The Agents of Operation Chaos Trounce The Agents Of Change

Sphere: Related Content

No wonder Hillary Clinton thinks Rush Limbaugh has a crush on her. If not for El Rushbo Hillary would probably have gotten up this morning as a former presidential candidate. Oh, she stands no chance of getting the nomination of course but her narrow win in Indiana last night left enough wind in her sails that ditching the vessel at this point would damage that image of being her being a "fighter" that she has tried so hard to develop and which she'll need as, no matter what happens this year, her eyes remain fixed on the prize.

And Operation Chaos, which the msm has sneered at and heckled has proven to be a huge success. Even the Obama campaign is acknowledging as much,

Barack Obama’s campaign issued an e-mail on Tuesday night that appeared to relegate Hillary Clinton’s lead in Indiana to efforts by Rush Limbaugh to wreak havoc in the Democratic presidential primary contest.

In an e-mail entitled “The Limbaugh Effect in Indiana = 7 percent,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton wrote: “According to the latest exit polling data, 17 percent of voters in the Indiana primary today said they would vote for John McCain in a Clinton/McCain match-up. Forty-one percent of that number is constituted by people who voted Clinton in the primary but also indicated they will vote for McCain in the general election. That comes out to just under 7 percent of the primary electorate the number that may be attributed to a Limbaugh Effect.”

Rush, of course spells out the true dimensions of Operation Chaos' impact best:

RUSH: Three times in the last 12 hours, maybe 18 hours, three times in the last 18 hours, the Obama campaign has said, most recently in a conference call with reporters about 20 minutes ago, that the only reason Mrs. Clinton won Indiana was because of me and Operation Chaos. They have the numbers to back it up. The Obama campaign putting out the number that Operation Chaos was responsible for 7%, she got a seven-point bump as a result of Operation Chaos. They made that point again today in a conference call. On that conference call, the haughty John Kerry, Senator from Massachusetts who served in Vietnam, also made this point to the reporters on the Obama conference call.

KERRY: If it hadn't been for Republicans taking Democratic ballots, he likely would have won in Indiana, too. So you have -- really there's no masquerade now. Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary, and the GOP has clearly declared that they want Hillary Clinton as the candidate.

RUSH: Senator Kerry and those of you in the Obama campaign, first off, Operation Chaos has nothing to do with the Republican Party. The Republican Party hasn't the guts to do Operation Chaos. Were there no Operation Chaos, the Republican Party would not have a plan. But I am not affiliated with the Republican Party here, sir, and the rest of you in the Drive-By Media and in the Obama campaign, Operation Chaos had nothing to do and to this day has nothing to do with seeing to it that Hillary Clinton was the Democrat Party nominee. Operation Chaos began when it was a fait accompli that the nominee would be Obama. But because Senator McCain and the Republican Party refuse to enter this campaign and be critical of Obama because they're afraid of racial charges, it was up to somebody to bloody up Obama politically, and that had to be Clinton. Who else could it be? Operation Chaos thus was born to keep Mrs. Clinton in the race, and it worked. Obama has been bloodied, the superdelegates are refusing to talk to her today. They don't want to meet with her today, but she has an ace-in-the-hole, and that's the superdelegates in Florida and Michigan. Those delegations, she controls the committee that will determine the outcome of Florida and Michigan. So this is not over.

