These excerpts from a Haaretz article on the looming battle for Gaza underscore the imminence of a huge clash between the IDF and Hamas, a major moment in the global war between jihadists and their enemies, but the situation doesn't seem to be receiving much attention in the U.S.:

Defense Minster Ehud Barak on Friday blamed Hamas for the escalating violence in the south, and said the Islamic movement would bear the consequences of it.

"Hamas is directly responsible for the current situation and will be the one to bear the cost of our response", Barak said during a visit to Ashkelon, adding that "an Israeli response is necessary and will be carried out."...

Also Friday, the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee said the IDF must reoccupy part of the Gaza Strip for an unlimited time and overthrow the Hamas government.

"The State of Israel must make a strategic decision to order the IDF to prepare quickly to topple the Hamas terror regime and take over all the areas from which rockets are fired on Israel," MK Tzachi Hanegbi (Kadima) told Israel Radio. He said the IDF should prepare to remain in those areas for years.

MK Gideon Sa'ar (Likud) said his party would back an invasion of Gaza, though he fell short of advocating reoccupation.

"There is no doubt that the security response needs to include a ground component," said Sa'ar. He said the "takeover of territory in the northern Strip" from which the Palestinians launch rockets at Israel would reduce the barrages from Gaza.

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah,"
the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

"The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Vilnai told Army Radio on Friday.

The suddenness of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah stunned most Americans, but the start of this next battle is being telegraphed.  American media might want to ask Senators Clinton and Obama about Israel's right to defend itself as the rocket attacks from the south escalate, and might also get about the business of informing the American public as to the aggressions against Israel being launched from Gaza.

Inevitably Israel gets hammered in the international media when it comes to blows with the Hamas jihadists, but the situation is simply as untenable as it would be for the U.S. if rockets were raining down on San Diego from Tijuana. 

How many Americans also know that yesterday PLA President Mahmoud Abbas asserted that al Qaeda was in Gaza working with Hamas:

“Al-Qaeda is present in Gaza and I’m convinced that they [Hamas] are their allies,” said Mr Abbas in an interview with al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. “I can say without doubt that al-Qaeda is present in the Palestinian territories and that this presence, especially in Gaza, is facilitated by Hamas.”

(HT: Commentary's Abe Greenwald.)

I can understand why Democrats don't want to talk about the war against the jihadists, but MSM really does owe the American public comprehensive coverage of the war unfiltered by the political campaign underway.  It seems incredible that the Middle East is on the brink of a huge explosion, and there isn't even a story on the Washington Post's front page.

 

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats wrapped up another busy three-day work week Thursday morning with a flurry of legislative action.  She passed five bills naming post offices, created the official inaugural committee, and authorized the use of the Capitol Rotunda for the 2009 Inaugural.  With that workload behind her, it was time to call it a week and break for four days until next Tuesday. 

On the bad side, she and her Democratic colleagues couldn't seem to find time on the calendar to bring up the permanent patch to the FISA law, the bill that already passed the Senate in bipartisan fashion and would pass overwhelmingly in the House, the bill that allows our intelligence officials to continue monitoring and tracking the movements of enemy terrorists abroad, and actually helps prevent future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.  So for almost the last two weeks, one foreign jihadist could make a 30 second sat phone call from one Middle Eastern country to another foreign jihadist in another Middle Eastern country, and because the communication technology routes a lot of this traffic through U.S. switching, our intelligence agencies would have to get a court order to be able to act on this 30 second phone call.  

But then again, on the good side, at least the trial lawyer lobby can continue to safely sue the telcoms if they cooperate with the U.S. government to try and thwart further attacks here.  

