The issues that remain concern Barack Obama's judgment and his credibility.

If Pastor Wright agrees to be interviewed by other than Bill Moyers, the questions should ask not for his opinions on various controversies, but for facts about his relationship with the senator.

For instance, did Pastor Wright discuss Louis Farrakhan with Obama before during or after they both attended the Million Man March?  Were they together during that trip.  Did Senator Obama indicated unease with or criticism of Farrakhan?

How often did you see Obama at Trinity on Sunday over the past twenty years?  Any particular dates you can recall with certainty?  Do you have your sermons from those days on which you are certain Obama was present?

Did you appear at non-church events together?  Did you ever discuss William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn?  Tony Rezko?

Wright can destroy Obama's general election chances with one serious interview, and the New York Post suggests the rebuked reverend may be in a mood to do so, especially after being slammed for his "rants" yesterday:

The Post has learned. "After 20 years of loving Barack like he was a member of his own family, for Jeremiah to see Barack saying over and over that he didn't know about Jeremiah's views during those years, that he wasn't familiar with what Jeremiah had said, that he may have missed church on this day or that and didn't hear what Jeremiah said, this is seen by Jeremiah as nonsense and betrayal," said the source, who has deep roots in Wright's Chicago community and is familiar with his thinking on the matter.

Read this column from today's New York Daily News. (HT: RealClearPolitics.)  The opening:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up "a gentleman named William Ayers," who "was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that." Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama's answer: "The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George." Obama was indeed only 8 in early 1970. I was only 9 then, the year Ayers' Weathermen tried to murder me.

I hope the victims who survived and the families of those who died retain plaintiffs' lawyers experienced in suing foreign firms protected by governments hostile to American tort actions.

Baxter is an easy target, but getting past the PRC's defenses will be tough.  My pal Joseph Timothy Cook is a retired plaintiff's lawyer who was part of the team that pursued justice for the families of KAL007.  That case took years of aggressive litigation backed by diplomacy to conclude . Another trial lawyer friend suspects Baxter is setting up a defense that will push victims into endless struggles with the PRC. 

The U.S. government will have to push China hard for cooperation in the investigation and court proceedings.  The response to date has not been encouraging, and there are certainly still patients out there who received the contaminated drug but have not been informed.  The effort to publicize the problem and alert the patient population has been minimal, and the coverage absurdly low given the scale of the deaths and other illnesses.

I interviewed former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith at length about his new book, War and Decision, because it is an important and thoroughly researched and footnoted account of the first four years of the war.  (The transcript is here.) Feith has been on the receiving end of some blistering attacks, but his account is not score-settling, but a crucial contribution to the record of how the U.S. responded to 9/11 and why it and its coalition partners invaded Iraq. It is full of the details of history and it is compelling and riveting.

Richard Armitage and George Tenet do not come off well in this book, even though Feith is restrained when it comes to their roles in the intelligence failures and planning miscues that marked the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and which plagued the occupation.  The epic failures of the CIA cannot be spun, and Armitage's flawed strategic thinking cannot be concealed.  (Feith does not bring up Armitage's key role in the Libby fiasco.) 

The Washington Post has now declined to review the book, as Scott Johnson at Powerline notes.  This is an amusing, brazen and repulsive bit of record-censoring by a would-be paper of record that wants the Beltway's official account of events to be Bob Woodward's and that of his pals at State and CIA.  Of course it does nothing to change the actual history of the events, or to obscure Feith's excellent book.  But the pettiness of the paper's decision tells us everything we need to know about D.C. elites, their self-absorption, and their uncanny ability to play the Emperor With No Clothes.

A great report on the Marines in Helmand province from Captains Journal.

Politico.com reports on Obama's continued hold on his superdelegates on the Hill.

Obama could become the political version of Weekend at Bernie's, and his superdelegates would stick with him, and more move to him because of the blowback they would face from the Obamians indifferent to the electoral realities.  They want their guy, no matter how badly compromised by Wright, Rezko and Ayers.  And they will forever mark as a Judas any superdelegate who bolts for Hillary at this late moment.

Hillary is on with Bill O'Reilly tonight.  Given the widespread suspicion that her campaign orchestrated the Jeremiah Wright party at the National Press Club, it will be a very interesting interview.

Mark D. Roberts points to a great interview with producer Michael Flaherty.

Which leads you to this presentation by Michael Hyatt.

John Mark Reynolds has the words.  The opening:

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the Senator they called ‘Chelsea’s Mommy’
That she, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of Wright rant twenty-six thousand words more
Ah how his mentor of yore made Obama’s words sound empty.
That young man and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.

Hum the whole thing.  Or record it and send me the MP3.

So, was Obama just as naive as a child for 20 years, or as disingenuous as any major political figure of the last forty years when he denied knowing the real Pastor Wright this morning?

Either way it creates a huge issue for voters.  Is Obama a dupe, or just duplicitous?  Do you want him in charge of the nation's security, making judgments about our enemies?

Follow-up reporting should focus on the depth of the relationship between Wright and Obama.  In Philadelphia Obama described a deep, strong and personal bond.  How deep?  What did they talk about all these years?  How could you miss the government-created-AIDS etc?

"I did not vet my pastor before I decided to run for the presidency," Obama declared today.  That's not the point.  The point is Obama's judgment. Or his truthfulness.

