The Discerning Texan

Skip CNN's self-inflicted wounds, and save your outrage for the doyenne of the White House press gaggle. Helen Thomas decided to get her feelings about the American military out into the open today:

Q Why should we depend on him?

MS. PERINO: Because he is the commander on the ground, Helen. He's the one who is making sure that the situation is moving —

Q You mean how many more people we kill?

MS. PERINO: Helen, I find it really unfortunate that you use your front row position, bestowed upon you by your colleagues, to make such statements. This is a — it is an honor and a privilege to be in the briefing room, and to suggest that we, at the United States, are killing innocent people is just absurd and very offensive.

Q Do you know how many we have since the start of this war?

MS. PERINO: How many — we are going after the enemy, Helen. To the extent that any innocent Iraqis have been killed, we have expressed regret for it.

Q Oh, regret. It doesn't bring back a life.

MS. PERINO: Helen, we are in a war zone, and our military works extremely hard to make sure that everyone has the opportunity for liberty and freedom and democracy, and that is exactly what they are doing.

I'm going to move on.

So should Thomas' employer -- and should have 30 years ago, when she was last coherent.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Host Indicted, Clinton Fund-Raiser Canceled

Mary Jacoby reports on the presidential race.

A Dec. 15 fund-raising event for Hillary Clinton at the home of prominent Mississippi trial lawyer Richard “Dickie” Scruggs is off, now that Scruggs has been indicted for bribery.

Bill Clinton was set to be the star attraction at the event at Scruggs’s Oxford, Miss., home. Hillary Clinton wasn’t scheduled to attend. It was the first event that Scruggs, who made a fortune suing the tobacco industry in the 1990s, had offered to host for Clinton, a campaign spokesman said.

It was canceled on Wednesday, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided his home and the federal indictment was announced…

Over the years, Scruggs has been a generous donor to Democrats, but he’s also given money to Republican candidates. He gave $4,200 to Clinton’s Senate campaign in 2005 but hadn’t made a donation yet to her presidential bid. Scruggs’s brother-in-law is Sen. Trent Lott (R., Miss.), who just announced his intention to leave the Senate before the end of the year.

Federal prosecutors in Mississippi have alleged that Scruggs tried to pass a $40,000 bribe to a state-court judge who was hearing a dispute between Scruggs and another lawyer over fees related to Hurricane Katrina litigation. Four others were indicted as well, including Scruggs’s son, Zachary, and another lawyer in the Scruggs law firm…

Will there be anyone connected to the Clintons who isn’t in jail by election day?

Congressional Democrats pose a bigger threat than al-Qaeda.

Having done nothing this year on the budget, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi decided to take a 2-week vacation to rest up from doing nothing.

They left Washington without even passing an Iraq funding bill for the president to veto.

Mind you, 5 years ago a Democratic Senate voted to authorize this war. Reid and half of this Democratic colleagues approved. Now, having placed troops in harm’s way, Reid and a Democratic Congress want to cut of the funding for the troops.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is scrambling to reconfigure his budget so that he can send the money to Iraq and Afghanistan that Reid refuses to send.

At Fort Hood on Monday, Gates said: “An immediate challenge the Defense Department faces is the ongoing delay in the Congress over the war funding bill.

“The facts are simple. Without these funds, Army operations and maintenance accounts will be exhausted by mid-February, and similar Marine Corps accounts about a month later.

“We cannot wait until mid-February to figure out how to deal with the consequences of these accounts running dry.

“For example, under certain of our contracts, civilian employees must be notified sixty days in advance of a furlough, and that means mid-December.

“We’re not trying to scare anyone, or play politics. That’s not the way I do business. But I am responsible for prudent management and planning. And that means prior planning just in case we don’t get this funding in a bill that this President will sign.

I cannot put into words how much I detest this despicable group of TRAITORS. Yes I used that word, and yes I mean it in every sense of the definition:

Read the rest here.

[...] Last night's fiasco was so thorough that it will take a while to settle in just how damaging it was to CNN's reputation as a news organization. From the awful judgment displayed with the opening guitar serenade through the preposterous selection of topics and questions right to the stark reality that CNN either was easily and completely manipulated by the Dems with planted question after planted question or were totally complicit in the hijacking of a Republican debate designed to serve Republican primary voters about who ought to be the Republican nominee. The network is either incompetent in a way no serious news organization should be, or wholly captured by agenda journalists of the left.

