The Real Benghazi Scandal

With Day 1 of the Benghazi hearings in the can, it's hard to know where to begin: altered talking points, murdered ambassadors, State Dept. review boards, YouTube videos, orders to "stand-down," etc. If there doesn't seem to be an immediate political pay-off it's because there's been so much information coming so quickly, it's hard to absorb. Still, I think there's one inescapable conclusion that  we can already draw, and it's the real Benghazi scandal:

We have a chickensh*t president and (had) a chickensh*t Secretary of State who, God help us, aspires to be president herself.

I say this with all due respect*, of course.

Obama and Hillary actively worked to depose Hosni Mubarak and Col. Qaddafi under the guise of an alleged democratic revolution sweeping the entire Middle East when in fact the "democrats" were just Islamists with Twitter accounts. The deposing of Qaddafi was supposed to be the exemplar of the sort of "lead from behind" way of war that would accomplish everything "dumb" George Bush tried to do in Iraq, but at the fraction of the cost in blood and treasure. Having overthrown the government and unleashed a typical jihadi maelstrom, Obama and Hillary deposited Amb. Stevens and three dozen diplomats and intelligence types into a hellhole and then left them for dead once the inevitable happened and the Muslims began seeking out Americans to kill.

Then they went out and blamed a video, supposedly made in America, for the violence. In other words, our American president tried to blame us and our First Amendment right to free expression for a coordinated attack by our deadliest enemies. He even went to the UN and said this. If there is another American president who would have even contemplated doing such a thing, let alone done it, I'd like to know his name.

Then, during the few precious minutes when Mitt Romney challenged Obama on his misfeasance and non-feasance, the president smugly demanded that we "look at the transcript," where you could indeed find a single generic sentence about "terror" from the one public statement he gave about Benghazi - and that settled that! As if the whole controversy was over a prepared statement in the Rose Garden and not the cold-blooded abandonment of our diplomats.

By any definition you choose, that is chickensh*t behavior.

It's probably true that there wasn't much you could do from DC to save the 4 men who died, but so what? They made no effort to save them, and actively stopped the efforts of the few people who tried to take the initiative and rescue the embattled mission. And, forget the 4 dead, what about the three dozen survivors, some of them grievously wounded, who were also abandoned to their fates by the progressive Jesus who went to sleep while his diplomats fought furiously for their lives? The Obama-ites left them to die. Say what you will about George Bush or Ronald Reagan, but they wouldn't have let this play out that way.

The million dollar question is whether this will discredit Obama and Hillary in the eyes of the public. Well, I don't know. The whole point of covering up Benghazi was to preserve the story line that al-Qaeda was dead and the Arab Spring was going great. The depressing lesson from the 2012 election is that there are tens of millions of Americans who are happy to look the other way so long as they keep getting their government money, whether for food stamps, "free" health care, condoms, abortions, Obama-phones, layabout jobs in the bureaucracy or whatever. Amb. Stevens may have died, but at least the Tsarnaev family still had their subsidized housing! (and there's a sort of grim irony in the younger Tsarnaev brother getting his US citizenship on the same day as the Benghazi attack, isn't there?)

This is the president we've got now. That's the real scandal.

*i.e. none

Lost In Transit: Where's Chris Stevens's Body?

Last week I was wondering whether there had been a funeral for Chris Stevens, the late American ambassador to Libya. Stevens is a Bay Area native, whose parents live in Marin County, so any funeral would be local news, but there's been nothing. If you Google "Chris Stevens Funeral" you get very little, except for a memorial service at Dover AFB where Obama and Hillary spoke. But, no funeral services. This story refers to his family traveling to Washington to retrieve the body and plan the funeral, but that was two weeks ago.

Then there's the matter of his autopsy, which we've been told is a big part of the investigation of his death. Have you heard of any autopsy results? I haven't. Googling "Chris Stevens Autopsy" and you get a lot of results mentioning the planned autopsy, but that's it.

Uh, anyone out there think this is a little odd? Our ambassador is murdered, yet there's (apparently) no funeral and no autopsy? Is that for real? I heard Melanie Morgan on the radio the other day say that, not only has there been no autopsy, but also that the State Department will not release Stevens's body to his family! Now, Morgan is an excitable partisan and all, but is that any crazier than the Obama Administration's stubborn adherence to their widely discredited propaganda ploy to excuse away the Benghazi attack by conflating it with the Egyptian embassey riot, which did seem to have been kicked off by the supposedly blasphemous Innocense of Muslims? 

