HALF-FULL REPORT 03/16/12

A bad situation in Afghanistan got dramatically worse last weekend when a U.S. soldier in Kandahar murdered 16 Afghan civilians.  Afghan President Hamid Karzai has demanded that U.S. troops leave village outposts.  The Taliban suspended peace talks.

An Afghan tried to kill Defense Secretary Leon Panetta when he arrived in southern Afghanistan on a surprise visit Wednesday.  The apparent suicide bomber tried to drive a truck he stole from a NATO base into Panetta’s plane as it landed at a British air base.

In an unusual move, U.S. Marines at Camp Leatherneck were ordered to disarm before entering a tent where Panetta planned to speak to them.

Panetta told the Marines the Kandahar killings would not cause the administration to accelerate withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That may not have been what most of them wanted to hear.  No excuse can be made for the Kandahar killings, but our best war correspondent, former Special Forces soldier Michael Yon, said he saw them coming:

About 200 coalition members have been killed or wounded from insider attacks. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is tantamount to being Taliban and has not bothered to apologize. Instead, Karzai whips up anti-U.S. fervor at every opportunity. Twice, Karzai has threatened to leave politics and join the Taliban.

Even our most disciplined troops – not the few problem troops – have lost all idealism. They have not lost heart for the fight. Mostly, they just don’t care. They fight because they are ordered to fight, but they have eyes wide open. The halfhearted surge and sudden drawdown leave little room for success.

We face a discipline collapse.

Obama’s defense cutbacks compound the problem Yon describes.  The accused soldier was on his fourth deployment, noted retired Army Major General Bob Scales:

The media is trying to make some association between the terrible crime of this sergeant and the Army’s inability to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. The real institutional culprit is the decade-long exploitation and cynical overuse of one of our most precious and irreplaceable national assets: our close combat soldiers and Marines.

If someone wants to place blame, it should be on a succession of national leaders who fail to recognize that combat units, particularly infantry, just wear out.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post thinks Zero is in over his head. 

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After surprise victories in Alabama and Mississippi Tuesday, Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign is still alive.

Rick got the headlines, but Mitt Romney expanded his delegate lead by winning caucuses in Hawaii and American Samoa.

We’re about halfway through the delegate selection process.  Mitt Romney has won 39 percent of the vote, but 52 percent of the 911 delegates selected in the 26 states that have voted so far.  Romney will win the nomination if he gets at least 49 percent of the delegates in the 24 states that have yet to vote.

Mitt has been able to amass a far larger percentage of delegates than his share of the popular vote because the Not Romney vote has been divided, and because he has the
bucks to compete in places like Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa, and the others don’t. 

But if the race turns into a head to head matchup with Santorum, he’d have trouble winning 49 percent of the remaining delegates, thinks Jeffrey Anderson:

As for Newt Gingrich, the Moving Finger is now skywriting "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin." Newt’s massive ego still blocks his view.  He may be marginalized anyway.

Romney still has the nomination in the bag, say Hugh Hewitt and Jay Cost. But Mitt is campaigning in Illinois as if he has reason to sweat.  Romney’s state chairman in the Land of Lincoln may have inadvertently created an opening for Santorum there. Ed Rollins thinks the fight will go all the way to the convention.

The longer the race goes on, Jonathan Tobin worries, the more it helps Democrats. Bill Kristol thinks the longer it lasts, the better for Republicans:

As the examples of Ford-Reagan in 1976 and Obama-Clinton in 2008 suggest, the victor in such a contest tends to seem by its conclusion a worthy winner, and is able to run a strong general election campaign coming out of the convention. If Romney were to earn the nomination in those circumstances, he’d be far better off than if he had clinched the nomination early by out-spending and out-muscling a divided field. If Santorum were to win an upset victory, he’d have a real wind at his back going into the general election.

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Mark Hemingway thinks this is the best presidential campaign ad of 2012.  Unfortunately, Paul Ryan isn’t running (except maybe if there is a brokered convention).

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Whoever the GOP nominee turns out to be, he or she will have a much better chance than liberal pundits were saying last week, according to this shocker CBS-New York Times poll Monday (3/12).  At 41 percent, Obama’s job approval was the lowest recorded so far.

The main reason for this is soaring gasoline prices, which set another record high this week.  But the poll’s internals suggest Zero’s campaign to make contraception an issue has backfired.  The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto said:

So maybe Sandra Fluke’s days as a cable television celeb are just about over.  Her boyfriend is wealthy enough to have popped for the condoms now and then. 

In a statement Wednesday (3/14), the Catholic bishops made it clear that the issue the Fluke nonsense was ginned up to obscure – Zero’s assault on religious freedom – won’t go away. 
 
And after a week of liberal campaigning to get Rush Limbaugh taken off the air, Talker’s Magazine says Rush probably right now has the biggest audience he’s had in years. The stock of Limbaugh’s leading corporate critic is tanking.

Obama’s fund-raising woes are another sign of trouble, says Karl Rove.  Zero’s campaign strategy indicates desperation, says Matthew Continetti.  He’d better rethink that strategy fast, says John Podhoretz.  It won’t matter if he does, says Datechguy.  Zero’s toast.

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The first stage of grief is denial.  Liberal journalists did not take the shattering of their illusions well. The New York Times spit on its own poll. Reuters and Pew rushed out phony polls to show that Zero isn’t really that unpopular.