No serious anchor would want to be where [Anderson] Cooper is today, at the center of a vast train wreck which cannot be explained away as the inevitable result of the sudden appearance of big news in a difficult setting, as with hysterical Katrina coverage of bodies stacked in freezers and gun fights in the Superdome, or the result of the input of bad data, as with the early call of Florida for Gore in 2000.

No, this [is] premeditated mediocrity. The network had months to prepare and consider and execute. But even with all that time, it lacked the minimal talent necessary to produce a serious debate about important issues using new technology. All it could deliver was a carnival of bad taste, trick questions, and full frontal left wing bias.

• The first report is from the Paris suburbs (and now spreading to numerous other villages), where--as was the case last year--violence and firebombing have broken out in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods. The updated post now has 86 Police reported injured, including by shotgun fire and one from a high-caliber bullet. Nina Poller of Pajamas Media has a particularly gripping report on the violence:

Violence is spreading from Villiers le Bel to a dozen neighboring communities. At least twenty policemen have been injured so far tonight (forty injured last night according to the latest figures), some of them critically. The insurgents are using firebombs, iron rods, baseball bats, and firing buckshot. Journalists are attacked, their cameras are stolen. ...

• The second breaking story is from Venezuala where student rioting against Hugo Chavez' referendum to suspend the Constitution and to allow Chavez to become President for Life has erupted in multiple cities. Multiple reports have police shooting students. Meanwhile Chavez continues his war posturing against Colombia.

Meanwhile, this story reminds those of us who live in Texas of another political campaign here back in 1947. The Senatorial election that year was between a legend in Texas politics and a young congressman from Austin. The legend, Coke Stevenson, had been the Speaker of the Texas House, Lieutenant Governor, and twice elected Governor. The congressman was Lyndon Johnson.

When the Texas Election Bureau closed on Election Day, Stevenson led by 854 votes. But the counting wasn't done, and neither was the voting. Resolution of the contested results would be a precursor of the 2000 Presidential Election drama in Florida, except more crudely complicated. Johnson eventually won by 87 votes in an election where 988,295 votes were allegedly cast. "Allegedly" is the operative word.

[...]

Johnson's big vote bundler was George Berham Parr, who solely controlled the Democratic Party machine in Duvall and Jim Hogg Counties, just north of Hidalgo County. Parr also exercised significant influence in other Southeast Texas border counties including Webb, Cameron, Nueces, and Hidalgo. Caro quotes the description of Parr, El Patron, written by a Corpus Christi Caller-Times reporter named James M. Rowe, who knew Rio Grande Valley politics well:

It is not easy for the average person to imagine what it was like...to oppose Boss Parr in his own county. A word from him was sufficient to get a man fired from his job or denied welfare payments or surplus commodities distributed to the needy. Merchants who opposed him faced the sudden loss of most of their trade. Little farmer and ranchers were intimated by the pistoleros. (p.185)

Parr's most ominous pistolero was his six-gun totting enforcer, Luis Salas. Days after the polls closed, Salas added 200 votes for Johnson to Ballot Box 13 in Jim Webb County. The fact that all the votes were recorded in the same handwriting was a clue. But the box was never examined by those who adjudicated the election results; it had disappeared by then.

Revised returns gave Johnson a 3,000 vote margin of victory in Hidalgo County. In the six Southeast Texas border-area counties most heavily influenced by the Boss Parr machine, Johnson tallied 10,323 votes to Stevenson's 1,329. In Parr's home county of Duvall, it was Johnson 2,908 - Stevenson 38. It all makes the chads and dimples show of South Florida look like child's play.

So what does this have to do with Hillary's McAllen bundler?

In 60 years, Election Day practices have changed considerably in Texas. Today, it's not easy anymore to use patronage and intimidation to stuff ballot boxes. But, when that kind of money, $640,000, comes from that many donors in what a Washington Post writer describes as a "border town of stucco bungalows and weed-covered farm lots," it does raise eyebrows from those who know the Democrat political history of Southeast Texas, and who remember the stealth donors from NYC's Chinatown.

Can the Iraqis hold what we have gained? The remaining 50,000 troops obviously will serve as a quick-action reserve and logistics support for the Iraqi Army, and that footprint would allow for re-escalation if absolutely necessary. The IA forces have grown much stronger over the last year, having performed well in firefights and patrols jointly with American forces and increasingly on their own. If General David Petraeus believes that they can handle security with the US strictly in logistical support, then that's tremendous news ... but it's the first we've heard of it.