Right now, Stevens is like one of those bit players in a movie. You know, someone who is shot by the bad guy, or vaporized by the alien, or run down by the run away train: you know nothing about him, you never see his family, or see his funeral. They are simply there to keep the story moving. We have a dead ambassador who, after two weeks, has not been autopsied, or buried; two things that could happen in a day. Instead, his bosses are holding on to his body for God knows what reason. Sorry for the lack of my usual asterixes, but that is some fucked up shit.

The Forgotten Man: The Effort To Bury Christopher Stevens

Althouse asks a question that has bugging me throughout the Obama Administation's contorted attempts to avoid the truth of attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi: why is the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens being so quickly swept from the scene?

What happened to Chris Stevens? I don't trust that we've learned the whole story. Why wasn't he protected? Was he an inconvenient man? We saw such an effort to create static around his death. Look — riots over here, here, and here! Offensive video on the internet! Man with a "towel" around his face! And hey check out the most important thing that happened all week: Romney said "47%" to some people back in May! 

The very fact that we're thinking about Nakoula — and futzing with Romney rhetoric — makes me feel that Chris Stevens got stuffed down the memory hole.

Who wanted that forgetting and why?

I think we all know the answer: the sacking of the embassey and the murder of the US ambassador were a disaster for the US. If W were still president, it would be treated as such, but he's not president, is he? A Democrat president can stuff whomever he likes down the memory hole.

All of this shows how cold our progressive betters are. Somewhere, there must be a picture taken on the day Stevens was appointed ambassador, and surely Obama and/or Hillary must be in that picture, along with Stevens's family. They sent him into harms way, without any sort of security (because they didn't want any of that bad Bush-era big footprint in the Middle East), and now that he's dead, they don't seem to want to have anything to do with him. Has there been a funeral? Did Hillary or, God forbid, Obama go? It's easy to imagine Ronaldus, or Bush 41, or Slick, or W front and to the left at the gravesite, next to Stevens's grieving widow, but it's not so easy to imagine Chillary or the former head of the Choom Gang doing so.

Also, the State Department is in a huff because CNN managed to wander into the Benghazi consulate and pick up Stevens's diary - four days after the attack. You know, the attack that the Obama administration says they're investigating night and day. That investigation does not seem to include visits to the actual consulate. Not surprisingly, CNN reported that Stevens wrote that he was concerned about the security situation. Rather than hide its head in shame, the State Department's response has been to knock CNN for taking evidence from a crime scene. Hey, send some marines in to secure the place if you care so d*mn much.

The murder of an American ambassador should be infuriating to the president, regardless of its cause. But I haven't seen much righteous anger out of DC, beyond Hillary's saying she couldn't believe the people of Benghazi, a city we saved from a medieval sacking, would turn on us so quickly. Frankly, it should be infuriating to the Loyal Opposition, too, but the GOP seems to have been intimidated into silence (yet again) by the media's ganging up on Romney for being the one guy in American politics to express any sort of anger with the events in Libya.

The need to protect Obama and his "legacy" is so great we apparently must sacrifice the memory of Christopher Stevens.

Repeated As Farce: Obama Echoes Carter In His Critique Of Romney's Foreign Policy Skills

A great history lesson from the Examiner which reminds us of the last Democrat president embroiled in a Middle East crisis who dared to chortle over his GOP rival's approach to diplomacy:

Carter criticized Reagan’s views on foreign policy during his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, slamming Reagan for living in a “fantasy world” and noting his inability to understand the “complex global changes” in foreign policy. 

“It’s a make believe world. A world of good guys and bad guys, where some politicians shoot first and ask questions later,” Carter said, “No hard choices. No sacrifice. No tough decisions. It sounds too good to be true – and it is. The path of fantasy leads to irresponsibility. The path of reality leads to hope and peace.” 

After Reagan’s nomination in July 1980, Carter criticized Republicans calling it “a party with a narrow vision, a party that is afraid of the future, a party whose leaders are inclined to shoot from the hip, a party that has never been willing to put its investment in human beings who are below them in economic and social status.” 