Ben Feller of the Associated Press made excuses for Zero.  The poor guy is getting blamed for events beyond his control.  But not to worry, fellow libs.  Obama’s  re-election bid looks rosier with every good month of job creation, and Obama has a story to tell on the killing of Osama bin Laden, the ending of the war in Iraq, the squeezing of Iran through sanctions.

Contra Feller, Americans who live beyond the Capital Beltway know this is the worst recovery since the Depression, and that Zero bears more responsibility for joblessness and the high price of gas than Mr. Feller would like them to believe.

Ben Thrush and Byron Tau of the Politico come close to the truth Feller is trying to obscure:

The polls go up and the polls go down but all of them illuminate the same static reality: Barack Obama probably can’t win if the 2012 election is strictly a referendum on Barack Obama.

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So the Dems want to talk about anything else.

Judging from the slant of its advertising, fund-raising and Hollywood helpers, Team Obama believes the only way their man can get four more years is to pretend the last three never happened.

Michael Goodwin was commenting on the release by the Obama campaign of a Web ad attacking Sarah Palin, who, the last time you and I checked, isn’t running this year.

This was a bizarre thing to do, and it gave Sarah an opportunity to fire back.

This latest ad is quite odd, but also quite telling. It shows that our President sure seems fearful of discussing the economy, energy prices, and all the other problems people need addressed. And intended or not, now that his ad opens up the discussion of Barack Obama’s radical past associations and the radical philosophy that shaped his ideas about his promised "fundamental transformation" of our country, I welcome the media to join ordinary Americans in finally vetting Barack Obama.

Goodwin says it’s an effort to rally the liberal base, which is obsessed with Sarah:

The idea is to prop her up as a symbol of the GOP, then knock her down. It’s no coincidence that the ad piggybacks on the themes of "Game Change," a piece of Democratic propaganda masquerading as a new HBO film about the 2008 race.

Ostensibly based on a book also unflattering to Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton as well as Republicans, the film ignores the inconvenient Clinton-Obama feud, deifies Obama and focuses like a laser on the flaws of Palin and John McCain.

With all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, it demolishes them and paints as racists and boobs most of their supporters. The claim that the movie is sympathetic to Palin is true only to the extent that it makes her a victim of larger, malevolent forces – you know, any American voter who might be tempted to dump Obama in 2012.

Stacy Drake describes the biggest lies in "Game Change" here.  According to this memo, the attacks on Palin by Nicole Wallace and others were ginned up to shield campaign manager Steve Schmidt from criticism. 

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No one has a more serious case of PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome) than Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.  After watching "Game Change," he wrote: Sarah Palin’s foolishness ruined U.S. politics.

So it must be killing Cohen that essentially only whacked out libs like him are going to see "Game Change." HBO says it’s one of their biggest hits for an original movie, but it was beaten by a rerun of "Pawn Stars."

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When Democrats lose popular support, they turn to vote fraud.  Attorney General Eric Holder ruled Monday (3/12) that Texas’ voter identification law discriminates against minorities.  His ruling was blatantly political, dishonest, and hypocritical. 
 
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott plans to fight Holder in court.  His chances are good.  In 2008, in a 6-3 decision written by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of, and the need for voter ID laws.
 
What’s unconstitutional is Holder’s attempt to use Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to invalidate state voter ID laws, says J. Christian Adams, who used to work in the Voting Rights section at DOJ.
 
Sources tell me DOJ is petrified of losing Section 5, and it affects their preclearance decisions.
 
Maybe they will, soon.  The U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. slapped around DOJ lawyers when they wanted to delay adjudication of the Texas suit until after the election.
 
Pennsylvania passed a voter ID law Wednesday (3/14), the 16^th state to do so.  Examiner columnist Gregory Kane, who is black, wants to know why
 
Obama’s Justice Department has yet to haul the state of Maryland into court. Maryland legislators, unlike those in Arizona and Alabama, blatantly defied federal law by allowing illegal immigrants to renew their driver’s licenses.

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You already knew this, but now there’s a scientific study to back you up.  Liberals are far less tolerant of opposing views than are regular Americans.
 
The new research found that instead of engaging in civil discourse or debate, fully 16% of liberals admitted to blocking, unfriending or overtly hiding someone on a social networking site because that person expressed views they disagreed with. That’s double the percentage of conservatives and more than twice the percentage of political moderates who behaved like that.

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It’s not unusual for Zero to display historical illiteracy, as he did in Maryland yesterday (3/15).  It is unusual for Talking Points Memo to call him on it.  Zombie cites here a bunch of other examples TPM has overlooked.

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Obamacare will cost approximately twice as much as Zero said it would, and will cause companies in the private sector to drop coverage for four million workers, the Congressional Budget Office says. 

Investors Business Daily thinks the CBO report may collapse the administration’s strategy of hide and delay: 
 
The 2014 date for benefits to start flowing was deliberately chosen to mask the full costs and delay the impact until after the 2012 elections. Had the full impact of ObamaCare been added to the administration’s war on business and energy, the economy might well have collapsed, and we suspect the White House knew that.
 
But the press doesn’t care.

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A sign you’ve been in Washington too long is when you’re ruled ineligible to vote in the state you represent because you don’t live there any more.

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In case you were sweating this, a Mayan elder says the world won’t come to an end when the current Mayan calendar cycle ends.  A better era will start that day, he said.
 
That’ll be true only if Zero loses in November.  And on that note, I’ll close this HFR.  Jack Wheeler will be back at his post next week.  Thanks for your patience with me while he was in darkest Africa.