Meanwhile, over on the other end of the Capitol, Republican leader Mitch McConnell played another game of Lucy and the Football, with Harry Reid playing the role of Charlie Brown.  Early this week, Harry Reid wanted to bring up, for approaching the 70th time since he's become majority leader of the Senate, another couple of bills authored by Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold that would require immediate steps to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

Reid had figured that he would bring them up for consideration, that McConnell would immediately rally the Republicans to defeat the bill's 60 vote requirement to proceed to open floor debate, and then go out and hold a press conference before moving onto something else.  McConnell, toying with Reid as he's done since the Democrats took the majority in January '07, didn't knock the bills down, allowing them to proceed to the floor for debate, throwing the feckless Reid into a scheduling disaster.

Here's a still shot that is a common sight since Harry Reid's been in charge.



Standing, that would be Reid, Christopher Dodd, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, also known as the Larry, Moe, Curly and Shemp of the United States Senate. 

They weren't planning on spending any serious Senate floor time on this issue, but now they had to scramble and start scheduling Senators to come to the floor and rehash the same old tired rhetoric about how disastrous the war in Iraq is, an even harder argument to make when the situation all over Iraq is better than it was two months ago, the last time the Democrats tried to declare defeat.  And two months ago, the situation had significantly improved as well.  

After a couple of days of on and off debate, and very little else going on, Reid began to see the writing on the wall, meaning he wasn't going to get anywhere near the 60 votes he needed to cut off debate and proceed to final votes on Feingold's bills.  So he withdrew them from consideration, and vowed he would live to try and surrender another day, probably in a month when the next war appropriation bills come up.  

On the eve of entering 15 months in charge of the Congress, one chamber is committing malfeasance in dealing with the national security of the country, and in the other chamber, the Democrats have demonstrated all the originality and effectiveness of the Los Angeles Raiders' playbook.
 
If the Republican Party and its conservative supporters would simply put their internal quest for ideological purity aside for a moment, they'd recognize how inept, dangerous and utterly beatable this bunch is at all levels.  It's time to use the window that's been provided to us by Mitt Romney's gracious and strategic exit from the campaign, along with the bloodletting going on between Senators Obama and Clinton, and come together once more as the coalition Bill Buckley built.  There is no reason why issues and substance shouldn't beat false hope and empty change rhetoric every time out.

Leap year day means we have one extra day to stop squabbling about who is or isn't conservative enough to support, and start focusing on the task in front of us. Use your day wisely.

Last week, the New York Times ran a debacle of a story about John McCain that lacked credible sourcing and any hard facts to back up whispered, third-party allegations. It was a story that was deemed unworthy for publication by the Boston Globe, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and Beltway insiders like Morton Kondracke, and even the Times' own ombudsman, Clark Hoyt.  As Hugh cites below, there is a Rasmussen report that of the roughly two thirds of people polled that say they followed the Times story fairly closely last week, two-thirds of them believe it was a hatchet job by the Times to hurt McCain. 

So after their credibility took a huge hit, how do they follow up this week?  Carl Hulse runs a story with the headline, "McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out."  John McCain, it's true, was born on a military base in the Panama Canal Zone to a serving military dad and mom.  But the problem with the Times story is they do not cite anyone who is politically questioning McCain's eligibility. Part of reporting is explaining the who, what, when, where and why.  Mr. Hulse and his editors forgot the who.  He gets comments from a few legal scholars as to what they think the term natural born citizen means, and whether or not these experts think McCain might have a problem, but doesn't get into who's making the allegations, and more important, what the impact of those allegations will have on military families. 

The left loves to tell Americans how much they love and support the military despite being against the war, as was on display once again in the Senate this week, where Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and his friends on the Democratic side of the aisle unsuccessfully tried once again to cut and run in Iraq in the face of increasing progress on all fronts.

But the question should not be about whether McCain is or isn't eligible to run on a potential technicality the left wants to interpret from the writings of the founders.  The U.S. base where McCain was born at the time was U.S. territory. The real question is are the Democrats really anti-military enough to essentially indicate to thousand of families sacrificing for and serving this country abroad, at the request of the United States, that part of their sacrifice includes banning their children from aspiring to run for the top job in the land, the same land they are fighting and dying to protect?

