'Cause I'm Waiting to Behold Your Many Charms...

Some trippy, happy Beatles-inspired music from Karl Wallinger, a.k.a. World Party.



World Party "Put the Message in the Box"

And if you listen now
You might hear
A new sound coming in
As an old one disappears.
See the world in just one grain of sand.
You better take a closer look
Don't let it slip right through your hand.
Won't you please hear the call.
The World says

Put the message in the box.
Put the box into the car.
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard.

Now is the moment,
Please understand.
The road is wide open
To the heart of every man.
A few simple words
So a mule could understand.
He don't want tomorrow
If it's just crumbling into sand.
Won't you please hear the call.
She says

Put the message in the box.
Put the box into the car.
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard.

The World says
Give a little bit
Give a little bit of your love to me
'Cause I'm waiting right here with my open arms.
Give a little bit.
Give a little bit of your soul to me
'Cause I'm waiting to behold your many charms.
Is that love in the air?
She says

Put the message in the box.
Put the box into the car.
Drive the car around the world
Until you get heard.

Yet More Alleged ACORN Fraud

This time, it's in Missouri:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

Here's more from CNN:



To my fellow Democrats, I say this: imagine if the evil George W. Bush himself was involved with a "voter registration" organization not merely accused, but found repeatedly guilty, of voter registration fraud! Then imagine that the Bush campaign gave $800,000 to said organization! Then try to imagine putting your head back together after it explodes.

As CNN reports above, Obama's campaign gave $800,000 to ACORN for its primary registration drive, and the supposedly non-partisan ACORN has returned the favor by endorsing Obama. I'd love to see the list of non-Democrats endorsed by ACORN -- I'm sure it's very extensive.

The bottom line is this is yet another example of Obama's Chicago style of politics -- remember to vote early, vote often and don't let being deceased stop you!

Hat Tip: Hot Air

ACORN Offices Raided for Alleged Fraudulent Voter Registration (again)

From United Press International:

Nevada authorities said Tuesday they raided the Las Vegas offices of the controversial voter-registration activist group, ACORN.

The Secretary of State's Office confirmed to the Las Vegas Review-Journal that a search warrant was served at the ACORN office as part of a probe into suspected voter registration fraud.

[...]

The Review Journal reported that the Secretary of State's Office said ACORN employees were suspected of using false names or addresses in their registration efforts, including the names of some former members of the Dallas Cowboys.

And that's the reason why Obama's campaign is so keen to deny any link between him and ACORN.

Update: I've heard on TV that ACORN's office in Missouri was raided again on the basis of alleged fraudulent voter registrations, but there's no link to be found yet. When there is such a link, I'll add it.

Obama and ACORN, again

Who you gonna believe, Obama or your lying eyes?

Obama's campaign has the following at its Fight the Smears website:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

But, Sweetness and Light cites the following from Toni Foulkes, identified as being a Chicago ACORN leader and a member of ACORN's national board:

As Sen. Obama puts it, how did a skinny kid with a funny name become the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, with 53% of the statewide Democratic vote in a seven-person field?

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

Interestingly, the link at the cited Social Policy journal for Toni Foulkes' article is non-existent, even though all other articles on that page and others have working links. So bear in mind I am taking Sweetness and Light at their word without independent verification. But it raises the question of why that article alone has no link in the journal, when all the others do have working links.

In any event, there is ever so slight wiggle room here for Obama to claim he never worked for ACORN. From the above, it looks like he didn't draw a paycheck from them. But come on! -- by this ACORN board member's own admission, Obama showed up from 1992 through 2003 at "our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office." By any reasonable definition, contrary to Fight the Smears, Obama was indeed an ACORN trainer, even if he was an unpaid one.

Obama vs. McCain: (not just) tonight's debate

In sum, I thought both men acquitted themselves well, and unfortunately right now with Obama leading in the polls McCain needed more dings on Obama than he got. So Obama is starting to look like he's trying to sit on his lead and run the clock out, we'll see if he succeeds.