Could it have been more perfect? Had Obama won in a landslide, Operation Chaos would have been mocked by those who live to mock your host. But I had courage, and I took the great political risk, the career risk, knowing full well that if Operation Chaos could have been minimized in any way, it would have been, and once again the cycle would repeat and the Drive-Bys would once again claim this program irrelevant. Had Hillary won in a blowout in Indiana, Operation Chaos would have been relegated to a token split-screen debate: "Was or wasn't Operation Chaos a factor?" But this cliff hanger, this 2% margin, this 20,000 vote difference, there can be no doubt that the difference was indeed Operation Chaos. I'm watching last night the returns, and I receive an e-mail blast, the first of two that went out last night from the Obama campaign: Bill Burton blaming me and Operation Chaos. The first one around 7:50, I think, the next one came around 10:50, and that blast at 10:50 from the Obama campaign to all the political reporters covering this campaign, said, "Limbaugh has to be responsible for this." It was Republicans, and the exit polls show that 65% of conservative Republicans voted Hillary, 53% of Republicans voted Hillary. There can be no question here, despite the Drive-Bys' attempt to downplay it, and there are some who are doing that. But that second blast went out about 10:50, and it established that as far as the Obama campaign is concerned, Operation Chaos was worth a seven-point bump to Mrs. Clinton.

In a year when Republicans have every reason to be demoralized, Operation Chaos has actually thrown real enthusiasm into conservative ranks by sewing discord among the Dems and allowing time and circumstances to start to reveal the Dems in ways that, if Obama had taken this race earlier, the msm would never have done.

And, needless to say the Left is not happy with the wildly successful Operation Chaos. From the Huffington Post:

How can you not love a guy who 's got enemies this vile? We all owe Rush a debt of gratitude...again.

Allahpundit at Hot Air also talks about OC

Ed Driscoll also gets Chaotic

The Sound Of Laughter

Sphere: Related Content

It has, of course ended in embarrassment. Jimmy Carter's trip into the heart of darkness, the upper councils of the terrorist organization Hamas is, blessedly over, and Carter has added yet another humiliation to his resume. The very idea of the trip was derided across the political spectrum but Carter, a man possessing a capacity of nearly diagnosable self-delusion, listens only to his own historically bad counsel went any way. The results were foreordained:

JERUSALEM — Just hours after former President Jimmy Carter trumpeted Hamas' agreement to let Israel "live as a neighbor," the same terrorist leader he met with face-to-face vowed not to recognize the Jewish state.

But Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal did offer Israel a 10-year truce if it withdraws from all lands it seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The offer is, of course a fraud as it is provisional, depending on it being

...approved in a Palestinian referendum, or by a Palestinian government chosen in new elections.

The likelihood of this happening is about as good as Osama bin Laden becoming the next editor of The Weekly Standard. Add in the idea that Israel would agree to pull back to its 1967 borders, which it refuses to do for security and political reasons and you have a "deal" which is simply not serious.

Carter's sole accomplishment in this whole embarrassing spectacle is to grant Hamas a bit of credibility that an organization whose stock in trade is murder does not deserve. Carter may think the sound he hears coming from some quarters is applause when in fact it is laughter. The man who history was once going to regard merely as America's most incompetent president has seen to it that a few more pages will have to be added to accommodate the fact that he is America's worst ex-President as well.

Common Sense Political Thought has something to say on the matter, too.
And so does Blogmiester USA

Jimmy Carter: Bad President, Bad Man

Sphere: Related Content

It is, of course undeniable that Jimmy Carter is a legend. Few Presidents have failed so monumentally as he. He brought us the first of the modern Islamofascist regimes when he ushered in the Ayotollah Khomeini in Iran. He devestated the American economy with faux oil shortages, he made accusations of American malaise (when the only malaise the American people felt was caused by his being in office), he brought 12% rate of inflation, 20% interest rates, a hostage crisis and on and on and on.

His post-Presidency has been equally illustrious and author Steven F. Hayward documented all the damage Carter has done both during and after his term in office in "The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry"

When it comes to the belligerence of North Korea, Carter's past involvement has done considerable damage. In the early 1990s, Carter traveled to North Korea on another of his "peacekeeping missions" and brokered a deal with dictator Kim Il Sung. He did so without the blessing of the Clinton administration, although, at the behest of then-Vice President Al Gore, President Clinton later agreed to adopt Carter's deal. The United States ended up providing aid, oil and, incredibly, material for building light-water nuclear reactors to the North Koreans in exchange for their abandoning their nuclear weapons program. The problem is they didn't abandon their nuclear weapons program; they just said they did. And in 2002, they admitted as much. Still, to this day, Carter claims that his approach was a success and that it was President Bush's inclusion of North Korea in the famous "axis of evil" speech that led to current leader Kim Jong Il's hostility toward America.