As Philip Klein noted on Twitter, the Carter campaign ran fearful “man on the street” ads during the campaign, fretting that Reagan would be a president who would “shoot from the hip.”

You really can't make this stuff up. The only people in US politics who seem to remember the lessons of the Carter years are conservatives!

The idea that Mitt Romney committed some kind of gaffe by talking tough against the Middle East mob is a striped-pantsed fantasy that can only work inside the Beltway. Americans have been watching Muslim a**holes attacking our embassies for decades. We "get" the idea that we can't treat every burned American flag as a casus belli. But that doesn't mean we have to like the peoples of the non-Israeli Middle East, and frankly there is little reason to. And, that also doesn't mean we have to lie back and enjoy the trashing of our emabssies and the murder of our ambassadors. Do we still need to be sending $1.5 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood's Egypt? Do we need to be hosting their diplomats? Best of all (and something we could implement in short order), do we need to be issuing so many visas to these folks?

A war-weary America will not react well to Republican sabre rattling, but will react well to a show of resolve. That's the real lesson of the Carter years.

Compound Interest: Inside Col. Qadaffi's Lair

The Wall Street Journal published an "interactive map" of Col. Qadaffi's compound. Although the Mad Dog liked to cultivate the image of the simple army officer who lived in a tent, the truth was a lot more boring. He was just another Middle Eastern potentate living large on oil money while his subjects scraped by.

Qadaffi might have been a dictator - who isn't in that part of the world? - but he was also enough of a socialist to have attracted the approval of such figures as Louis Farrakhan, Rev. Wright, and Nelson Mandela. Qadaffi also liked to play the "authenticity" card, meeting visitors in his ceremonial tent, which can be seen in the map, and which was dwarfed by the main building where Qadaffi repaired to after a day play-acting at "simple tribesman" dress-up.

Socialism is a funny thing. It pretends to be the vanguard of the future, but the people who manage to assert themselves into the head of the parade manage to live better than the monarchs and prime ministers whom they replace.

War On 45

Word is (again) that the Libyan rebels are at the gates of Tripoli, and that the Mad Dog might be getting ready to head out to pasture.

Moammar Gadhafi is making preparations for a departure from Libya with his family for possible exile in Tunisia, U.S. officials have told NBC News, citing intelligence reports…

The officials could provide no further details as to conditions or precise timing for Gadhafi’s departure, NBC said, and the news report emphasized that there was no guarantee that Gadhafi would follow through on any plans to flee…

Five loud explosions shook the center of Tripoli on Thursday afternoon, possibly striking near Gadhafi’s compound. NATO jets flew overhead minutes after the blasts. It wasn’t immediately clear what was hit or if there were civilian casualties. NATO has bombarded military targets all over Libya since March when a no-fly zone was instituted…

If Qadaffi leaves, then arguably you could say that the Obama Administration's passive-aggressive approach to Middle Eastern warfare had the positive effect of getting rid of at least one lousy petro-dictator. Then again, the word on the Arab Street is that any Qadaffi abdication will be promptly followed by a massive blood-letting. I thought the whole reason we were in Libya was to prevent a massacre in Benghazi. Is a massacre in Tripoli OK? Smart power is a lot more difficult than I realized.

Putting aside international diplomacy, Ace looks at what we can learn about America's future war-making should Obama's half-assed bombing raids lead to the exact same result as the massive expenditure of blood and treasure obtained in Iraq

The Bush model of war -- go in heavy, attempt to win the war on the backs of American (and allied) soldiers, attempt to establish a monopoly on the use of violence, and then continue that monopoly on the use of violence by acting as the nation's law enforcement/army for five, six, ten years -- doesn't work, or at least does not work at costs the American public is willing to pay.

I see no point agitating for a Full War Model against Iran, for example -- to urge such a thing is futile. I do not believe the American public has the appetite for such an endeavor. (At least-- not unless Iran uses its soon-to-be-built nukes.)

We didn't use to take care of these countries in this fashion. We used to arm and train rebels within those countries (they've all got them), fund them, provide intelligence, spread some bribe money around, and, when necessary, bring in the sort of Word of God that our air and naval forces issue from the air or sea.

Such wars were messy and bloody and often very very dirty, with guerrilla tactics that often looked like "terrorism" being employed by both sides. This is only a problem when the forces on our side employ such tactics, because that's the only time such tactics get condemned in the press.