Apart from the debate, I wanted to discuss some historical parallels from my own lifetime that I see in Senators McCain and Obama.

For all my vehement criticism of him and his questionable associations, I think Senator Obama is an honorable man, as is Senator McCain. My issue with him is that he's far more comfortable with the far left than people realize, much further left in his own way than President Bush, for example, is a creature of the far right.

Which leads me to my next thought, that Bush is the Nixon figure hanging over this election much in the way that Nixon, though not on the ballot, hung over the 1976 Presidential race between Ford and Carter. Carter was able to make the 1976 election a referendum on Nixon and thus was able to narrowly defeat the incumbent President Ford. Obama is trying to do the same thing by tying McCain to the discredited President Bush, and so far it looks like he's succeeding.

With either man we are going to get a repudiation of Bush -- the only question is how decisive a repudiation, and what form it will take. McCain decisively repudiates Bush on torture, for example, which is one of the many reasons I admire him. And he proposes, and I believe him because of his long record as a deficit hawk, that he will be tough as nails on needless new spending, which is critically necessary after the drunken spending spree both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been on these last 8 years, all of them overseen by President Bush with nary a veto.

Obama, on the other hand, promises to change everything -- except to rein in the profligate government spending. His only quibble with government spending is that we have not spent enough. On health care, more government spending. On the environment, more government spending. On a whole host of issues, the problem for Obama is framed as being the rich and/or the war in Iraq. The Obama solution: withdraw from Iraq post-haste, and tax the rich, and the combination of the two will pay for all his wonderful new government programs, which he says will benefit 95% of America.

So who's Ford in this parallel, and who is Carter? As if you didn't guess already, I think McCain stands in as Ford, and Obama as Carter. And that's where the problem lies... both Ford and Carter were repudiations of the much-despised Nixon, but Ford was a moderate repudiation while Carter was an ultra-liberal one. Personally, I much prefer the Ford model -- an honorable, moderate Republican battling the excesses of a profoundly liberal Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House.

Was Carter more effective, for having inherited such a Democratic Congress after having defeated Ford? No, he was not. As I predict will be the case with Obama, Carter was rolled by the Democrats in Congress, and was increasingly regarded in his own party as weak and ineffectual. This judgement was mirrored abroad by our old enemies in the Soviet Union, and our then-new enemies the Ayatollahs taking over Iran while Carter watched, helplessly.

Folks thought that things couldn't get worse in 1976, and that Carter would turn things around, would "save" America. I see a similar sentiment now, that things can't get any worse, and that only Obama can save America now.

I fear Obama will make things much worse, that he will follow the Carter model of being rolled by aggressive Democrats in Congress, and emboldened adversaries such as Putin in Russia, Chavez in Venezuela, and the decaying, corrupt Ayatollah's regime in Iran. Also, as was the case with Vietnam, where the Democrats cut off all military aid to South Vietnam and let it collapse, I fear the Democrats under Obama will gladly cut off all aid to the nascent democratic government in Iraq, regardless of the disastrous consequences for ordinary Iraqis or for American prestige.

Even if McCain is not the Reagan figure so many Republicans still hunger for (maybe Palin is? we'll see!), I think the American people would be better served in the next four years by a moderate, effective President McCain facing down a Democratic Congress than by an ultra-liberal and ineffectual President Obama being dominated by that very same Congress.

The Bottom Line on Obama is that he has none, himself

I am a bit enraged right now, actually trembling with it, after reading some things that are very relevant as to the character of Barack Obama, and why I personally cannot vote for him. Bear with me, it will be a while before we get there, though.

I've been reading for a while now about Bill Ayers and Obama's association with him, and I keep coming back to it. It crystallized my doubts about Obama, and what I read this morning dispelled all doubts that I was, perhaps, being too hard on the man.

I was born in the mid-60s, so like Obama I was a pretty young fellow when the Weather Underground crimes of Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, Boudin et al were committed. So I had a vague sense at best of what they did, but I knew it was safely filed under the category of Bad Things.

