Kicking Over My Traces

Every year since I’ve paid attention, Knute’s Kustom Mules has provided a mule to raffle to raise the excitement (and a bit of cash) leading up to Montana Mule Days.

Here is this year’s raffle prize:

That is a fine-looking john mule, ready to take in hand for saddle training, ready to ride by fall.

Tickets are a dollar. All proceeds go to the Montana Longears Association, towards building a bigger and better Montana Mule Days.

To purchase raffle tickets — and see more photos of Victor — check the raffle page at Knute’s.

Michael Barone, an astute political writer, has been reading Douglas Feith’s book, too:

Feith identifies as our central mistake the decision not to create an Iraqi Interim Authority to take over some sovereign functions soon after the overthrow of Saddam. Bush ordered the creation of such an authority March 10, 2003. But it was resisted by State Department and CIA leaders, who argued that Iraqis would not trust “externals” — those in exile — and who were especially determined to keep the Iraqi National Congress’ Ahmed Chalabi from power. As head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer took the State-CIA view and, without much supervision from Washington, decided that the U.S. occupation would continue for as long as two years. Only deft negotiation by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld produced a June 30, 2004, deadline for returning authority to Iraqis. The January 2005 elections placed many of the “externals,” including Chalabi, in high office.

From the end of Chapter 7 of Douglas J. Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism:

In its review of such prewar intelligence failures, the Silberman-Robb Commission criticized the CIA, and the intelligence community in general, for flawed tradecraft. Those failings raise the question of whether policy officials were skeptical enough about the intelligence — whether we challenged the CIA vigorously enough — and if not, why not. The errors created an enormous credibility problem for the United States, because Administration officials, for reasons we’ll explore further, chose to make the stockpiles — and the intelligence about the stockpiles — part of the case for war.

The decision to feature the CIA’s badly crafted asessments of Iraqi WMD stockpiles this way was unfortunate, because the existence of those stockpiles was not a cornerstone of our rationale for going to war. But the differences between the actual strategic rationale for the action against Saddam and the public presentation were not lies or misrepresentations. They reflected mistakes in judgment about how best to focus the presentation both at the United Nations (whose support we sought for resolutions approving action against Saddam) and to the American people. By presenting the case for the war poorly, the Administration hurt more than its own credibility; it jeopardized the success of the war effort itself.

This error by the Administration was more than a mere public relations problem. When leaders decide that war is necessary, communicating their reasoning — showing “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as Thomas Jefferson put it — is a critical element of strategy and statecraft. The Administration’s public statements were the basis on which the American people and their representatives in Congress supported the war. The flaws in that presentation inevitably affect the public’s willingness to continue to support the war, at times when patience is required and confidence in victory is shaken.

An understatement. The Bush Administration, with help from rinky-dink work by the CIA, mucked up a big piece of the information battle even before the start of the second war with Iraq.

President Bush is demonstrably capable of laying out strategies, goals, arguments, facts, tactics. He has had and continues to have surrogates to speak competently and authoritatively on his behalf. Why more explaining and expounding has not been done since 9/11 is a mystery.

AllahPundit sounds pre-emptively jaded about the new Indiana Jones movie:

He’s a swashbuckler; he has cliff-hanging adventures involving Nazis and mystical relics. We get it. Branch out.

Me? I’m willing to give Spielberg my willing suspension of disbelief, and my earnest desire that Indy hasn’t aged into Anakin Skywalker.

After all, Anakin improved with age — Darth was definitely more fun.

To take back Florida 16, the Republicans will need to elect someone who fits the district. It is a conservative district that stretches across the state. It is a very good fit for Tom Rooney, the conservative Republican running.

Tom Rooney is a native to the area. He and his wife both served the military in the Army JAG Corps. In 2002, Tom went to teach law at West Point before heading home to serve as an Assistant Attorney General. Tom Rooney is active in the community, serving on the Children’s Services Council of Palm Beach Board of Directors, while maintaining his law practice. He, his wife, and their three sons live in Tequesta, Florida.

More importantly for us at RedState, Tom Rooney is a small government, pro-life conservative. He doesn’t just want to cut taxes, he wants to cut spending. We trust Tom to remain consistently conservative when he gets to Washington, D.C.

Men like Tom Rooney are needed to take back the GOP. While we’ve looked at his opponents, we are convinced that Tom is the best fit for the district and is least likely to go off the conservative reservation.

RedState has also started a new vetting process. To make sure we’ve got a good understanding of a candidate’s positions, I sent Mr. Rooney a questionnaire asking him to outline his positions on various issues — worded to make sure he’d have to give us more than a yes or no. I think you’ll agree when you review them that he is worth supporting.

It’s been some time since we’ve asked you to open your wallet for a candidate. We need candidates like Tom Rooney to make up ground in the Congress. Tom Rooney has the best shot at beating Congressman Mahoney, but he has to get out of his primary. So give what you can today.

A scattering of stories noting a dip in voter registration for the Republican Party has me wondering whether Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos is the gremlin in the machine.

Will Republican registrations rebound for the fall election, as participants in Operation Chaos who changed registration return to the Republican fold?

To get everyone in the mood for following voting returns from the Indiana and North Carolina Primaries, here are two musical selections. First, John Krondes singing “Indiana Girl”:

Second, Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers singing “If I Lose, I Don’t Care”:

• Cleaned up RSS feeds in Google Reader, deleting a bunch I no longer read. #

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Cleaned up RSS feeds in Google Reader, deleting a bunch I no longer read.

