Timing, as they say, is everything, and not just for baseball players trying to hit a 95-mph fastball.  For example, if Hitler had come along 70 years later than he did, I have no doubt that he would have succeeded in conquering all of Europe.  One only has to look at how close he came, and that was in spite of all those nations and the U.S. aligned against him.  Today, much of Europe has no backbone, and I doubt that, in the wake of Iraq, Americans would have the collective will required to oppose Nazism.  It bears remembering that when we went to war against the Axis powers, FDR was never asked if he had an exit strategy.

While it’s true that our presidents must deal with a great number of issues other than war, war and national defense are at the top of the list.  Can anybody actually picture Barack Obama, a man born to be a left-wing social worker, as commander-in-chief?  Keeping America safe is simply not on Obama’s to-do list.  He has made that perfectly clear by several of his statements.  For instance, he insisted that John Kennedy got Nikita Khrushchev to pull Soviet missiles out of Cuba by sitting down and reasoning with him.  He obviously believes he will turn evil dictators into peaceful lambs by the sheer power of his personality. [more]

Michael Kinsley is wearing his intellectual short pants again, in his essay on Swiftboating. Wishing upon wishes for a ‘clean’ campaign of purity, he asserts, “Swift-boat is shorthand for the brilliant, despicable Republican campaign strategy in 2004 that turned John Kerry's honorable service in Vietnam into a negative factor in his campaign. The phrase has become more broadly the term for a particular category of campaign tactics and has even become a verb. To ‘swift-boat’ somebody is to use these tactics against him or her.”
 
Kinsley is not stupid, nor ignorant, but plainly very conveniently ‘forgetful’ of much history in his lifetime, never mind that of the DNC and its minions earlier in the century, before Kinsley’s mind was even a glimmer in his parents youthful eyes.  Swiftboating began in January of 1929, nine gestative months before the Black Tuesday stockmarket crash foreshadowed the Great Depression, and the swiftboating by historians and journalists of Herbert Clark Hoover. [more]

by John Mark Reynolds [author, academic]

My most delightful Christmas gift was Life With Jeeves. Nearly as delightful are the video versions which include a young Hugh Laurie (House). My children claim that House is hateful, because Jeeves has left him.

For me, the compilation of three of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels was the perfect antidote to the serious nature of our times.

There is the War.

There is an election coming.

There is poverty and injustice.

On the other hand, the gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves must save Bertie from an ill advised marriage to a woman of the sort who “suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain. . ." [more]

by John Mark Reynolds [author, academic]

Some people pick churches the way they pick clothing: based on personal comfort and style. Other people select their religious home for bad reasons: they hope to gain some personal or political advantage from it.

It is difficult to understand how Senator Obama could attend a church for twenty years, defend it in one of the most eloquent speeches I have heard, and then suddenly have an epiphany, in the heat of a political campaign, about the nature of the place where he trusted his own and his children’s spiritual well being. If God appeared to the Senator on the Road to Denver, then miracles still do happen, but this miracle happened very conveniently for the Senator’s ambitions.

Perhaps Senator Obama is not made of the stuff from which martyrs are made, but if so it is very sad. [more]

Whenever retreat-now activists or their favored presidential aspirant are confronted with our progress in Iraq, their stock reply is, "Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq in 2003."

Well, I happen to agree with Sen. Barack Obama and his supporters on that count: At most, the terrorists had a tenuous connection with Saddam's regime. But it's 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It's today's reality that matters.

It's as if, in June 1944, critics had argued from facts frozen in June 1939. ("Why invade Normandy? Hitler's content with Czechoslovakia.")

In the course of a war - any war - the situation changes, enemies evolve and goals shift. A war to preserve the Union becomes a war to end slavery; a war to defeat one set of totalitarian systems empowers a new network of tyrannies. It's a rare war whose end can be forecast neatly at its outset.

And you don't get any do-overs. [more]

This election will be all about Senator Obama.

He has made history in a good sense. Only a racist or a fool (while all racists are fools not all fools are racists) isn’t happy to see a nation conceived in the original sin of slavery nominate an African-American for president. That is not a good reason to vote for him, but it is a good thing.

Like Reagan in 1980, the country is fed up with the incumbent party. Like Reagan in 1980, the country is open (which is rare) to somebody more from the edge of acceptable politics. The attractive challenger can get a big majority of the voters . . . if. It is the “if” that makes this election interesting. My bet is that in the end it will not be very close. If Obama can show he is acceptable to moderates, then he will win. If he cannot, he will lose in Dukakis style.

Senator Obama has to not lose in order to win. [more]