If the pullout begins in the late spring, it changes the entire tenor of the elections. Both sides can claim some piece of that victory (assuming this works and Iraq does not collapse). Democrats can claim that the Republicans finally capitulated, while the GOP can claim that they remained tenacious until victory was assured. Given the Democrats' inability to affect the war strategy, their argument will be rather weak, and they still will have to explain the rush to surrender in the spring of 2007, led by Harry Reid's declaration of defeat on the Senate floor.

I'm hopeful that we're pursuing the dramatic drawdown for the right reasons. Bush has not caved to political pressure in the past on Iraq when it could have done him much more good than this will do for him. If we can keep al-Qaeda from gaining a toehold again in Iraq and settle into a normal postwar security arrangement similar to those with Germany and Japan, then we have won an important victory -- and we will have more resources and political will to use in Afghanistan to tackle AQ at its source.

Brian DePalma's award winning anti-war movie earned $25,628.

It was made for $5,000,000.

That is a .5% return.

My first documentary cost $35,000 to make, and thanks to the supporters of the Outside the Wire project, has made $23,464 or 67% return.

When one guy with a camera is beating Hollywood in rate of return and almost beating Hollywood in gross receipts--Hollywood has a problem.

Who would respond to criticism from the Club for Growth by calling the conservative, free-market campaign organization the "Club for Greed"? That sounds like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich or John Edwards, all Democrats preaching the class struggle. In fact, the rejoinder comes from Mike Huckabee, who has broken out of the pack of second-tier Republican presidential candidates to become a serious contender -- definitely in Iowa and perhaps nationally.

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: And speaking of bad Republican candidates...

Over on the Democratic side, meanwhile, they’ve got a woman, a black, an Hispanic, a preening metrosexual with an angled nape – and they all think exactly the same. They remind me of The Johnny Mathis Christmas Album, which Columbia used to re-release every year in a different sleeve: same old songs, new cover. When your ideas are identical, there’s not a lot to argue about except biography. Last week, asked about his experience in foreign relations, Barack Obama noted that his father was Kenyan and he’d been at grade school in Indonesia. “Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations,” he said, “is the fact I spent four years overseas when I was a child in Southeast Asia.” When it comes to foreign relations, he has more of them on his Christmas card list than Hillary or Haircut Boy.

Senator Clinton was gleefully derisive of this argument. “Voters will have to judge if living in a foreign country at the age of ten prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face,” she remarked dryly. “I think we need a president with more experience than that, someone the rest of the world knows, looks up to and has confidence in.” As to what “experience” Hillary has, well, she’s certainly visited Africa enough to acquire plenty of venerable African proverbs (“It takes a village”, etc), even if no African has ever been known to use any of them. When I mentioned on the radio how much I was enjoying the Hill/Barack snippiness, I received a lot of huffy e-mails from Democrats saying, oh yeah, well, how much foreign policy experience do Romney or Giuliani have? Sorry, but you’re missing the point. On the GOP side, the debate isn’t being conducted on the basis of who was where in Grade Four.

To be sure, John Edwards is said to have been hammering Hillary on her Iraq vote, but this is an almost surreally post-modern dispute. Five years ago, Senator Clinton’s Iraq vote was exactly the same as Senator Edwards’: They both voted for war. The only difference is that the former stands by her vote while the latter has since ‘fessed up and revealed he was duped, suckered, played for a sap by George W Bush. Bush is famously the world’s all-time biggest moron but that’s apparently no obstacle when you’re seeking to roll the Democratic Senate caucus. Anyway, Senator Edwards is now demanding Senator Clinton repudiate her Iraq vote and concede she’s as big a patsy and pushover as he is. And this is apparently what passes for “toughness” on the Democrat side. Judging from the number of “North Country For Edwards” signs that have sprouted in the first snows throughout the White Mountains in recent weeks, it may even have some traction on Primary Day.