Which means I knew vaguely about the bombings at the Pentagon and the Capitol Building, and that they had not killed anyone, but I regarded that as being luck more than design, no matter what Ayers claimed.

After those "harmless" bombings, came the premature explosion of bombs intended for a dance for Non-Commissioned Officers at Fort Dix Army Base in New Jersey. Apparently, striking this blow would cripple the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, or something. From Wikipedia:

The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion was the premature detonation of a bomb as it was being assembled by members of the American "urban guerilla" organization, Weatherman (later rechristened the Weather Underground), in the basement of a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street in New York City's Greenwich Village. The three persons nearest the bomb were killed, two others in the house were slightly injured, and the four story townhouse was reduced to rubble and caught fire.[1] Shortly before noon on Friday, March 6, 1970, people in the townhouse were assembling anti-personnel weapons armed with roofing nails and packed with dynamite. Years later, former members of the organization who had not been at the scene advanced differing (but not incompatible) claims as to the plans for use of the bombs. Thus, according to Mark Rudd, the plan was to set them off that evening at a dance for noncommissioned officers at the Fort Dix, New Jersey Army base.[2] According to a detractor, "former members" have reported that some of the bombs were destined for the Fort Dix dance and others for Butler Library at Columbia University.[3]

Killed by the blast were Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins. Surviving in a stunned and bleeding state were Weatherman members Kathy Boudin and Cathlyn Wilkerson, who were upstairs at the moment of the blast. The two survivors were led out from the burning structure by a police officer and the off-duty New York City Housing Authority patrolman who had entered in search of survivors.[4] The rescuers were treated at St. Vincent's Hospital for smoke inhalation.[1]

Boudin and Wilkerson disappeared before they could be questioned. They had been free on bail on assault charges stemming from the Days of Rage riots in Chicago.[5] A neighbor who rendered aid after the blast described them as "dazed and trembling" as they were led "staggering" from the wreckage, one clad only in blue jeans and the other naked. The neighbor brought them to her house, where they showered, borrowed some clothing and told a housekeeper they were going to a local drugstore, then got into a taxi and disappeared.[6][7]

The building was owned by Wilkerson's father, a radio-station executive.[5] As the search for bodies continued days after the explosion, Wilkerson's parents made a televised appeal to their missing daughter to avoid needlessly risking the lives of searchers. They asked her to "let us know how many more people, if any, are still left in the ruins of our home", saying "more lives would be needlessly lost and only you have the key".[5]

Never fear, though, Kathy Boudin at least turned up again:

On October 20, 1981 heavily armed terrorists staged a daylight assault on a Brinks armored car at the Nanuet Mall in Nanuet, New York. In the attack that followed, Brinks guard Peter Paige was killed and Joseph Trombino seriously wounded, nearly losing his arm to the gunman’s bullets. Another Brinks guard, James Kelly, suffered wounds and a concussion as the gunmen pumped automatic weapon fire into the armored vehicle.
After leaving the mall the gunmen fled east, ditching their getaway car and entering the rear of a waiting U-Haul truck being driven by co-conspirators. This was an attempt to escape detection, as the participants knew that the police would be on the lookout for the male blacks that robbed the armored car. The gunmen were to be driven to safety by white accomplices, thinking they would easily escape back to New York City in the confusion immediately following the robbery.

Unfortunately for them a high school student witnessed the switch from the original getaway car to the U-Haul. Looking out her bedroom window, she notified the local police and an alert was broadcast to officers on patrol.

Ten minutes later Nyack Police officers were conducting a roadblock at Exit 11 of the New York State Thruway. Spotting a U-Haul, they ordered it to the side of the road. The driver and passenger in the front of the U-Haul did not match the description of the gunmen at the mall. Further, police radio transmissions had broadcast reports of another U-Haul being spotted heading south into New Jersey on Rt. 304.