They are, however, effective, much of the time at least, and with a light American involvement as far as troops on the ground.

Colin Powell's ludicrous statement -- "You break it, you buy it" -- is a formula for nonstop, decades-long nation-building of exactly the same type that George W. Bush campaigned against in 2000, albeit on a much longer and much bloodier scale than we saw in, say, Haiti.

Why do we "buy" it if we break it?

Broken societies reassemble themselves. In fact, they seem to do so more quickly than people expect, even when faced with great devastation.

This is a bit of a change as Ace, like a lot of conservative bloggers, was a big Iraq War booster/defender back in the day. But, like a lot of people, the seemingly endless f***-ups, the depressing grind of the Casey/Abizaid years, the thousands of dead, and so on were wearying.

And, it's not like the war's political boosters made it any easier. I don't know about you, but I can't say I was happy when Bush Administration figures like Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld admitted they could have done a "better job" of defending the war from leftists eager to treat every Sunni stubbed toe as the new My Lai. No kidding! I mean, you start a war; send thousands of young people to the other side of the world; and then do such a poor job fighting it that you lose a congressional majority and then a presidential election largely due to war weariness. And all you can do is send out Scott McClellan for day after agonizing day of tongue-tied "advocacy??" Try harder next time, please.

Ace is reflecting a change in defense mindedness that I think is more prevalent on the Right than people realize. No, conservatives aren't going to become peace advocates. But, the next time some Republican "moderates" like Colin Powell or John McCain put on their Long Serious Faces and announce we need to invade this or that Third World hellhole, they're going to need to have some damn good satellite images. I have to wonder if any such war would be politically saleable right now, absent another 9/11-style event.

This, of course, makes you wonder about the prospect for passing the dreaded defense cuts. The knee-jerk GOP reaction has always been to simply say, no. But, now I'm not so sure. No one's going to advocate for outright disarmament. But, do we really need to spend billions of dollars on a single ship that can be sunk by one carefully aimed missile? Do we really need to be planning fight two big wars at once? Do we really need bases around the world in the exact same places they've been since the end of the Cold War?And so on. Also, just cause the military's mission is an honorable one doesn't mean procurement scandals are not any more grubby wasteful than an ACORN shakedown.

I've seen a lot of worried commentary about China rising, and how they are building carriers. But, they're not really doing that. They're buying hulls from the Ukraine and putting weapons systems (no doubt using technology stolen from us) in them and doing things like intimidating Viet Nam. Ooooo. I'm scared.

The fact is that the Pentagon hasn't changed its habits or its budget since the end of the Reagan Administration. Not saying we should be cutting to the bone, but I'm also not seeing why American soldiers need to continue to act as the world's peace keepers.

Mad Dog: Keeping the Libyan War Going

You just have to laugh at this stuff. The Obama administration is taking to new heights its argument that American involvement in the Libyan Air War is not the sort of bellicose behavior that will run afoul of the War Powers Act. The NY Times reports that Obama's own lawyers told him the US was at war with Libya causing him to ... seek out new lawyers who would tell him what he wants to hear.

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

Just to add to the hilarity, Koh was one of the leading lights of the unitary executive critique that was so fashionable during the dread Bush Administration. Now he's making goofy hair-splitting arguments about how we are warring but are not "at war." Ridiculous. Maybe Americans aren't looking through the cross-hairs, but we are certainly providing logistical and material support that is much more important to the war effort than whomever is at the tip of the spear. As others have pointed out, if there was a country attacking the US in an effort to force Obama from office, and there was a third country offering material support (and even hovering off-shore) is there any doubt we would consider ourselves to be at war with them?

The worst of it is that this was all so unnecessary. The original sin of the Libyan Intervention was not going in without congressional approval. It was the inexcusable two-week delay when the rebels - remember them? - were at the gates of Tripoli and Qaddafi was on the ropes. A quick intervention then would have toppled the Mad Dog. Instead, Obama's dithering saved him, and now we are left with a bloody stalemate abroad and tortured definitions of "war" at home.

Barbary Coast: What Happened When Libya Invested With Goldman Sachs

Today's Wall Street Journal had a long story about Libya's sovereign investment fund's misadventures in currency trading with Goldman Sachs during the fateful year of 2008. The Libyans invested $1.3 billion with Goldman and lost 98% of their investment. Then, after losing a fortune, GS tried to make up for it by offering the Mad Dog a sizable stake in the Vampire Squid. Who needs the CIA to undermine our enemies?

