Fred Barnes:

You can’t fight a successful war unless the commander-in-chief is fully committed to it. So President Obama’s chief task in his speech Tuesday night on Afghanistan is to make it absolutely clear that he is.

***

It’s true that Obama championed Afghanistan as the “good war” in his presidential campaign last year. And as recently as August, he called it “a war of necessity.” But his painful, three-month deliberation on what to do in Afghanistan severely undermined his prior statements.

The point is legitimate doubts about Obama’s tenacity in Afghanistan—his level of commitment—abound in the military, among allies whom Obama wants to deploy more troops, and with the American public. More than anything else, he needs to lay those doubts to rest in his address.

So despite the fact that the previous administration almost completely ignored Afghanistan for the last two terms, and the fact that it was Obama who immediately rushed more supplies and personnel to Afghanistan upon his inauguration, because Obama has not immediately followed through with the next neo-con wet dream and instead took a couple months to determine the best course of action, he has a credibility problem.

Up is down with these people, and I simply can’t believe they can say or write this crap without bursting out in laughter. They have to know how full of shit they are. They just have to.

And again, Sullivan:

If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama’s middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.

Is there any doubt that this is exactly what is going to happen?

Steve Benen makes a good point about the Dickmentum that Jon Meacham is feeling right now:

Indeed, rank-and-file Republicans were asked in a new poll about who best reflects the party’s principles. Just one chose Dick Cheney—not 1 percent, I mean one individual person.

Republicans deserve a lot of condemnation for making Bush their 2000 nominee and for generally supporting Bush-Cheney policies until the bitter end. But Republican voters never really chose Dick Cheney. Bush won the primary in 2000 before Cheney chose himself to be vice-president, of course. For the first four years of the Bush administration, Cheney had his way with a dumb and weak president. However, by many accounts, from 2005-2008, even this weak and dumb president rejected many of Cheney’s foreign policy ideas (I buy into the idea that the Cheneyites would have gone into Iran but the Condiites managed to nix it, I realize not everyone believes this).

I’m sure that there’s all kinds of polling showing that Republicans are expressing or have expressed reasonable levels of approval for Cheney. That doesn’t prove anything. The party functioned as a Bush personality cult for many years and some amount of support for Cheney was bound to be a byproduct of that. If Republican voters thought of Cheney as the heart and soul of the party now, there would be more than one person in a sample of a 804 who thought he best reflected the party principles.

The disconnect between the Village and the voters here is near total. It isn’t just that Cheney is disliked by the public at large, it’s that rank-and-file Republicans don’t even love him that much.

Cheney is probably too monstrous for outside-the-beltway wingers, as crazy as they are. But he’s not too monstrous for the Village.

I’d like someone to ask the folks living at the C-Street Christian Brothel about this:

Members of the Family have occupied seats in both houses of Congress going back to the 1930s, but for all but its most recent history, the hallmark of the Family has been secrecy. In the past year, however, three sex scandals involving highly placed associates — Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C.; Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.; and Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss. — have thrust the group and its C Street house into the national spotlight.

And just this month, Family members Rep. Bart Stupak, a Catholic Democrat from Michigan, and Rep. Joe Pitts, an evangelical Republican from Pennsylvania, brought more attention to the secretive group when their Stupak-Pitts Amendment passed as part of the House health-care reform bill, threatening to further restrict abortion funding for the poor, if it remains in the final bill. (Pitts, like all his GOP colleagues, voted against the bill, even though it included his amendment.)

But what many people may find surprising is that the Family has branches around the world. In fact, yesterday, Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” reported on NPR’s “Fresh Air” that it was a Family member in the Ugandan parliament who introduced a bill that would increase the punishment for homosexuality from life imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence today, to death.

Then again, we wouldn’t want to give Bart Stupak any ideas for more poison pill amendments.

fuddmain, Anhinga.

Jeff, Black Rhinoceros Spraying a Trail.

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.

Click on the photos for a link to the photographer’s website. To see all photo threads, click on ‘photo blogging’ at the bottom of the post.

If your computer cannot read our email links at top right, my email is (remove the zeroes): portus0jackson0ii at yahoo dot com.