The fruits of Carter's history with Iran are even more rotten. Carter's abandonment of the shah in 1977-78 helped lead to the Islamic revolution (and the murder or imprisonment of many of the Iranian leftists who had supported overthrowing the shah), the emboldening of the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan and the rise of radical Islam worldwide. His botched approach to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 inspired Islamic terrorists all over the world, culminating in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The threat of nuclear war emanating from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can be seen as another offshoot of Carter's ineffective policies. Predictably, Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his former national security adviser, are now pushing for "direct talks" with Iran. But considering the abject failure of U.N.-brokered negotiations (supported by the Bush administration) thus far, it is difficult to imagine how U.S.-led negotiations would fare any better.

Wherever U.S. interests have been imperiled and a temporary "peace" could be bought at the expense of long-term security, Carter has always been on board. The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed it up when he said of Carter in 1980, "Unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has essentially adopted our enemies' view of the world."

Not satisfied with this level of disgraceful behavior Carter has pushed on to new heights of awfulness. His anti-semitism, which hitherto managed to elude most of the mainstream media during his Presidency (His Secretary of State once famously said that if Carter had had a second term, he would have "sold Israel down the river." ) has lately taken center stage. His recent book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid raised such a furor with what many considered to be its blatant anti-Semitism that fourteen members of his own Carter Center resigned in protest.

So it is not surprising that today this news comes:

JERUSALEM – The Hamas terrorist organization has confirmed to WND plans are in the works for former President Jimmy Carter to meet the chief of Hamas on a trip this month to Syria.

Sources in the Gaza Strip office of Ismail Haniyeh, the deposed prime minister of the Hamas-led Palestinian government, confirmed Hamas is in talks with Carter's representatives about setting up a meeting during his trip, scheduled for later this month.

The Hamas sources said no concrete date has been set but that Carter has expressed interest in meeting Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal, who resides in Syria.

In a statement to Fox News today, Carter's press secretary, Deanna Congileo, did not deny the former president was slated to meet Meshaal.

"President Carter is planning a trip to the Mideast next week; however, we are still confirming details of the trip and will issue a press release by the end of this week," Congileo said. "I cannot confirm any specific meetings at this point in time."

Earlier, Ahmed Yousuf, Hamas' top political adviser in the Gaza Strip, claimed to WND he wasn't aware of any Carter-Meshaal meeting.

"I don't know anything about any such meeting," said Yousuf, who advises Haniyeh.

Israeli security officials say Meshaal is responsible for coordinating all elements of Hamas and for calling for many of its major terror attacks.

Hamas is listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization. The group is responsible for scores of deadly suicide bombings, and thousands of shooting attacks and rocket firings against civilian population centers.

Just today, Hamas-allied gunmen took part in the deadly shooting of two Israeli civilians near the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

FoxNews.com quoted a State Department spokesman in Washington stating the U.S. government is concerned about Carter's unsanctioned trip to Syria, which the Bush administration has been trying to isolate.

"The State Department has expressed our concerns and advised President Carter that past engagement with the Syrian regime has not produced positive results," the spokesman said.

If the meeting with Hamas takes place, Carter would be the highest-level American to meet with Hamas.

The evidence is in. The jury is back. The verdict is certain: Jimmy Carter wasn't just a bad President. He's a bad man.

Fred Kagan Explains The World

Sphere: Related Content

American Enterprise Institute resident scholar and one of the major architects of the current Iraq surge Fred Kagan has written a a lengthy piece for NRO Why Iraq Matters, Talking back to anti-war party talking points.


