Cartoons of the Day: Iranian nukes? What Iranian nukes?

How to rob the military and appease dictators: 3 easy lessons

If I didn't already believe 2010 would be a good time to throw the bums out in Congress, a news item on how Senators have robbed our wartime guns and ammo budget for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan would really tick me off. I was already ticked and now I've moved up to pissed off.

Senators diverted $2.6 billion in funds in a defense spending bill to pet projects largely at the expense of accounts that pay for fuel, ammunition and training for U.S. troops, including those fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an analysis.

Among the 778 such projects, known as earmarks, packed into the bill: $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.

While earmarks are hardly new in Washington, "in 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year," said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer who worked on defense funding and oversight for both Republicans and Democrats. He is now a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, an independent research organization.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, called the transfer of funds from Pentagon operations and maintenance "a disgrace."

"The Senate is putting favorable headlines back home above our men and women fighting on the front lines," he said in a statement.

It's only $2.6 billion, which is chump change for Senators, but it's the principle of the thing that really pisses me off, $20 million to honor the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who never saw a war he liked and never saw a war protester he didn't like? What the hell has that got do with defense?

I'm mad as hell and I'm going to tell everybody I know it's time to clean out the D.C. pig sty.

And speaking of Teddy Kennedy and the peaceniks, Wesley Pruden reports today on the recent adventures of Peacenik No. 1 and Peacenik No. 2 now in power, Obama and Hillary, and how their adventures with the big, bad Russians are working out. Suffice it so say, not too well.

The Russians succeeded in putting Mr. Obama and the Americans in their place. Nikolai Patrushev, the chief of the Presidential Security Council, manufactured an occasion while Mrs. Clinton was in Moscow to warn that Moscow reserves the right to make "a pre-emptive nuclear strike" against both small and large enemies.

In an interview with Izvestia, the important Moscow daily, he said Russian officials are examining "a variety of possibilities for using nuclear force, depending on the situation and the intentions of the possible opponent." In situations critical to national security, he said, "options including a preventative nuclear strike on the aggressor are not excluded." Even regional or "local" wars will be included in the new strategy, expected to be official policy in December.

A willingness to use any or all weapons, if the time and place is right, is nothing new, of course. If the stakes are high enough everybody will use everything, and only fools object. The significance of these remarks, which were certainly calculated for effect while Mrs. Clinton was in town, is what they tell about how the Russians regard the toughness of Barack Obama, the noble peacenik with a prize to prove it, and whether there is any "there" there.

Mrs. Clinton and her acolytes at the State Department, ever eager to seek the softest way to say nothing, tried to put a nice face on her visit to Moscow. The United States, Russia and China are "closer than before" on their policies regarding Iran's nuclear-weapons program, Mrs. Clinton told a radio interviewer. She seemed to be taking care not to say that actual positions are closer, just that everyone understands those positions: Russians tough, Americans soft.

And to make a long post even longer, I can't leave this topic without quoting Sir Charles Krauthammer, who sums up the Obama-Clinton Doctrine of International Appeasement.

Well, at nine months, let's review.

What's come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What's come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama's shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told). China hasn't moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed it's pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

What's come from the new-respect-for-Muslims Cairo speech and the unprecedented pressure on Israel for a total settlement freeze? "The settlement push backfired," reports The Washington Post, and Arab-Israeli peace prospects have "arguably regressed."

And what's come from Obama's single most dramatic foreign policy stroke -- the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.

But maybe not gratuitous. Surely we got something in return for selling out our friends. Some brilliant secret trade-off to get strong Russian support for stopping Iran from going nuclear before it's too late? Just wait and see, said administration officials, who then gleefully played up an oblique statement by President Dmitry Medvedev a week later as vindication of the missile defense betrayal.

The Russian statement was so equivocal that such a claim seemed a ridiculous stretch at the time. Well, Clinton went to Moscow this week to nail down the deal. What did she get?

"Russia Not Budging On Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart." Such was The Washington Post headline's succinct summary of the debacle.

Note how thoroughly Clinton was rebuffed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that "threats, sanctions and threats of pressure" are "counterproductive." Note: It's not just sanctions that are worse than useless, but even the threat of mere pressure.

It gets worse. Having failed to get any movement from the Russians, Clinton herself moved -- to accommodate the Russian position! Sanctions? What sanctions? "We are not at that point yet," she averred. "That is not a conclusion we have reached ... it is our preference that Iran work with the international community."

But wait a minute. Didn't Obama say in July that Iran had to show compliance by the G-20 summit in late September? And when that deadline passed, did he not then warn Iran that it would face "sanctions that have bite" and that it would have to take "a new course or face consequences"?

Gone with the wind. It's the U.S. that's now retreating from its already flimsy position of just three weeks ago. We're not doing sanctions now, you see. We're back to engagement. Just as the Russians suggest.