Americans may be split on the issue of Iraq.  Americans may have differing views of what role our military should have in foreign policy.  That's a fair debate.  But Americans will not tolerate a political party that penalizes American citizens' future political ambitions because of their parents' active duty military service.  And the Times' attempt to sling mud stories week after week is going to eventually sound like the paper that cried wolf.

This gives me some hope that the American public is still listening to the arguments about why the left should not be allowed to run the country.  This in turn gives me hope that John McCain can make a persuasive argument to the majority of Americans that we simply cannot afford another holiday from history no matter how appealing the eloquent Barack Obama may make it seem.  Congrats to Jonah Goldberg for demonstrating that superb writing can still take difficult subjects and make them not only interesting but accessible and widely read.

If you missed our conversation about Jonah's book from last week, it is here.

The audio of the first hour is here, and the second hour is here.

You can order the book from Amazon here.

(HT: K-Lo.)

From Rasmussen Reports:

Just 24% of American voters have a favorable opinion of the New York Times. Forty-four percent (44%) have an unfavorable opinion and 31% are not sure....

The Times recently became enmeshed in controversy over an article published concerning John McCain. Sixty-five percent (65%) of the nation’s likely voters say they have followed that story at least somewhat closely.

Of those who followed the story, 66% believe it was an attempt by the paper to hurt the McCain campaign. Just 22% believe the Times was simply reporting the news. Republicans, by an 87% to 9% margin, believe the paper was trying to hurt McCain’s chances of winning the White House. Democrats are evenly divided.

The widespread and instant recognition of the attempt to smear John McCain reflects the low esteem in which the public holds elite media.  Like the MSM networks. the Times and many other of the big papers have spent decades branding themselves as left-wing subsidiaries of the Democrats, and rebuilding credibility is an almost impossible task for them as a result.  The declining value of the paper reflects the fact it has allowed itself to alienate more than half of its potential customers, and Rasmussen is simply recording the inevitable result of media elites never allowing themselves to hear from much less report fairly on the center-right majority in the country. 

In the summer of 1974 before I began college, I submitted an article to National Review, along with a cover note to Wlliam F. Buckley, Jr.

I cannot recall what the piece was about, and I suspect it wasn't very good, but Buckley very quickly and unexpectedly sent me back a very kind and encouraging note, as well as the recommendation that I look up Charles Kesler when I got to school, as he too was about to begin his undergraduate studies and he too had corresponded with Buckley.

I did meet up with Charles and have remained friends through the next 30-plus years, but what I never forgot was Buckley's example of graciousness that struck me as inspiring then and since.  The exceptionally talented staff at NRO will be honoring WFB for the next few days, and the magazine he founded for as long as it is published (may it be centuries more) but my guess is that there are thousands and thousands of people who Buckley encouraged in a similar fashion that we won't be hearing from, a silent legacy that is vast and enduring.

There may have been more influential conservative pundits and intellectuals over the past half century, though none come immediately to mind, and there may have been more accomplished interviewers and authors of such numerous, diverse and always interesting books, though, again, no names jump out.

But I don't think there is anyone who combined accomplishments of this order with such widespread, genuine and deep affection across the center-right except for Ronald Reagan, who owed much to Buckley, which means we all do.

The launch of a new Politico.com blog by Michael Calderone devoted to political media is good news.  Here's the first post in case you missed it:

Welcome to Politico's newest blog, where media and politics meet. It's official: a little caricature has now gone up on the homepage.

With this blog, I'll cover both the epic battles between presidential campaigns and the press (like Clinton/ MSNBC or McCain/ The Times), as well as the daily twists and turns in political coverage (and the narratives developing at a rapid pace).

Besides '08, I'll expect to tackle journalism issues while trying to steer clear of professorial hand-wringing or dwelling on a misplaced comma. I'll misplace quite a few.