Let me ask a question of my Democrat friends: What does John Edwards really believe on Iraq? I mean, really? To pose the question is to answer it: There’s no there there. In the Dem debates, the only fellow who knows what he believes and says it out loud is Dennis Kucinich. Otherwise, all is pandering and calculation. The Democratic Party could use some seriously fresh thinking on any number of issues - abortion, entitlements, racial preferences - but the base doesn’t want to hear, and no viable candidate is man enough (even Hillary) to stick it to ‘em. I disagree profoundly with McCain and Giuliani, but there’s something admirable about watching them run in explicit opposition to significant chunks of their base and standing their ground. Their message is: This is who I am. Take it or leave it.

This was sent to me from Israeli sources this morning:

According to the leading correspondent covering the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, Shimon Shiffer of Yediot Ahronot (Israel's largest newspaper), President Bush's address at Annapolis "will not be easy for Israeli ears." In Friday's magazine, he argues, in an article co-authored by his colleague Nahum Barnea, that Bush will call for "the establsihment of a Palestinian state, the end of 'occupation,' and a return of Israel to the 1967 borders, leaving an opening for land swaps."

The authors explain that Olmert knows that "this text cannot be changed."

If the report is true, and both of these reporters have direct access to Olmert, then Bush is close to abandoning the April 2004 gurantees on settlement blocs and "defensible borders" that he gave in writing to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. That letter was all Israel received for pulling 9,000 Israelis out of their homes in the Gaza Strip. That was the quid pro quo. Back in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that Israel was not expected to fully withdraw from the territories it captured in the Six Day War (in a war of self-defense) and this US position was enshrined forty years ago in the language of UN Security Council Resolution 242.

It is difficult to believe that Bush, who is known for his consistancy and loyalty, would make this change and demand full withdrawal. In Sunday's Maariv newspaper, Ben Caspit, its chief foreign affairs correspondent, is reporting that there is a struggle in Washington today over the contents of the Bush Annapolis address, with the Saudis, Rice, and Israel all pulling in different directions. Today, Bush's old friend Sharon is in a comma in an Israeli hospital and cannot comment on such a change should it occur.

But it is also difficult to explain the sudden decision of the Saudis to attend Annapolis at the level of foreign minister, unless someone in the administration gave them some guarantees.

Now, check this out...
This morning Syria announced that it is planning on attending the talks this week, after the issue of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was added to the agenda.
It looks like this tip was accurate.
It could be a devastating week for Israel.

IS REDACTED Hollywood's biggest bomb ever? It makes Heaven's Gate look like a hit.

UPDATE: Don Surber has done the research--there is a better chance of your getting hit by lightning than your having seen Redacted. Read the whole thing. Maybe now Mark Cuban will stick to basketball: he's been had.

1. Is merely following a long-standing tradition in asserting Executive Privalege for his personal aides;
   
2. Is following many other Presidents' precedent of conducting surveillance of the enemy when the nation he was sworn to protect was at War and/or in danger of attack;
   
3. Is a President whose wartime actions do not hold a candle to the extra-constitutional wartime actions of Democrat hero FDR during WWII and Lincoln during the Civil War; and
   
4. Would easily have enough support to prevent the 2/3 majority needed to impeach.
   

It does not have the drama of the Inchon landing or the sweep of the Union comeback in the summer of 1864. But the turnabout of American fortunes in Iraq over the past several months is of equal moment -- a war seemingly lost, now winnable. The violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. Political allegiances have been radically reversed. The revival of ordinary life in many cities is palpable. Something important is happening.

And what is the reaction of the war critics? Nancy Pelosi stoutly maintains her state of denial, saying this about the war just two weeks ago: "This is not working. . . . We must reverse it." A euphemism for "abandon the field," which is what every Democratic presidential candidate is promising, with variations only in how precipitous to make the retreat.

How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks -- mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government -- that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation.

It's all true, I really do consider this "going to war" every night. I am nothing--less than nothing--compared to those young people laying their very lives on the line for us every day, but it is the least I can do.

I have no visions of grandiosity for myself. I do not have the time, talent, or resources of the so called "big names". And that's perfectly OK, because that isn't what drives me. I have a small group of daily readers and I am VERY thankful for them.

Every time I even think of folding my tent, I get this fear--a weird feeling in my stomach; and it is this: what if the next post is the one that actually helps the cause, that makes the difference between achieving an important objective and not achieving it?

