The Weeks Review

THE "FRONT RUNNERS"
Thankfully, we have a long way to go

Huckabee: I cannot determine what people see in this man. His resume is essentially that he is Governor of Arkansas...haven't we already had one of those? OK, so he lost a lot of weight, quickly. Perhaps he would make a good diet buddy or a personal trainer, but I hardly see where this qualifies him to be president. Oh yes, he's a Christian, and he seems to talk about that far too much and in terms that make me more than a little wary. We get quite enough of that kind of talk from the Middle East, thank you.

Speaking of the middle East, while he says he wants to win, his method is breathtakingly obtuse:

"I support a regional summit so that Iraq's neighbors become financially and militarily committed to stabilizing Iraq now rather than financially and militarily committed to widening the war later. This summit will add more voices, Muslim voices, to the pressure to perform we're already applying to the Maliki government."

Ah yes, the old "regional summit" solution. Let's see, Iraq is bordered mainly by Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and Mike thinks that these are countries that want to participate in promoting a liberal democratic state in the center of the Middle East?

Obama: It's pretty clear to me that liberal pinheads and people who know absolutely nothing about anything (yes, may be redundant) are the main constituency in the Obama "groundswell" because, well, he's black and they figure it's time to have a black president. It doesn't matter that he's grossly inexperienced (a former state senator and a US Senator for 3 years) and if he were of any the race that he would not even be considered. The rationale behind his support seems to be "he's black, and it's time we had a black president". As a bonus, he has Muslim heritage and his middle name is Hussein - a bonus on the "feel-good-about-how-open-minded-I-am" scale.

As for Iraq, Obama is clearly in the "cut and run" wing of the Democrat party (yes, more redundancy):

Now, as a U.S. Senator, Senator Obama has continued to critique the administration's mishandling of this war, and believes that while our troops have done an outstanding job in Iraq, there can be no military solution to what is inherently a political conflict between Iraq's warring factions. The only hope to end this burgeoning civil war is for Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds to come together and resolve their differences. That's why Senator Obama agrees with the Iraq Study Group's conclusion that we must begin a phased redeployment of American troops to signal to the government and people of Iraq that ours is not an open-ended commitment.

To set a new course for U.S. policy that can bring a responsible end to the war, Senator Obama introduced the Iraq War De-escalation Act in January 2007. The legislation begins redeployment of U.S. forces no later than May 1, 2007, with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008, a date that is consistent with the expectation of the Iraq Study Group.

Since this is still up on his website, I can only assume that he is unaware of, or uninterested in the enormous progress that we have made in the past few months in Iraq and that we are, in fact winning. Can we still assume that he favors a complete withdrawal of all combat brigades by March 31st? This gives new meaning to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, does it not?

Perhaps he has been to busy campaigning to formulate his "new" plan for our defeat and it will appear on his website at a later date........