Also, look for updates on political media news that goes beyond November, as well as, gossip from the newsroom and on the campaign trail

How exactly will this blog develop? Well, since media predictions haven't been working out lately for anyone, I'll just say I hope it grows organically in the days, weeks, and months to come.

And it will be a whole lot easier (and far more comprehensive) with suggestions, comments, and tips. Always appreciated!

Note as well that JohnTaylor, Frank Gannon et al are posting excellent stories at The New Nixon. Gannon provides this glimpse of Obama campaign brain David Axelrod:

Senator Obama is clearly a man of exceptional ability and presence. He also is an excellent judge of talent. His choice of Chicago’s David Axelrod to conceive and execute his candidacy accounts, in no small part, for its great success so far.

Axelrod is a colorful New Yorker who started out as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and ended up as the Chicago Tribune’s chief political writer. He has worked for Paul Simon, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emmanuel, Chris Dodd, Tom Vilsack, John Edwards, and Deval Patrick. The latter gig supplies an Obama/Patrick link that far more important than just some shared rhetoric.

Axelrod got to know the young Obama some fifteen years ago when a local Democratic party activist got them together for a voter registration drive. The still young pro saw the great potential in the still fledging pol and has been following him around with cameras and sound crews ever since he entered the US Senate in 2004.

Axelrod, in his early fifties, has delegated managing the Obama campaign to David Plouffe, one of the partners in his consulting firm AKP&D Message and Media (Plouffe is the “P”).

There are lots of interesting insights and colorful asides to be found in Ben Wallace-Wells’s profile of Mr. Axelrod — “Obama’s Narrator” — which appeared last spring in The New York Times Magazine.

This Politico.com story focuses on the disarray at the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The biggest problem the NRCC has is its total failure to communicate a plan for getting back to the majority.  Why contribute to a party that lacks a path back to power? 

Visit the NRCC.org homepage and you'll get a sense of the confusion and aimlessness there.  It is a total mess.  Instead of a front page listing in order of importance of the races where GOP contenders are positioned to take back a seat lost on '06, you get a mishmash of links.  What little traffic the site generates almost certainly never returns as there is no useful information here.  Dig a little deeper --say into the "briefing memo" on Illinois-- and you have to read deep to find the sort of info you would think would be front page:

 

IL-08 (Rep. Melissa Bean, D)

Steve Greenberg is primed to pose a formidable challenge to incumbent Democrat Melissa Bean. In a three-way primary contest, Greenberg overwhelmingly secured the GOP nomination.

Steve Greenberg, a successful businessman from Long Grove, IL and former minor league hockey player, will bring an outsider’s perspective to a general election that is surely going to be about change in Washington. Greenberg’s positions on reforming government, cutting taxes, making government more efficient and maintaining a strong national security policy are all perfectly suited for the conservative 8^th District.

Greenberg will face off against Melissa Bean, who was only able to garner 51% of the vote in the Democrat wave election of 2006.  Bean has now found herself in a much more difficult position as she has been forced to deliver her vote for Nancy Pelosi’s liberal agenda on many occasions. Her support for legislation that would cripple small businesses, as well as her penchant for runaway government spending, leave her vulnerable to what is sure to be a strong Republican challenge.

History. Congresswoman Bean represents one of 47 Democrat districts that President Bush carried in 2000 and 2004.  The President carried IL-08 in 2004 and 2000 with 56% of the vote.

Geography. The 8th Congressional District is located in the northwest Chicago suburbs and includes parts of Cook, Lake and McHenry counties. The 8^th District is also home to Schamburg, one of the country's major corporate cities.

Note that there is no link to Greenberg's campaign site, no polling data, and no links to media reports on the race that would add credibility to the NRCC's assertion that Bean is vulnerable.  Instead we learn he was a minor league hockey player.  Sheesh.  Can't the NRCC afford one decent new media consultant?  Or at least invite Ruffini to lunch?