This difference would not in my mind be due to my own "reach" or popularity, but simply because in that one instance the right person at the right time just happened to see something I posted, and in so doing it somehow unknowingly sets off a chain of events that would not have occurred otherwise. And so every time I decide to keep at this, it is this fear of the "accidental assist" that is a big player--not because I somehow think I could ever be walking around with the fame of a Michelle Malkin or Glenn Reynolds, with flashbulbs popping; that isn't it at all.. rather I envision that it would be synchronicity--chance--which might get an anonymous snowball rolling that really DOES make a difference in this war for the soul of America--whether I know about it in retrospect is mere "icing", but the "cake" is the hope that at some time in the future, because of some thing I may have done or said at a particular moment of time, it starts the snowball rolling. Even if I never know what impact I might have had on this "avalanche" is not as important as having done something good. Even if I never know.

Its just faith, really. Faith that if I keep at it, someday, somewhere, it will help to change something. Maybe it will be something as simple as comforting someone in grief or providing clarity for someone who is feeling confused or on the fence... Or maybe it is introducing that little glimmer of doubt where doubt is appropriate--and someday that doubt becomes action, and that action makes a difference in lives or in the goal or restoring the America I grew up in. That is long winded, but it is the essence of what keeps me going. Fame or oblivion is really not in my hands so I don't worry about it. I try to improve the product, I take more care than I used to take writing. But in the end it is this intuition that I will somehow make a difference at some point if I do keep at it, even if I never fully understand the scope of that contribution. So be it.

Anyway I get out here whatever I can--whenever I have the time and energy. And if while I am here something I do can start a "ripple effect" that makes a difference, it is less important that I know about it--it is only important that I did not give it give up before it happend, which will inadvertantly undo the good which otherwise will have been done as a result of my sticking with it. It is the "fear" of not being there at the proper time which keeps me going. The rest is all gravy.

Who knows, I may even venture out and go to the blog expo in Vegas next year. But not because I am necessarily interested in anyone meeting me--rather it would be because I like the idea of hanging out a few days with the Hamiltons, Adams, and Franklins of my time; with people who really do and will have a profound impact on the world and on winning this war in the years to come. Because that is where my "bliss" lies, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell. And besides, maybe something they say or do will rub off on me and I can improve my "soldiering" as well.

Convoluted? Yes. But it keeps me going. And your letters of encouragement do as well. So thank you. As long as I can I will keep plugging away for that "just in case", I will. That, plus a little faith that it will all ultimately work out for the best... And if things get worse, at least I will have the comfort level that it was not because I dropped the ball.

So it's onward and upward. It is the least I can do for the Greatest Country on Earth, which has done so much for me.

Watching it dawn on some newspaper people that the 21st century is here has been amusing. But it is painful in the case of James Vesely, editorial page editor for the Seattle Times. In a column in the Sunday newspaper, he tried to tie the future of democracy to newspapers.

That sadly reminds me of the car companies that tried to peddle their clunky behemoths to the public in the 1970s because, by golly, they were made in America.

He wrote a couple of silly paragraphs: “We can’t rely on the First Amendment to provide us with a paycheck; the First Amendment is not a financial model. And yet, as newspaper men and women, we return to the articles of democracy to give us a place at the table, and with it the notion that we will find a meal.

“Without democracy — which means not just freedom but the robust life in a democratic state — the free press cannot survive, no matter how rich it gets. Indeed, I can imagine a fat and prosperous press without the freedoms of contradiction and accuracy. It would not be a free press, just a profitable one. Its people might think themselves free, yet would not be.”

I don’t know. Athens seemed to have a pretty good democracy going there 2,500 years or so before the Linotype came along.

Self-importance is an occupational hazard for we editorial writers. But James Vesely really lost it when he wrote: “Reporters know that truth is fleeting, and that it changes in the palm of the hand like mercury. For just a moment, something is true. It is true because it is verifiable by other sources and true because of the checks and counterchecks that look for truth amid the haze of events. It was that verifiable truth that kept newspapers coming to the kitchen table.

Maurico Celis is, of course, a major democratic donor to candidates Hillary Clinton and Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill.
The AP reported:

A major contributor to Democratic causes and political races was indicted Friday on charges of falsely holding himself out as a lawyer and impersonating a public servant.

Mauricio Celis, a Corpus Christi businessman, has a controlling interest in the CGT Law Group of Corpus Christi even though he is not a lawyer.

Now, he's being accused of practicing law without a license. Texas law prohibits anyone from owning a controlling interest in a law firm unless he is a licensed lawyer.