Kathy Boudin, an occupant of the U-Haul, complained to the police that their guns made her nervous. Apparently, thinking they had the wrong U-Haul, the police stowed their weapons and shotgun. At that moment the rear of the U-Haul flew open and half a dozen heavily armed killers jumped out, each with military-style fully automatic weapons. Police Officer Waverly Brown was hit immediately and died at the scene. Detective Arthur Keenan was struck before he was able to take cover and return fire. Sgt. Edward O’Grady was shot numerous times and died ninety minutes later at Nyack Hospital. Officer Brian Lennon exchanged shots but was seriously outnumbered and under heavy fire.

This is where we get to the part that set my blood boiling. Kathy Boudin obviously used her "don't worry, officers, I'm just a white middle class girl" demeanor to set them up to be gunned down by her Black Liberation Army compatriots in the back of the U-Haul. She might as well have gunned down the policemen herself. And, she did all this a full eleven years after helping build bombs nearly killed her, and cost her the lives of three of her fellow radicals, showing that she had learned nothing at all about the utter futility of her violent extremism.

After Boudin went to jail, Bill Ayers and his wife raised Kathy Boudin's son Chesa Boudin as their own. Any doubts that Ayers has repented one bit of the same idiocy as Chesa's mother are dispelled by the following words from Chesa himself, now a newly-minted Rhodes Scholar: "We have a different name for the war we're fighting now — now we call it the war on terrorism, then they called it the war on communism. My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I'm dedicated to the same thing."

Yeah, Chesa, your parents helped murder policemen because that actually improved lives in the rest of the world. How did anyone let this morally blind idiot into Yale, much less into the Rhodes Scholar program?

So Chesa's adoptive father Bill "I don't regret a thing. I think we didn't do enough" Ayers leads us, at long last, back to Barack Obama. It doesn't really matter whether you think Obama agrees with violent radicals like Ayers, or just went along with working with him at the Annenberg Foundation in Chicago for well over five years.

I actually think it's worse if Obama thinks poorly of Ayers, because it means Obama doesn't have a spine worth speaking of. It means that, just to get ahead in Chicago politics, Obama was willing to work with a leftist thug anyone should have been proud to spurn.

And that's when it hit me -- Obama has no bottom line. He has nothing that will make him rise up and say, "No! No! Hell no! I won't do it!" He's the quintessential go-along, get-along example of utter political spinelessness. And this might well be how he manages to glide by long enough to get elected, but it's why I feel he will be an utter disaster as a President, which is a far more serious matter.

Think of it -- which of the major Democratic constituencies has he been willing to piss off? The anti-war left? Nope. The protectionists in Big Labor? Not them, he's in the bag for them. The environmentalists who won't countenance nuclear power or drilling in the U.S.? Nah, he's their puppy too.

The list is endless, and he is basically the perfect liberal checklist -- every box is checked. The idiocy and manifest incompetence of Bush may be enough for Obama to ride the wave of "anyone but a Republican!" all the way to the White House, but what happens after that?

What if Obama is faced with a crisis where he can't please everyone?! As in, not having enough cash for the federal government to pass all of Obama's programs and give a middle class tax cut? Or keeping the anti-war folks happy by departing Iraq, even if things take a turn for the worse there? Such crises and many more are inevitable, and where is Obama's bottom line? I can't say. Can you?

Great leaders are the ones who actually stand for something, and let the chips fall where they may. Obama may be a great campaigner, but I think his utter lack of a bottom line means we'll be in for a second round of Jimmy Carter with him -- neither his enemies nor his allies will respect him, to the world's detriment.

So that's my bottom line on Obama: if he doesn't have enough of a spine to say "hell no!" to working with Bill Ayers, where will he draw the line?

I am absolutely certain that, both for better and for worse, McCain does have a bottom line, stuff he will simply not countenance. Both his enemies and his Republican allies have learned this. The certainty that there are certain things on which you simply do not cross a President McCain will serve his country much better than Obama's utter lack of similar red lines.

The Whole of the Moon!

The Waterboys became one of my favorites in the late 1980s, and this is the first song of theirs which I ever heard.