Generating excitement depends on having a story to tell of momentum here and a change in the wind there.  It depends upon having viable, exciting candidates, and hopefully some of them will be veterans of the war determined to bring their experience to the Hill.

If every GOP Member cannot instantly reel off the top 15 races where he or she expects to see a new Republican sitting in 2009, then they, the leadership and the NRCC is not doing its job.  Very few people have an interest in sending money to an atrophied organization that can't communicate and doesn't appear to have any serious plan for regaining the Speaker's chair.

Last week, Hillary Clinton waited until well into her debate with Barack Obama to utter the line of the night that cost her the debate.  She had a scripted line to use about Barack Obama's change as being something you can Xerox, which fell flat and drew boos from the audience. 

Tonight in Ohio, Hillary didn't waste nearly as much time before uttering a gaffe which will probably seal the deal with many of her supporters as the final straw on the back of her candidacy. 

 

The first sixteen minutes were a ponderous back and forth over who's health care plan was more socialistic than the other's.  After Brian Williams tried to wrestle back control several times, he finally stepped in and changed topics to whether NAFTA should continued.  He started with Hillary Clinton, who inexplicably was appalled that she was asked the question first. 

Usually, in a debate, you like it when you get more time.  Just ask Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards and Bill Richardson, who many times in the earlier debated looked a collection of Maytag repairmen instead of presidential candidates while the focus was on Hillary and Obama.

Hillary should have relished the opportunity to go first.  Explaining her position wouldn't even have been as important as using the opportunity of going first and framing the views of her opponent, since Barack Obama doesn't give views on anything except the war.  He's a change guy. He's a hope guy.  He's a big picture/concept guy.  Obama doesn't get into specificity, so Hillary could easily have put him on the defensive.  

She didn't.  Hillary Clinton said she was curious about the media in the last few debates always going to her first, citing Saturday Night Live and offering to give an extra pillow to Obama to make him more comfortable.  Groans and boos immediately erupted from the crowd.  Want to know another signal that a campaign has come completely apart at the seams?  Look at the debate prep.  Hillary Clinton didn't just walk into the auditorium in Cleveland tonight and throw caution to the wind.  She prepared for this debate. She had people coaching her on what to say.  The 'change is something you can Xerox' line was scripted.  It laid an egg.  A week later, she tries again to make another sarcastic joke about the media's love afair with Obama. Again, it was an awkward egg laid by Mrs. Clinton.   If I were a campaign manager, and my candidate flopped like that in two consecutive debates, whoever was prepping her wouldn't just be fired, but probably sued for oratory malpractice.

You can tell that Hillary is frustrated that Obama is skating his way through the primary season without any significant scrutiny by the press.  But as vast and skilled as Team Hillary is, there seems to be no one on the payroll that has any idea how to combat it.  She doesn't possess the debate skills to put her opponent on the defensive, and when she's speaking at campaign rallies, whatever legitimate point she makes about the media's messianic complex with Obama gets lost in her shrill delivery.   

She may want to be the first woman in the White House, but she's never going to win by whining.  Because of the charisma chasm between her and Obama, she is being treated as a conservative by what she considered to be her allies in the mainstream media, and she clearly doesn't like it.  

What Hillary has not yet realized is that you can whine your way out of contention all you want.  Lord knows the Republican Party has enough experience with that. But if you want to actually win, you have to do it on issues and ideas, not sarcasm and excuses.   

The convictions in London of would-be terrorists are accompanied by warnings against minimizing the early attempts by terrorists-in-the-making to get organized:

A senior counter-terrorism source said: “There has always been the danger of trivialising what these people were doing. They were engaged in paramilitary training for terrorism, they talked repeatedly of fighting and killing non-believers and they rejected Muslims who did not follow their path.

“They posed a huge danger to young impressionable people who could have been lured into terrorism.”