A Nueces County grand jury on Friday indicted him on seven counts of falsely holding himself out as a lawyer, a third-degree felony. Each count stems from separate incidents in which Celis was listed as an attorney, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported in its online edition. Celis' business cards, letterhead and his firm's Web site identified him as an attorney licensed in Mexico. One business fax sheet stated he was licensed in Washington, D.C., and California. Celis also signed a settlement document as an attorney. He told Police Chief Bryan Smith he was licensed in Mexico, according to the indictment.

Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott also has sued Celis for allegedly practicing law without a license...

Celis also was charged with impersonating a public servant, a third-degree felony, for flashing a Duval County sheriff's badge in an incident near his Corpus Christi home.

In that case, police reported that a naked woman ran from Celis' home to a convenience store, claiming she had been in a hot tub and groped against her will. Celis quickly followed her into the store, wearing a bathrobe. He flashed a sheriff's deputy badge from a nearby county and told police at the store that he would take custody of the woman, police said.

A woman getting groped?
How Clintonesque!

Captain's Quarters has more on his favorite democratic candidates including Claire McCaskill, Hillary Clinton, and Ken and John Salazar.

Whew, that was a close one. We suffered a big attack and were in mortal danger for a while, but we are safe now. Thank God, the war on terror is over. There are no Islamic extremists. Homeland security is not an issue. The only problem in Iraq is how to get out.

Wait, this is news to you? Then you didn't watch the Democratic debate Thursday. Or maybe you did watch, but since those unpleasant topics were completely or mostly ignored, you assumed the war was over and went to bed believing peace is at hand and Santa Claus is busy making toys at the North Pole.

It's not your fault. It's the Democratic presidential candidates who are sleepwalking through history.

As befitting a scrum with too many people and too little time, the debate touched on everything and illuminated nothing. Sen. Hillary Clinton made headlines by defending herself and for finally taking a position against driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, but the gaping hole was the absence of any serious reference to the war on terror. It's long been that way on the campaign trail, and now Dem debates reflect the dangerous drift.

A New York Times language tracker tells the tale. Neither "homeland security" nor "war on terror" were mentioned. Osama Bin Laden was a no-show and Al Qaeda got one mention. "Terrorism" got three, two of them by audience members asking questions, as did "extremists," with two of those in a single answer by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. On the other hand, "health" got 45 mentions and "education" 20.

It is remarkable how far the party and much of the country have strayed from the national unity of 9/11 (three mentions). While Bush's flawed handling of Iraq is a main reason, the unwillingness to separate his failure from the overriding truths of the continuing terror threat will come back to haunt not only Democrats, but the nation.

Consider that what was once called a generational war against an existential threat is now by unanimous consent of the candidates only a misguided Republican war in Iraq that must be ended immediately. What was once a bipartisan concern about the new phenomenon of lethal nonstate actors such as Al Qaeda has been reduced to denunciations of waterboarding and attacks on the Patriot Act. Thursday produced only one reference to Islam — when Sen. Joe Biden complained that Bush acts as though America is at war with the whole religion.

I just sat down with presidential candidate Fred Thompson, for an interview that will air tonight on Kudlow & Company. The former Tennessee senator was in good form.

He attacked Warren Buffet’s tax-hike proposal on the rich as totally wrong, and Buffett himself as nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Democratic party.

He agreed with Dick Armey that the GOP will lose if it departs from the first principles of limited government and lower tax rates.

He called the farm bill “disgraceful” and would veto it if he were president.

He said Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic candidates are wrong on taxes. He noted that the top 5 percent pay 60 percent of all tax collections now; that the tax code is progressive enough; that there’s plenty of economic mobility in the country; that for those who have fallen behind, the problem is poor education, not tax rates; and that America is the freest, most prosperous, most powerful nation in the history of the world.

Thompson is a staunch free trader. He stood firmly behind his Social Security reform plan that would slow down future benefits and provide for private savings accounts.

On inflation, he said he’s not worried about today’s reported 3.5 percent increase in the consumer price index for October. Nor is he overly concerned about the weak dollar. Ben Bernanke is doing a good job, he said, though he refused to say if he’d reappoint the Fed chair.

On politics, the former Senator made it clear that he will continue to attack former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s support of federal funding for abortion, gun control, and sanctuary cities.

He said you might as well say what you believe is right; that life is too short for the aggravation of not telling the truth.