It's probably a good thing that moonbats everywhere already see him as Rudolph Hess to Bush's Hitler as Kagan apologetically faces down many of the anti-war Left's arguments against the Iraq war and this article would certainly put a bullseye on his forehead, if it weren't already permanently affixed there by the Moveon.org Left.

He comes out of the gate, both guns blazing and letting the war's opponents know that their ever-changing reasons for pulling out would have real world ramifications:

Yes, in the world as it is, whatever line we sell ourselves, there really is victory and there really is defeat, the two are different, and their effects on the future diverge profoundly. And yes, the reason we must continue to spend money and the lives of the very best Americans in that far-off land is that the interests of every American are actually at stake.

He makes no effort to disguise his distaste for the Left's cynicism.

The antiwar party rather gleefully seized upon recent Iraqi Security Forces operations against Sadr’s militia and other illegal gangs as proof of this — the general glee with which the antiwar party has greeted any setback in Iraq is extremely distasteful and unseemly, whatever domestic political benefits they believe they will receive from those setbacks.

And then he begins to dismantle their arguments. He dispatches the "The War Cost Too Much" mantra by comparing Iraq War costs with the costs of previous wars.

Military spending in World War II ranged from 17.8 percent of GDP to 37.5 percent; in Korea from 5.0 percent (in 1950 — 7.4 percent in 1951) to 14.2 percent; in Vietnam from 7.4 percent to 9.4 percent. Current expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars bring total defense expenditures to something well below 5 percent of GDP. Even granting the simplistic and misleading $3 trillion figure, $3 trillion is about 5 percent of the nearly $60 trillion American GDP over the five years of the war.

He also deals with the related complaint that "The war has caused the upcoming recession" with ease as well.

Defense spending as a percentage of total federal spending is now around 20 percent. In World War II, it ranged from 73 percent to 89.5 percent; in Korea it ranged from 32.2 percent (1950 — 51.8 percent in 1951) to 69.5 percent; and in Vietnam from 42.8 percent to 46 percent. In more context: at the height of spending on this war, defense spending was only 12.3 percent of all public spending (including federal, state, and local expenditures); in World War II the high was 82.1 percent; in Korea, 52.5 percent; and in Vietnam 31.3 percent.

And he puts the lie to the assertion that "High gas prices are the result of the war — and ending the war would lower gas prices."

Oil prices do not rise because American forces are in the Middle East — they rise because of instability and fighting in the Middle East. One of the most dramatic increases in oil prices in history occurred during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when no American forces were present.

One of the arguments that I've always found to be most insincere coming from the Left is their programmed, "We're spending money on X "that would otherwise be spent on more important domestic programs. "

In the real world, there is no way that even a Democratic Congress would spend $100 billion a year in non-offset emergency authorizations for education or health care, even if some war critics think that they would like it to do so. As for increasing domestic spending, those who believe that we should raise taxes and spend more money on domestic programs can still advocate that policy, whatever its wisdom. This isn’t an argument about the cost of the war — it’s an argument about whether we want to have higher taxes to pay for increased domestic spending.

He goes on and on like this, puncturing holes in the Left's varied arguments, revealing them to be the political showthings that most of them are rather than thoughtful, reasoned arguments. The only area in which I think his argument goes weak is in addressing the Arab World's readiness for democracy. He holds up various modern states and populations as examples of how well Muslims can function under democratic rule. There are problems with all of his examples. Indonesia is hardly an example of a stable, long-lived democracy. Any discussion of Muslims in Europe being an example of how easily they can adapt to Western-style democratic ideals just doesn't pass the sniff test. If Kagan were to visit some of the Parisian suburbs or London's mosques he might rethink using these as examples of how ready Muslims are to enter the "Free World". The one example he gives that might have some legs is Turkey, but there are stresses in that country too that might yet cause Kagan to reconsider his confidence.