The Waterboys "The Whole of the Moon"

I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hand
I had flashes
You saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

You were there in the turnstiles
With the wind at your heels
You stretched for the stars
And you know how it feels
To reach too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

I was grounded
While you filled the skies
I was dumbfounded by truth
You cut through lies
I saw the rain dirty valley
You saw "Brigadoon"
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon

I spoke about wings
You just flew
I wondered, I guessed and I tried
You just knew
I sighed
And you swooned
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

The torch in your pocket
And the wind on your heels
You climbed on a ladder
And you know how it feels
To get too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

Unicorns and cannonballs
Palaces and Piers
Trumpets, towers, and tenements
Wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferryboats
Scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and vision
Underneath the stars
Yes, you climbed on a ladder
With the wind in your sails
You came like a comet
Blazing your trail
Too high
Too far
Too soon
You saw the whole of the moon

ACORN and its alleged voter registration fraud

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic writes an excellently fair-minded post about GOP complaints about the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN):

ACORN works in urban areas and among the poor, so their advocacy benefits the Democratic Party.

And most acutely, Republicans point to charges, many validated, of ACORN's turning in hundreds, if not thousands, of fraudulent registrations in at least a dozen states and employing felons in states where it's illegal to do so for voter registration purposes.

Defenders of ACORN insist they're non-partisan, say that the group simply wants to make sure that as many eligible voters as possible vote and contend that critics are motivated by their partisanship, and possibly by their antipathy toward poor people and black people. Note: ACORN has liberal critics too, including some who think the group's aggressive tactics and history of quasi-socialism make other community organizers look bad.

I've been having growing concerns about this myself, since there have been all too many convictions of various ACORN canvassers for allegedly making fraudulent voter registrations by the thousands. The fact that there has been more than one such episode is troubling.

I'm all for maximum registration and participation of every American voter, especially the poor who are the most vulnerable and too often disenfranchised. It does no one any good, especially the Democratic party, when that noble goal becomes tainted by voter fraud.

I would love to see this cease being a political football between the two parties, and become something both parties devote time to fixing in a clean, verifiable way. But alas I am probably dreaming.

Cindy Sheehan Hearts the Muslim Brotherhood

As if embracing Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez was not enough, "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan has now taken up the mantle of waging peace on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Here's part of her letter to the First Lady of Egypt, Suzanne Mubarak, on the Muslim Brotherhood's own English language website:

Through my work on this issue I have become an
advocate for human rights violations all over the
world. I am sad to say that my first visit to your
beautiful country of Egypt brings me here under this
guise to appeal for fair and just treatment for the
forty members of the Muslim Brotherhood, all civilian,
who are being tried through a military tribunal. As I
understand it this process is illegal both under
Egyptian law and International law and since the
defendants have all been found innocent on four
different occasions in civilian courts, I can only
conclude that the Egyptian government is trying them
in a military tribunal as a last resort to guarantee a
guilty verdict.

Now, I have no doubt that the Mubarak government is not exactly a champion of due process in all instances, not just those where the accused are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But I have not (yet) seen Ms. Sheehan championing secular Egyptians who have run afoul of the Egyptian government.

Ms. Sheehan is of course allowed to espouse any views she likes, but her alliance with thugs like the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez and now the Muslim Brotherhood makes her self-professed pro-democracy stance ring entirely hollow.

Update: Wikipedia's entry on the Muslim Brotherhood helpfully has the following:

In the group's belief, the Quran and Sunna constitute a perfect way of life and social and political organization that God has set out for man. Islamic governments must be based on this system and eventually unified in a Caliphate. The MB goal, as stated by Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna was to reclaim Islam’s manifest destiny, an empire, stretched from Spain to Indonesia.[22] It preaches that Islam enjoins man to strive for social justice, the eradication of poverty and corruption, and political freedom to the extent allowed by the laws of Islam. The Brotherhood strongly opposes Western colonialism, and helped overthrow the pro-western monarchies in Egypt and other Muslim nations during the early 20th century.