Maybe in 2010 and 2012, we the voters can put some adults back in charge of our nation. But God help us until then because the children in charge now are giving away our future daily.

Obama Mockfest goes from Iran to North Korea to Gitmo

Mocking our feckless President is an amazingly easy thing to do these days. Despot leaders in North Korea and Iran do it almost daily with nukes or missiles or both. Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus of the Washington Times, joins in the daily mockfest this morning on that topic.

Two of the peace-loving republics formerly known as the Axis of Evil threw a frightful scare into anyone paying attention Monday, with North Korea exploding a nuclear bomb as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima and Iran telling Barack Obama to get lost (and take his teleprompter with him).

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wouldn't accept an invitation to freeze work on his own nuclear weapon and he's not interested in talking to Mr. Obama or anyone else about it. But not to worry. The United Nations Security Council postponed its afternoon tea to hold an "emergency session" to consider options for dealing with developments in Korea. The world is considerably less worried about Iran, since Mr. Ahmadinejad appears to be mostly interested in only killing Jews...

The temptation to deride the reaction from Western capitals, couched as it is in the prissy language of the diplomacy so beloved by Mr. Obama, is irresistible, not only for its pretentious prissiness, but because the evildoers have heard it all so many time before. The presidents and prime ministers of the West need at minimum new speechwriters to project their pretense of toughness, their affectation of strength. They invite mockery at home because they strike neither fear nor caution in the hearts of enemies they insist on regarding as just friends they haven't made yet.

The latest test is a reminder that North Korea "is going it alone as a nuclear power," the executive director of the Center for Korean-America Peace, a Pyongyang front, told the daily Guardian of London. "North Korea doesn't need any talks with America. America is tricky and undesirable. We are not going to worry about sanctions ... we don't care about America and what they say."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered his own mockery of naive intentions, and showed no signs of the unclenched fist that the dear leader in Washington sees in his future.

"The nuclear issue is a finished issue for us," Mr. Ahmadinejad told reporters Monday in Tehran. But he made an offer that Mr. Obama will find difficult to refuse, proposing to debate the president and his teleprompter at the U.N. "regarding the roots of world problems." But no talks about the Iranian bomb. "Our talks [with the major powers] will be only in the framework of cooperation for managing global issues, and nothing else."

And David Brooks at the Noo Yawk Times has remembered what it means to be an op-ed writer, taking an opposing editorial view to the kneejerk leftwingnuts on the editorial and news staff with his own bit of mockery that's so far over the top it's clear over into seeing the actual truth.

There is nothing so inspiring as public service, so I’ve been incredibly moved over the past few weeks to watch squads of corporate executives come to the White House so President Obama could announce that he was giving away their money...

These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II. The press conferences and events marking this new spirit of cooperation have been the emotional highlights of the administration so far.

These events usually begin when the executives gather in the Oval Office, where they experience certain Enhanced Negotiating Techniques. I’m not exactly sure what the president does to inspire the business leaders’ cooperation and sense of public service, though those who remember the disembowelment scene in “Braveheart” will have a general idea.

Then the president leads the executives out onto the White House lawn for the announcement ceremony. Often, the president will still be carrying the riding crop and the pliers used in the private negotiation. He moves to the microphone while the executives take their pre-assigned places behind him, the jingle of their leg shackles blending with the dulcet tones of spring. I thought one hospital executive was so moved by the occasion that he had slipped into catatonic shock, except that he was blinking “Save Me! Save Me!” in Morse code to his shareholders.

Finally, Cal Thomas offers a sobering rebuttal to Obama's plan to close Gitmo's terrorist prison.

President Obama wants to put at least some of the Guantanamo detainees in maximum-security prisons in the U.S. Assuming an ACLU lawyer doesn't win their release, these suspects might convert others in prison to their cause in order to recruit them for jihad should they be let out. Some of those New York terror suspects were converted to Islam and radicalized while in prison.

A more mature and sobering vision was offered by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has emerged as the Republican Party's missing backbone.

In a well-crafted and powerful rebuke to President Obama's call for treating terrorists as criminals rather than enemy combatants, Cheney said, "Throughout the '90s, America had responded to these (terrorist) attacks, if at all, on an ad hoc basis ... with everything handled after the fact -- crime scene, arrests, indictments, convictions, prison sentences, case closed. ... 9/11 made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat -- what the Congress called 'an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.' From that moment forward, instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count up the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place."

It worked. History will show this approach protected our "values" against those who would destroy them. If there is another attack, President Obama won't be able to blame it on the shortsightedness of the Bush-Cheney administration.

Wouldn't it be doubly ironic if one of the soon-to-be-released Gitmo terrorists committed a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, just as several of the already released terrorists have returned to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan? Obama wouldn't be able to blame that on Bush-Cheney.

I'm not saying I look forward to another terrorist attack. But I am saying the half-baked, kneejerk leftwing plans of this administration are not making America safer. Far from it.