Just tell me he is wrong about this:

As Obama appears to be intensifying the lost war in Afghanistan, with the same benchmark rubric that meant next-to-nothing in the end in Iraq, he does not seem to understand that he will either have to withdraw US troops from Iraq as it slides into new chaos, or he will have to keep the troops there for ever, as the neocons always intended. Or he will have to finance and run two hot wars simultaneously. If he ramps up Afghanistan and delays Iraq withdrawal, he will lose his base. If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama’s middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.

It appears sully has finally attained the appropriate level of cynicism required when discussing the modern Republican party and the principled “conservatives” running it.

Can you imagine what the GOP’s own message man, Alex Castellanos, would do with commercials with this information:

Maurice Clemmons, the 37-year-old Tacoma man being sought for questioning in the killing this morning of four Lakewood police officers, has a long criminal record punctuated by violence, erratic behavior and concerns about his mental health.

Nine years ago, then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee granted clemency to Clemmons, commuting his lengthy prison sentence over the protests of prosecutors.

I’m sure Mark Halperin or one of the bobbleheads will inform us this is actually good news for Huckabee because it takes the spotlight off Palin.

Jon Meacham:

But I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting. A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama’s unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.

Didn’t we already have a referendum on the Bush years in 2008?

More to the point, the reason that Dick Cheney won’t be the Republican nominee in 2012 is that people don’t like him and he’d be guaranteed to lose in a general election. But why should we leave these political decisions up to primary voters? Wouldn’t it be better if Republicans just did what Jon Meacham told them to do?

The arrogance of articles like amazes me.

John Harris, in a list of ways to attack Obama that Republicans may find helpful:

Too much Leonard Nimoy

[.....]

But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.

Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.

Are there other first-world countries where the media spends a lot of time worrying that its leaders are too rational?

The next two criticisms are, by the way, in order “The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols” and “But some of the same insider circles that are starting to view Obama as a bully are also starting to whisper that he’s a patsy.”

The Village attacks on Obama are just as inconsistent as the winger attacks.

I am reading the front pages of the NYT, WaPo, and ESPN mobile sites. One doesn’t have a Tiger Woods story on it. Guess which?

This time for reals, although I don’t even feel like it is game day. I sort of feel like this is a scrimmage or a pre-season game, because I honestly have no expectation that we might win. I guess this is what it is like to be a Browns fan.

In other news, memeorandum’s top story is a bunch of wingnuts who couldn’t tell you what a Pearson’s correlation is (or, for that matter, spell correlation) are claiming that the modeling done by some of the smartest people in the world is fake and a scandal. How do they come to that conclusion?

Because shut up, that’s why!

There was a request for an open thread, even though there are two fresh threads up already. I do what I’m told.

Question: I did some wine-tasting in the Willamette Valley yesterday (visiting my sister in Portland). Any interest in some wine blogging about expensive pinot noirs? I worry that it might seem, well, too fru-fru.

I missed this: the winner of the WaPo Next Great Pundit contest is Michelle Rhee’s ex-husband. Rhee is the chancellor of the DC schools and a darling of the Post (as well as David Brooks, Joe Klein, and the rest of teachers’ union-hating punditocratic masses).

What a fresh outside-the-beltway voice this will be!

One thing that’s quite striking in the health care debate is the lack of detailed analysis opponents are presenting in their arguments. Compare Ron Brownstein’s positive analysis of the Senate bill for example, with David Broder’s meandering, senility ramblings against it. Or this MIT economist’s favorable analysis of its impact on premiums with Krauthammer’s latest vague, error riddled column on the subject.

The anti-health care reform piece that I found most disappointing was this one, by Jeffrey S. Flier, a dean at the Harvard Medical School.

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care’s dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.

Remarkably, he doesn’t name even one of these health-care leaders or economists! And it turns out this guy also produced some kind of glibertarian nonsense opposing health care in 1994.

I understand why the WSJ published the piece: they’re right-wing sociopaths with no journalistic integrity. But I wonder if the Harvard Medical School is happy to have this kind of fact-free garbage go out under their name. And It’s remarkable the extent to which wingers are happy to abuse their positions to forward the political agenda they favor.

I’m really not looking forward to this at all.

Have at it.