On the issue of women and gender the Muslim Brotherhood interprets Islam quite strictly. Its founder called for "a campaign against ostentation in dress and loose behavior," "segregation of male and female students," a separate curriculum for girls, and "the prohibition of dancing and other such pastimes..."[23]

"... political freedom to the extent allowed by the laws of Islam." What a wonderful cause Cindy Sheehan has found for herself now!

Obama and the Surge in Iraq

Prior to the Surge, in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on November 20, 2006, Obama said the following:



Then, Obama told us "the Surge has not worked" on July 20, 2007, and at many other campaign stops. The next month, there were 80 U.S. service deaths overall in Iraq, 69 of them by my count from combat or IEDs.

Fast-forward to this year, when the evidence has been mounting that not only has the Surge in troops and the accompanying change in strategy has reduced U.S. military casualties but also reduced Iraqi civilian casualties, and Obama tells Katie Couric in Amman, Jordan on July 22, 2008 that he still would have opposed the Surge:



Given how laughable this stance became by August 2008, Obama and the Democrats had to resort to their new rallying cry: there's not enough political reconciliation in Iraq! We should still leave!

Somehow, they missed the news that Iraq's largest Sunni political party rejoined the Iraqi government in July 2008, after a year's boycott.

Or, they missed the following news in September 2008:

Now that Iraq's parliament passed a provincial elections law Wednesday, overcoming months of political gridlock, many politicians and Iraqis are looking ahead to what the elections early next year will mean for Iraq

Oh, and here's the death toll for that very month, September 2008, as compared to the year before:

The number of civilians killed in Iraq last month more than halved to 359 compared to a year ago, Iraqi government figures showed, and the number of U.S. troops killed in action also fell dramatically.

U.S. combat deaths fell to eight in September, down from 12 last month and vastly reduced from 43 in September last year, statistics from independent Web site www.icasualites.org showed.

Violence in Iraq has fallen to around four-year lows in recent months, but militants have still been capable of large-scale attacks.

A string of bombings last month targeted civilians shopping before their evening meal during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, and in Iraq's north, where the U.S. military says al Qaeda is active, violent attacks are carried out almost daily.

But September's toll of 359 civilian deaths was still lower than August's 382. Some 884 Iraqi civilians were killed in September last year.

So, U.S. combat fatalities have fallen to 8 in September 2008 vs. 69 in September 2007. Iraqi civilian casualties have fallen to 359 as compared to 884 in September 2007. Political reconciliation is proceeding apace, now that Sunni and Shi'it politicians are not constantly worried that extremists will slaughter them if they make a compromise with the other camps in Iraq. And still the Democratic candidate for President says his course of opposing the Surge was the right one!

I will yield to none in my contempt for Bush's criminally incompetent management of the war from March 2003 through January 2007. But by finally jettisoning Rumsfeld and putting General Petraeus in charge of a Surge in troops and a change in strategy, Bush has managed to show he can, however belatedly, come to grips with reality.

That is more than the Democrats, or Senator Obama in particular, can say.

Updated 10/3/2008: Yahoo News:

Baghdad - Iraq's presidential council on Friday ratified a law that paves the way for the first provincial elections in four years, officials said.

U.S. officials hope the election will give greater representation to minority Sunni Arabs and disaffected members of the Shiite majority.

This exemplifies the difference between McCain's approach and Obama's -- Obama has pledged repeatedly over the last two years to "end the war" and leave, no matter what, even if genocide results.

McCain also proposed ending the war in Iraq, but only by defeating our extremist enemies first! McCain's preference is increasingly validated by the fact that, with violence declining, the critically necessary political reconciliation between Iraqi factions is happening.

Of course, since things are going well in Iraq these days, expect it to fall all the more rapidly off the front pages. That's a shame, because what we're seeing is nothing less than the dual defeat of Sunni (Al Qaeda) and Shi'ite (Mahdi Army) extremists, with huge repercussions for the entire region. The Ayatollahs of Iran and the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia might be distressed, but this development is to the great benefit of ordinary Iraqis.