One starting point --as Stanley Kurtz notes today, Pastor Wright attended the Million Man March.  So did Obama.  Obama writes about the Nation of Islam in his memoir, Dreams From My Father.  How can Obama possibly expect us to believe that he didn't know that Pastor Wright esteemed Louis Farrakan?  This morning Obama used the Wright praise of Farrakhan yesterday as one of "ridiculous propositions" that led him to "denounce" Wright. 

(When men from my church attended the Promise Keepers rally in D.C. in 1997, they went as a group.  Do you think that either Obama or Wright traveled with others from their church membership to the rally? I hope a reporter asks Pastor Wright that follow up.)

There's no other way to put it.  Franken cheated on his taxes and has been found out:

Senate candidate Al Franken says he will pay about $70,000 in back income taxes in 17 states going back to 2003.

The Minnesota Democrat has been under attack by Republicans for failing to file tax returns in California for several years when the comedian-turned-candidate earned money there.

How many working class Democrats are going to leave a wealthy-comedian tax dodger for a very effective, classy Norm Coleman?  I think quite a few.

That's the speculation. 

I'll be on Hannity & Colmes tonight to discuss Obama's effort to put a tourniquet on his campaign. Politico's  Mike Allen and National Review's Jim Geraghty will be on my show to discuss it.

Even if Obama's superdelegates remain loyal after losses in Indiana and North Carolina and beyond, they will also be tested by concerns that Michelle Obama's rhetoric is also harmful to Obama, as well as the still barely explored Obama ties to Tony Rezko and Bill Ayers/Bernadine Dohrn.

On a completely different subject, I taped a long interview with Steven Pressfield today about his wonderful new novel, Killing Rommell.  This is an amazing read, and Pressfield has made a short documentary to set up the novel, which will be as popular as his classic Gates of Fire.  Here's the video:




Here's the Amazon page for the book.  The book is about war in the desert, and about the honor among warriors, and will quickly become a must read for everyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan and their families and friends.

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to issue its decision on whether the polar bear is a threatened species as a result of global warming's impact on polar ice by May 15.

I have written about the effort to back door Kyoto via the polar bear listing push here and here.  The impact of a decision to list the bear would be vast, and the costs to the economy only dimly perceived even by the industries which would be immediately impacted.  The short summary is that any activity that leads to the emission of greenhouse gases and requires a federal permit would immediately be subject to a new level of permitting and feceral review (and demands for "mitigation") under Section 7 of the ESA.

If the petition to list is rejected, the environmental groups that generated more than 600,000 comments in favor of the listing will sue.  If the bear is listed, the environmental groups will start suing to push the most expansive interpretation of the law. 

Ordinarily the chaos that follows a listing is limited to the region a species inhabits.  The polar bear controversy will dwarf all previous ESA smash-ups, whether the snail darter, the delta smelt, the California gnatcatcher or the spotted owl.

I conducted a lengthy interview with major General Rick Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division yesterday.  The transcript is here.  The audio is here. 

The enormous progress that the surge has brought to Iraq is detailed by the general, but so was Iran's continued operations inIraq, operations that kill Americans:

 You see, what we’re trying to do, Hugh, is to trace the rat line back where it came from. See, I’ve lost 147 soldiers under my command since I’ve been here in the last fourteen months. Many of those soldiers were killed by explosive foreign penetrators that are all traced back to Iran, or by Iranian rockets. So what we do, in everything that we do, for example, we found so many weapons caches over the course of the last month, and in those weapons caches we found Iranian rockets and Iranian mines. So we’ve got detailed biometrics. We check for fingerprints, and we traced those back to where they started. We’re following the money back to Iran, we’re following the munitions back to Iran, and then looking for those people that are trained in Iran as well. So it’s a major piece of our operations, to block that Iranian influence. 

As Scott Johnson notes, the Obama campaign is sinking fast.  Unless Senator Obama moves quickly and decisively to completely repudiate Reverend Wright, his fall campaign will be doomed.  (And even a complete repudiation of Wright may not save the nomination if Hillary Clinton stays to her own course and begins to talk about Michelle Obama's vision of America for the rest of the primary season.)

The audio and transcripts of Pastor Wright's 9/16/01 and 4/13/03 sermons are here.

The result of the combination of Senator Obama's "bitter" comments and Pastor Wright's and Michelle Obama's speeches and Hillary's decision to go negative on Obama?  From AP:

Democratic Party members increasingly dislike the contender they are not supporting in the bruising nomination fight, an Associated Press- Yahoo News survey and exit polls of voters show. That is raising questions about how faithful some will be by the November general election.

In the AP-Yahoo poll—which has tracked the same 2,000 people since November—Barack Obama supporters with negative views of the New York senator have grown from 35 percent in November to 44 percent this month, including one-quarter with very unfavorable feelings.

Those Obama backers who don't like Hillary Rodham Clinton say they would vote for Republican candidate John McCain over her by a two-to- one margin, with many undecided.

As for Clinton supporters, those with unfavorable views of Obama have grown from 26 percent to 42 percent during this same period—including a doubling to 20 percent of those with very negative opinions.

And we thought Dean '04 was a train-wreck.

"He does not speak for me," Obama said yesterday, referring to Wright. "He does not speak for the campaign. He may make statements in the future that don't reflect my values or concerns."

The obvious questions: Why did Barack Obama stay in Wright's church for 20 years?  And Michelle Obama certainly speaks for him --what about her "moving the bar" speech?