In early 2008, Libya's sovereign-wealth fund controlled by Col. Moammar Gadhafi gave $1.3 billion to Goldman Sachs Group to sink into a currency bet and other complicated trades. The investments lost 98% of their value, internal Goldman documents show.

What happened next may be one of the most peculiar footnotes to the global financial crisis. In an effort to make up for the losses, Goldman offered Libya the chance to become one of its biggest shareholders, according to documents and people familiar with the matter.

Apparently the poor GS executives who had to deliver the bad news to the Qadaffis needed an escort to the airport in order to leave Tripoli alive. Hey, you guys wanted to be big shot wizards of finance, right?

More seriously, I think this story, and a million more like it that haven't yet been told, gives you a real sense of the insanity that drove the Crash of '08. I mean, how do you "lose" 98% of a billion dollar investment? But that was the thing back then. Some of the world' wealthiest and sophisticated investors were throwing billions of dollars into a black hole. And the people running the black holes - those would be Lehman Bros, Goldman, et al. - were traveling the world looking for further billions. Not only that, they were contemplating going into business with a government that just a few years earlier had been caught developing nuclear weapons.

The history of Wall Street is filled with roguish characters, but a financial alliance with a man who once demarcated a "line of death" in the Mediterranean would seem to be too much, even for Goldman.

Cannons From the Left: Liberals at War

The rapidly changing rationales of the Libyan Air War have come too quick for me to comment fast enough to be current. Victor Davis Hanson, however, does a good job summarizing the amazing contradictions and flip-flopping that have marked Obama's move to war, which was - at once - both too fast and too late.

This is a Potemkin coalition, far smaller than the one that fought in either Afghanistan or Iraq, notwithstanding loud proclamations to the contrary. We are not even done with the first week of bombing, and yet no one seems in charge: What body/country/alliance determines targets, issues communiques, or coordinates diplomacy? The U.K. goes after Qaddafi, and we plead “They did it, not us”? Again, fairly or not, the impression is that Obama dressed up preponderant American intervention under a multicultural fig leaf, earning the downsides of both. A loud multilateral effort could be wise diplomacy, but not if it translates into a desire to subordinate American options and profile to European and international players that are not commensurately shouldering the burden — and not if all this is cynically used to advance a welcomed new unexceptional American profile.

When we talk of “European leadership,” we mean the U.K. and France, not Germany, Italy, or most of the EU. When we talk of the “Arab League,” we mean essentially zero military assets. And when we talk of the “U.N.,” we mean zero blue-helmeted troops. So, like it or not, there is a level of understandable cynicism that suspects Obama’s new paradigm of multilateral, international action is simply the same-old, same-old, albeit without the advantages that accrue when America is unapologetic about its leadership role, weathers the criticism, and insists on the options and prerogatives that a superpower must demand in war by virtue of its power and sacrifice.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Technically, I support this effort to the extent it is focused on ridding the world of Qaddafi, but...uh, they keep saying they're not trying to kill Qaddafi, or even depose him! They just want to keep him from killing his own citizens. A worthy goal, but one that promises a much longer commitment than the Obami are speaking of now. Fact is, the time to act was two weeks ago when Qaddafi was on the ropes. Now, he has nearly stamped out the rebellion. He's not going anywhere, unless he decides to go on vacation.

Much has been made of Obama having been dragged into war by the women on his national security team. Whatever. The bigger problem is that all of his actions have communicated for all to see that he has absolutely no good instincts in matters of war and foreign affairs. Want to pass an unconstitutional health care "reform" law by hook or by crook? Obama can get it done! Rid the world of an odious dictator who has killed hundreds of Americans? Forget it. Not only was his timing off, his method of announcing we were at war - a quick presser on the way to the airport - telegraphed how little he cares, and how little he realizes how dangerous it is that he doesn't care.

A bigger theoretical problem receiving only glancing attention: Obama's enthusiasm for waging a war only arose after France, the UN and the Arab League had demanded action. Coalitions are swell, but since when does the United States take orders from France and the UN? Feverish libertarians are already issuing dire warnings about how this is bringing us closer to one-world government. Ben Stein has noted that Obama hasn't even pretended to consult Congress, a constitutionally dubious precedent. Even Mickey Kaus is uneasy about the idea of intervening in a country purely on the UN's say-so.

