09.30.2011 - 12:46 PM
Dissatisfaction with the other candidates and his own strong performances in the debates has lifted Herman Cain from who-do-these-guys-think-they-are territory to a-long-shot-but-who-knows land. Certainly a mark of that new status is yesterday’s Wall Street Journal column by Daniel Henninger.
The main objection to Cain is that he has never held public office. Given the fact that Barack Obama has never held anything but, I’m not sure that that is such a disqualifying attribute.
David Petraeus developed a reputation for preaching a softer-side of counterinsurgency but it is important to remember that in Iraq and Afghanistan he was responsible for the deaths of vast numbers of Islamist militants—more than any other American, I would wager. Now in his new capacity as CIA director he has notched another important kill: A CIA drone fired a Hellfire missile in Yemen which blew up Anwar al-Awlaki, the head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
It is very much to President Obama’s credit that he authorized the dispatch, without any legal proceedings, of the American-born Awlaki—something that the ACLU no doubt deplores and that a fainter-hearted president would have shied away from. And it is very much to the CIA’s credit that it managed to track him down and kill him.
09.30.2011 - 10:00 AM
ABC News reports that Muammar Qaddafi’s surface-to-air missile stockpiles have gone missing without much of a trace. This nightmare cuts to the most dangerous problem with Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind Libya strategy: it’s bad.
The word “triumphalism” came to be synonymous with the Bush administration and the Iraq war. But Tripoli had barely fallen when Obama supporters like Fareed Zakaria declared the effort, literally, a model victory: “The Libyan intervention offers a new model for the West,” he wrote in Time, explaining that it was “a new model in that it involved an America that insisted on legitimacy and burden sharing, that allowed the locals to own their revolution.” And to own about 20,000 of their dictator’s missiles.
09.30.2011 - 10:00 AM
I wanted to add to Alana’s comments on the postby a major finanacer supporter of President Obama, Ted Leonsis, in which he takes the president to task for Mr. Obama’s repeated appeal to class warfare.
“I say this as I read all of the rhetoric about Class Warfare, the rift that is being created between economic middle and lower class and as the President said ‘those millionaires and billionaires,’” according to Leonsis. “The real rift in philosophy though is do you want the Government to create jobs and stimulate the economy or do you want America’s small business to be the engine of growth?”
