to know how Gov. Palin understands Wasilla. For Palin, her time as mayor...

In case you missed this editorial on the Arab-Israeli peace process, condescending titled “Diplomacy 101″: The president’s promising peace initiative has unraveled… The Israelis have refused to stop all building. The Palestinians say that they won’t talk to the Israelis until they do, and President Mahmoud Abbas is so despondent he has threatened to quit. Arab states are refusing to do anything. Mr. Obama’s own credibility is so diminished (his approval rating in Israel...

Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard writes about his effort to have a zero-carbon footprint. It literally involved smearing mayonnaise on his face. Go read! Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

David Gregory pointed to this Presidential declaration from July: PRES. BARACK OBAMA: We are–we’ve been under the illusion that the more health care we get, the healthier we become. And it turns out that every study shows that the question is are you getting the right care, are you getting the best care, the high quality care; rather than are you having a whole bunch of tests ordered that are unnecessary, getting a bunch of treatments that are unnecessary, staying in hospitals longer...

I’d like to think I am one of very, very few customers who bought both Going Rogue and Eating Animals as part of the same order from Amazon. What could be more inconsistent than buying an anti-factory farming polemic and the autobiography of a woman who asserts that every animal has place — right next to your mashed potatoes? What will Amazon now recommend for me? Books on cognitive dissonance? Anyhow, some initial thoughts on both books: I don’t expect politicians to write fair...

I first got to know Phil Carter as a blogger, rather than an attorney, a Iraq war veteran or the director of the Obama campaign’s outreach to veterans. Until this week, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy. Or as the NY Times put it: Official charged with closing Guantanamo quits. The Times hints that Carter’s departure had to do with the failure meet the Gitmo closure deadline: Mr. Carter’s departure comes as the administration has acknowledged...

I certainly didn’t expect to hear this from the liberal super-pundit and former Secretary of Labor. This is from ABC: REICH: I agree with Liz. I think that — that in preparation for this trip [to China], as in many others, even the trip to Europe to try to sell Chicago as the Olympics, there needs to be more thought about the appearance of weakness or strength that may come out of the trip. But I want to go back to, George, your point, because I think the big issue over the next 10 years...

Jackson Diehl: [After months of deliberation in 2006], no one accused George W. Bush of dithering. So why does Barack Obama keep hearing the taunt as he deliberates about Afghanistan — and why do even some who sympathize with his dilemma find it hard to shake the feeling that this commander in chief lacks resolve? One part of the answer is easy: Bush was renowned for summoning plenty of resolve, and not enough critical thinking. No one questioned that Bush’s heart was in his bid for...

Andrew Sullivan informs his readers that he is taking a brief pause to pore over Sarah Palin’s new book: Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin’s unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning – specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy – we feel it’s vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything...

On Monday, Think Progress trashed liberal pundit Mark Shields for allegedly saying, with regard to Obama’s patience on Afghanistan, [It] makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection. Kevin Drum read TP’s post and seconded the motion, albeit with more circumspection and less vitriol. But to his credit, Kevin read the...

From the Weekly Standard: Republicans need to point out that Obama’s economic policies aren’t working. But they need to resist appearing to relish bad news for the country on Obama’s watch. When rising unemployment numbers come out, there is occasionally an unseemly sense of celebration in the emails that come from various GOP offices. More in sorrow than in joy, more in confirmation than in vindication–that should be the Republican mood as the news of Obama’s failures,...

A “dog warning card” arrived with my mail today. Thanks to a New Jersey branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, you can see the form online. The form provides invaluable advice, such as “Do not deliver mail if you feel endangered by an animal.” For a better understanding of the threats faced by America’s letter carriers, I recommend the following passage from The Postal Employee’s Guide to Safety (August 2006 edition), Section IX D: Animals and...

Monday NY Times, Page 1: Every time Mr. Obama declares that the United States will not have an “open-ended” military commitment in Afghanistan, he fuels a second concern of the powerful Pakistani military and intelligence establishment, which believes the United States commitment is fleeting. It is a concern that some of them say justifies Pakistan’s continuing ties to the militants who fight American troops in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to fuel this concern...

“Having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently. I feel like this may be a license for mis-behavior. (If you’re interested in the context of Rabbi Schochet’s remark, click here.) Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

No, that’s not a serious prediction. My real point is about Republicans getting too excited about thrashing the Democrats in 2010. Sure, that’s what I’d like to see. But remember what happened during Reagan’s first term? That precedent has been on my mind, so I was glad to see that Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts were thinking along the same lines. Here’s their exchange from Sunday morning: SAM DONALDSON: …[Reagan's] popularity went down to 37 percent, at...

Kevin Drum praises Jonah Goldberg for resisting the impulse to call Nidal Malik Hasan a terrorist. A traitor? A murderer? Sure. But not a terrorist. The strange thing is that liberals assume they should be against labeling Hasan a terrorist and conservatives assume they should be for it. That makes a certain amount of sense. Liberals fear exaggerated threats. Conservatives fear threats that are ignored. But wouldn’t the Afghanistan doves want Hasan to be a terrorist? Then they can say...