The Libyan Air War didn't have to last long, but Obama's deliberations and the confusion about the war's goals means it could go on much longer than we realize.

Back To The Shores of Tripoli: US At War With Libya

Heading out the door to Brazil, President Obama paused for a moment to announce that, let me be clear, we are going to war against Libya. I don't think there are any more "what if George Bush did this" columns left to write

President Barack Obama demanded Friday that Moammar Gadhafi halt all military attacks on civilians and said that if the Libyan leader did not stand down the United States would join other nations in launching military action against him.

But the president also stressed the United States "is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya."

In a brief appearance at the White House, Obama said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would travel to Paris on Saturday to join allies in discussing next steps in Libya, where Gadhafi has pressed a brutal crackdown against rebels trying to end his 42-year reign.

Stressing that the United States was acting in concert with European allies and Arab nations, the president said, "Our goal is focused, our cause is just and our coalition is strong."

Obama's remarks came less than 24 hours after the United Nations Security Council voted to authorize military action — including a "no-fly zone" over Libya — to prevent the killing of civilians by Gadhafi's forces.

The idea is that this will be a war to do nothing more than provide a no-fly zone for Libyan rebels, who will have to do the ground fighting. And, that's great, only it's about two weeks late. Two weeks ago the rebels had the momentum and were marching on Tripoli, while Qaddafi was issuing blood curdling promises to fight to the last man. Now, it's Qaddafi who is on the march. Indeed, he is at the gates of the last rebel stronghold. Yes, he's now declared a cease-fire and, yes, apparently the Egyptians are arming the rebels and the rebels now have their no-fly zone, but...the above is not a recipe for success. At best, it promises more bloodshed and even a stalemate.

Two weeks ago, Qaddafi was on the ropes and could have been quickly dispatched by the mere presence of US forces (such as an air craft floating off-shore). Now? We're going to be stuck providing a no-fly zone to rebels whose politics and motivations are largely unknown. Hillary Clinton has been meeting with Libyan rebels in Paris, and supposedly these guys are liberal democracy advocates. Could be. But, this would not be the first revolution that put forward liberal reformers as spokesmen and then dispatched those reformers as soon as the real rebel leadership took power.

There's a lot of scuttlebutt out there that many of the rebels are aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, which would explain how street protests could morph into an armed insurrection that nearly toppled the dictatorship in a few weeks time. Sure would be nice if the President had some workable intelligence to help sort this out, but he and his ideological allies have spent decades neutering the CIA's ability to gather such intelligence. Surely it says something that the Secretary of Defense, whose department has had to set up its own intelligence shops after the CIA's failures in Iraq, was loud in his skepticism of prosecuting this war. Oddly, it's been the diplomats who have pushed Obama to war. Hope they know something we don't know.

And, speaking of the president's ideological allies, how do you suppose they will react? I mean, it's not like Libya attacked us, right? Doesn't Libya have a lot of oil? Wouldn't want to be seen as "stealing" it, right? The rationale for this war seems to be that Qaddafi must go because he's killing his own people, but that was never enough, by itself, to support removing Saddam Hussein, was it? Plus, I'm old enough to remember all of the "cowboy war monger" complaints when President Reagan sent in the air force to decapitate the Qaddafi regime*. And so on. I've read that there are fears Qaddafi might us mustard gas on the rebels. Wouldn't it be a hoot if somehow we found out that he didn't have any mustard gas, or other WMD's, but let the world think he did?

Conservatives are often accused of having a simple-minded view of the world, but I would hate to have to go through the mental contortions of having to adjust my political posture to support the left-wing alpha dog of the day. Here, for example, is Nancy Pelosi's obsequious message of support:

"I commend the president for his leadership and prudence on how our nation will proceed in regards to Libya and work in concert with European and Arab allies to address the crisis," she said in a written statement.

Lotta smart power in the air these days.

* oh, and Reagan gave an Oval Office address after he unleashed the military, ticked off the reasons why the attack was justified, and did not go jetting off to Rio immediately afterward. Also, when he signed off with "God bless America" you knew he meant it.