Of all the arguments the Left uses to attack the war, the above may be their best and seems to demand more attention than the President's "All men yearn for freedom" talk indicates that it is getting. But this argument would change the whole complexion of the Left's anti-war rationales, requiring a good faith effort to develop strategies to assist the Muslim World to reform itself into a more modern form. The Left doesn't want that. They want George W. Bush destroyed. They want him to lose and if it means (as of course it would) that America loses too, that's fine with them.

Kagan points out why their arguments are as insubstantial as their motivations. His article is well worth reading.

Iraq v. Mahdi Army - The Real Story

Sphere: Related Content

The recent stories about the battles between Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Iraqi Army, in which al-Sadr was declared the victor despite calling for a ceasefire are starting to fall apart. Intuitively it just seemed wrong that al-Sadr was laying down his arms when he was supposedly giving the Iraqi government a shellacking. Well chalk one up for intuition. According to a Center for Threat Awareness symposium Iraq v. Mahdi Army (hat tip to NRO's The Tank) the media (surprise!) got it wrong.

Bill Roggio, Military Operations analyst of The Long War Journal: On March 25, the Iraqi security forces, under the command of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, launched Operation Knights Assault against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-back Shia terror groups in the port city of Basrah. The Iraqi forces met stiff resistance in Basrah as the whole of Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army rushed to fight the security forces. A brigade from the Iraqi Army apparently cracked under the offensive, and about 500 soldiers “underperformed or defected” along with about 400 police. The Iraqi brigade was only five weeks out of training; it is the Army’s newest formation.

The Iraqi military immediately began rushing forces into Basrah; about 7,000 soldiers, special forces, and SWAT units were moved to Basrah to join the fight. Meanwhile Mahdi Army forces attacked in Baghdad and the wider South. US and Iraqi forces killed nearly 200 Mahdi fighters in Baghdad The Iraqi security forces quickly restored security in the cities of Najaf, Karbala, Hillah, Diwaniyah, Nasiriyah, Al Kut, and Amarah with minimal US assistance.

Just as the new Iraqi forces began to arrive in Basrah and US and British forces were gearing up to augment the Iraqi military, Muqtada al Sadr, under orders from Iran’s Qods Force, called for his fighters to withdraw from the streets. Sadr issued a nine-point list of demands, which included that operations cease. Maliki refused and Iraqi and US forces continued to move into Basrah and conduct pinpoint raids against Shia terror groups. More than 200 Mahdi Army fighters were killed, 700 were wounded, and 300 captured during the six days of fighting in Basrah alone.

Maliki has said the military will continue to operate against the Mahdi Army, and US and Iraqi forces have kept Sadr City and Shula in Baghdad under curfew. Forces have been reported to be slowly moving into the Mahdi Army stronghold.

In other words, despite taking some punishment from al-Sadr's army the Iraqi forces pressed (and continue to press) onward. They now have control of the valuable Basran seaports. It seems that the press was too willing to buy the rather unlikely scenario that at the moment when he was looking victory in the eye al-Sadr was choosing negotiations instead.

It would be easy to blame this very large error on journalistic bias against the war and no doubt this played a part. But even more evenhanded outlets (Fox News) seemed to buy the erroneous interpretation of what happened. The Center for Threat Awareness (CTA) makes a reasonable suggestion about how to prevent or at least lessen such poor reporting in the future:

“Do we want to lose?” That is a question believed by many to unfortunately be perhaps less than rhetorical in nature. We at the Center for Threat Awareness have long held that the American public would be much better served and more accurately informed if we had more military veterans in a journalistic operation rather than journalism veterans in a military operation.

The media no doubt is looking forward to General Petraeus' testimony before Congress this week to watch members of that body slam the General on the recent escalation of violence in Iraq. Petraeus has a better story to tell than Democrats would like to hear. It will be interesting to see how honestly that story is told by the press.