It was a lively interview, and Fred Thompson is not afraid to mix it up. I went at him. He came right back at me. It was great fun. He’s a serious and impressive man. Much stronger than when I interviewed him back in June.

On deep background, his campaign strategists tell me they are pouring tons of money into Iowa advertising. They see a strong opportunity for a Thompson surge in Iowa that would undermine Romney and inflict damage on Giuliani. Walking off the set, Thompson told me this election will be about peace and prosperity. And he intends to fight hard.

It is far too early to declare victory but you would think that all Americans and Australians, regardless of whether they supported the war in Iraq or not, would want to stick with a strategy that is delivering peace and security to a people who have suffered not just 4 1/2 years of a brutal insurgency but also three decades of tyranny and war. Yet some Democrats in the US, as with some on the Left in Australia, are still determined to lose the war if possible by withdrawing troops, even when success is starting to appear to be within reach. Undaunted by the fact that there has been an improvement in Iraq, Democratic staffers on Congress's Joint Economic Committee are trying to generate more bad headlines by focusing on the cost of the war, which they calculated would reach $US3.5 trillion by 2017. To arrive at such a massive total, the committee threw in everything they could think of, including their best guesses at the Iraq war's impact on oil prices and other economic factors.

The sad fact is that for most of the anti-war Left, the only thing that matters is delivering a defeat to the Bush administration, and in achieving that end the Iraqi people are expendable. John Pilger said in January 2004 that while he didn't like the "terrible civilian atrocities" committed by what he called "the resistance", "the outcome of this resistance is terribly important for the rest of the world" and that only a defeat in Iraq of the US "military machine" and the Bush administration would make our world secure. As Christopher Hitchens wrote despairingly in 2005 of his erstwhile friends on the Left, while there is plenty of support for debt relief and making poverty history in Africa, there isn't a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq.

The anti-war, anti-American Left should be ashamed, but precisely for this reason they continue to look away when Iraq doesn't fail in the way they wish. The success of the surge has become their inconvenient truth.

Four plants made by CNN, who are stepping forward to claim that CNN screened them and made sure they asked what CNN wanted them to. Also, the post-debate analysis had two former Clinton staffers and James Carville praising Hillary's performance as the most flawless thing ever witnessed.

Sorry - all SIX plants were Democrat supporters, former staffers or politicos.

Even the KOSBOTS noticed the failed attempt to portray the plants and analysts as "undecided voters."

CNN - guys, the mask slipped. The jig's up. You're toadies for the Democrat Party, protecting Hillary (the lead Democrat candidate) from the big bad eeeevil questions that may hurt her polling numbers and make her appear to be the ignoramus she obviously was shown to be when Russert (GASP) asked her an unscripted series of questions and follow-up questions.

PATHETIC, and with potentially disturbing implications. Here we have a major, supposedly "objective" news network actively colluding with the Democrat Party to create in the public consciousness a false and staged image of the political candidates in that party to make them look better than they really are.

They told me if George Bush was reelected, that the media would be beholden to certain political parties and that messages of those parties would be mindlessly parroted (in direct cooperation with those networks) as "news" that was "fair and balanced." And they were right!

What a laughable attempt to panic the great unwashed.

The IPCC seems to think that the louder they scream the more believable they are. Science doesn’t work like that. Or at least it’s not supposed to. But maybe these days it does, which is the real danger here.

Hey, if global warming is “irreversible,” why get so exercised about it? Oh, wait, it’s almost irreversible. Well, that is convenient, isn’t it?

Mind you, this self-same United Nations doesn’t think that Ahmadinejad developing nuclear weapons is a threat to the world.

Instead, they think that a (highly questionable) increase in world temperature of perhaps a degree or two over the next century will bring about the end of the world. Of course the folks at the UN really don’t think any such thing. Or even care to find out the truth about such matters.

Rather, they see the global warming scam as just the latest way to redistribute some of the wealth in the world in a more just and equitable fashion. And they plan to skim off their cut — just as they always do.

Meanwhile, maybe the UN will do its part to cut carbon emissions by turning off the electricity, the heating and cooling at the UN building. They should also prohibit their members and employees from having cars.

Better still, the UN should simply prohibit anyone from using airplanes or using any other such harmful transportation.

In fact, they should make all of their delegates and their bloated staffs stay home in their mud huts and sit in the dark and the cold.