This sort of trivialising of the threat has happened repeatedly in the U.S. by people intent on making a political case against the Bush Adminstration.

The refusal of the Obama-Pelosi Democrats to reauthorize FISA surveillance authorities is the ultimate trivialization of terror.  The fall campaign will largely turn on whether a majority of Americans are willing to listen to Obama, Pelosi Reid and the rest who want us to believe that the '90s are back, and 9/11 a distant, one-time tragedy.

One of our good friends, Dean Barnett, has checked into the hospital with complications from whatever bug is hitting the East Coast, along with his Cystic Fibrosis.  If you have a prayer to spare, send one his way for a speedy recovery.

Howard Dean is upset that John McCain wants out from public matching funds for the primary. So much so that's he's filed a complaint with the FEC.

Very well. If that's how he really feels about it, he'll tell Senate Democrats to give up their extraordinary block against the President's FEC nominees -- a block that is preventing the FEC from holding a pro-forma vote to allow McCain out of the system.

And who put the hold on Hans Von Spakovsky, one of the FEC nominees in limbo?

Barack Obama.

(In fact, this left-wing blogger asserts that Obama is THE key reason there is no working FEC right now.)

This is extraordinary. Obama is using his Senate office to limit his likely November opponent's spending to $9 million between now and the convention. Incidentally, Obama's actions would have been responsible for cutting John Edwards off at the knees had he stayed in the race and required an infusion of federal funds.

The FEC must vote to approve any such transfers, and partly because of the Obama-led block, it can't. That also means John McCain hasn't seen any Federal money yet. I don't see how you can be in a federal matching funds system and not receive any matching funds.

Is this "change we can believe in" or just Chicago-style politics?

Danielle Pletka and Michael Rubin write in today's Wall Street Journal about the failure of the International Atomic Energy Agency's director Mohammed ElBaradei to alert the world to Iran's nuclear ambitions:

The IAEA director seems intent on undercutting Security Council diplomacy. Just weeks after President George Bush toured the Middle East to build Arab support for pressure on Tehran, Mr. ElBaradei appeared on Egyptian television on Feb. 5 to urge Arabs in the opposite direction, insisting Iran was cooperating and should not be pressured. And as he grows more and more isolated from Western powers intent on disarming Iran, Mr. ElBaradei has found champions in the developing and Arab world. They cheer his self-imposed mission -- to hamstring U.S. efforts to constrain Iran's program, whether or not the regime is violating its non-proliferation obligations or pursuing nuclear weapons.

In working to undermine sanctions, however, Mr. ElBaradei demeans the purpose of his agency and undercuts its non-proliferation mission. He also makes military action all the more likely.

 

Read the whole thing.  Iran will not be deterred by the IAEA in any event, but candor from the alleged nuclear watchdogs would be welcome as the U.S.and its allies debate whether to stop the mullahs. 

The transcript of my interview with Jonah Goldberg from Thursday is here.  The audio is here and here.  The interview unleashed a ton of e-mail which I cannot really respond to given the problematic nature of the connection I am working with, but you will find a great deal more on Jonah's best-seller, Liberal Fascism, at his blog by the same name at NationalReview.com.

My thanks to Carol Platt Liebau for filling in for me yesterday.  Dean Barnett is behind the microphone Monday through Thursday, and Michael Steele guest hosts for me on Friday.

Posting from the Amazon is a bit of a challenge, but this story was the subject of a presentation I attended by Jean-Michel Cousteau. Cousteau avoids the emotional alarmism of much of the climate change debate, and his short presentation on the glacier retreat in the Andes was the sort of presentation that climate change skeptics need to examine in detail.  His argument about the imminence of the major changes looming in Peru as a result of climate change is the best case I have heard yet about the specific negative consequences of global warming.  Since the internet connections are so tenuous here, I'd appreciate pointers to supplemental information on the Andes glacier story from anyone familiar with it, via hugh@hughhewitt.com.