My Next Read

Sphere: Related Content

Stanley Kurtz over on NRO's The Corner points out what looks to be a good, informative read. The book, Culture and Conflict In The Middle East by Philip Carl Salzman is an answer to the late Palestinian academic Edward Said's theory of "Oreintalism" which places much of the blame for the current problems of the Middle East squarely at the door of US and Israeli policy decisions.

Salzman refutes this conception of the causes of current terrorism by focusing on Middle Eastern tribal culture with Islam as only a part of a greater cultural milieu. The idea of tribalism is generally alien to Western thought so it is easy to see how it can be relegated to a minor role in Arab affairs but it is, in fact central as can be seen regularly in Afghanistan and Iraq most notably, today.

Kurtz has a nice review here that should whet your appetite. It did mine and I look forward to finding out more about a perspective that is out of fashion and generally little noticed in the West.

First The Bill, Then The Change

Sphere: Related Content

We can learn a lot about people by the words they use. In the Democratic presidential debate that took place on January 5, the word “change” was uttered 65 times by the candidates and moderator.

They touted their experience in “making change”, how they “delivered change”, that they represented “significant change” and would bring “real change”. At one point Senator Hillary Clinton said that for 35 years she has been an “Agent of CHANGE” (caps mine) (a turn of phrase that conjures disturbing images of the former First Lady tooling around in a classic Aston Martin, while unleashing all manner of clever gadgets at all the nefarious enemies of CHANGE before announcing they’d been brought low by “Clinton, Hillary Clinton”).

From all this one idea shines through, brightly: this “change” thing is hot stuff. Obviously everybody wants it, wants a lot of it and wants it now. But I wonder…is change, in and of itself, necessarily good?

Since the past is frequently instructive in answering such questions I decided to revisit the outcomes of situations where “the people” demanded change and got it. Following is a very abbreviated history of political change:

· In 1917 the Russian people, dissatisfied with their chronic poverty, food shortages and out-of-touch autocracy, overthrew it and brought into existence the Soviet Union. This certainly was change writ large. This change was then followed by seventy-plus years of political repression (including the forced starvation of ten million Ukrainians), economic stagnation and a Cold War that for forty years threatened to lead to nuclear incineration for all of humanity.

· In 1933 with Germany reeling economically, socially and politically after its defeat in WWI and the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles under which it was forced to exist, change was obviously needed and Adolph Hitler became chancellor promising to deliver it. This change was then followed by WWII, the Holocaust and the deaths of twenty-plus millions of people.

· In 1976, the American people, angry at President Gerald Ford for pardoning the corrupt Richard Nixon voted for change and elected Jimmy Carter. This change led to gas shortages, a 12% rate of inflation, a 7.5% unemployment rate, a hostage crisis and the triumph of Islamic radicalism in Iran.

Of course political change also led (in no particular order) to the election of Ronald Reagan, American economic and spiritual renewal, the collapse of the aforementioned Soviet Union and American Revolution. So it would seem that the history of political “change” is a checkered one indeed and that “change” is positive only insofar as the kind of change that is being brought.

While apparently trying to turn “change” into some sort of mystical mantra the recitation alone of which shows their worthiness, the Democratic candidates haven’t totally ignored why they feel change is needed and the type of change they plan to bring. Senator Barak Obama has said and the others agree that Americans have lost their trust and confidence in government. Of course believing this to be true it is somewhat odd that the Democratic party-line on this is that the answer to it is more government. All the Democratic candidates are throbbing in anticipation of having the federal government take over health care, take more of our money in new taxes and basically do more of what they believe the American people feel the government doesn’t do very well in the first place. Hillary Clinton has made it known that she has more ideas for government than we “can afford”, a much more honest and bold admission than can be found in the Pavlovian chanting of “Change!” in response to every question.

After understanding the uselessness of the bald notion of “change” maybe it would be better if, every time a politician tries to hypnotize us into thinking the future will be rosy because they’ve got “change” in their hip pockets we asked them how much the bill will be instead. After all, there could well be a big cost for the change they plan to give us in return.