While we’re looking for “root causes” for the run-up in food prices and scarcity of commodities like corn, wheat and rice, beyond American subsidies of biofuel, perhaps we should be looking at the secondary effects of China’s hunger for non-food commodities:

The rice fields that blanketed this remote mountain village for generations are gone. In their place rise neat rows of young rubber trees - their sap destined for China.

All 60 families in this dirt-poor, mud-caked village of gaunt men and hunched women are now growing rubber, like thousands of others across the rugged mountains of northern Laos. They hope in coming years to reap huge profits from the tremendous demand for rubber just across the frontier in China.

The villagers in Communist Laos don’t have a voice in the decision to switch from rice to rubber. It will be seven years before a crop of latex can be harvested.

In the meantime, what do they eat?

• @jaysolo: you don’t want the girls to be quiet! You want the baby to learn how to sleep through environmental noise… #

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@jaysolo: you don’t want the girls to be quiet! You want the baby to learn how to sleep through environmental noise…

If you want more to do than eating popcorn while the Democratic candidates knife each other, consider participating in Congressional Quarterly’s VP Madness, modelled after basketball brackets:

Who should be Sen. John McCain’s running mate? We’ve handicapped the races and now it’s up to users to decide who will advance to face each other in the next round. The winner will be revealed on May 22, giving McCain plenty of time to consider your choice. You’ll have a chance to weigh in on the Democratic ticket once the nominee is set. Already voted? You can view the latest results by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.

The first round closes May 6th.

In his just-published book on the run-up to and aftermath of the 9/11 attack within the Bush Administration, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, Douglas Feith describes the policy and strategy debate that led to the President declaring that the United States should work not to punish those specifically responsible for that attack, but rather to adopt a broad strategy to disrupt terrorism around the world (pages 50-51):

In our [strategy memo], [Peter] Rodman and I memorialized the emerging idea that our enemy in this war was “terrorism against the United States and our interests and state support for that terrorism.” …we argued the United States must confront “the entire network of states, non-state entities, and organizations that engage in or support terrorism against the United States and our interests, including the states that harbor terrorists. All those organizations and states constitute a state support for terrorism, regardless of whether a specific tie can be established to the perpetrators of the World Trade Center and Pentagon outrages. The objective is not punishment but prevention and self-defense.”

We formulated this war aim to remind people of what the United States had at stake: “We cannot expect to eliminate every terrorist activity but we can realistically aim to prevent terrorism from undermining our way of life and to demonstrate its futility as a weapon of political blackmail against America and our interests.” A key goal of the military campaign was to force the terrorists to play defense: If they had to run, hide, and devote their energies to evading our active pursuit, they would have less capability to plan and execute new, large-scale offensive operations.

In line with that strategy comes this news today out of Somalia, far from both Iraq and Afghanistan geographically but not strategically:

The U.S. military killed a man identified as the head of the main al-Qaida cell in Somalia and 10 others in an airstrike overnight, an Islamic insurgent group said Thursday.

The U.S. military confirmed an attack on a suspected al-Qaida target but did not identify the target.

Islamist leader Aden Hashi Ayro, believed to be the head of al-Qaida in Somalia, was killed when the airstrike struck his house in the central Somali town of Dusamareeb, about 300 miles north of Mogadishu, said Sheik Muqtar Robow, a spokesman for the Islamic al-Shabab militia.

Another commander and seven others were also killed, Robow said. Six more people were wounded, two of whom later died, said resident Abdullahi Nor.

Not incidentally, this broad strategy is what is missed by people who insist that we pull out of Iraq willy-nilly, or who wag a finger over Osama bin Laden not yet languishing in a cell in Guantánamo.

After a suitable baseball anecdote about Paul Waner, Thomas Sowell lays into Barack Obama:

There is no reason why someone as arrogant, foolishly clever and ultimately dangerous as Barack Obama should become president — especially not at a time when the threat of international terrorists with nuclear weapons looms over 300 million Americans.

Yikes.

Don’t hold back — tell us what you really think!

My thoughts: a lot of people read Obamarama as a political Tiger Woods, a post-racial classy progressive politician. The more we get to know Uh-Oh, the more he looks like a no-class empty-suit leftist paper tiger instead.

(Hat tip: William Katz at Urgent Agenda.)

In the May 5 issue of Newsweek, George Will serves up a set of sizzling questions to Barack Obama. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but this one will serve as exemplar:

ExxonMobil’s 2007 profit of $40.6 billion annoys you. Do you know that its profit, relative to its revenue, was smaller than Microsoft’s and many other corporations’? And that reducing ExxonMobil’s profits will injure people who participate in mutual funds, index funds and pension funds that own 52 percent of the company?

Next: a batch for John McCain.

Did I miss his batch for The Hildebeast?

(Hat tip: Gary Gross at California Conservative.)

• @jaysolo: heh. magnifying glass. Can I ever sympathize! #

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Airlines are merging or filing for bankruptcy.

SUVs are auto non grata as trade-ins.

Now another domino is falling — cutbacks in the auto industry:

Sagging pickup truck and sport utility vehicle sales have forced General Motors Corp. to shut down one shift each at four North American factories and lay off about 3,500 workers.

The world’s largest automaker by sales said Monday that the cuts, to take effect starting this summer, were brought on by weak demand due to high gasoline prices and an economic downturn.

Each of those 3,500 workers likely has mortgage payments…

From today’s edition of the WSJ’s Political Diary (subscription required):

“The whole idea that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been attacked over ’soundbites,’ and if Americans saw his entire sermons, in context, they’d feel differently, now seems ludicrous…. He used his hour with [PBS’s Bill] Moyers to argue that his thoroughgoing critique of American evil is, well, true. And I’m on the left. I know huge chunks of it are true. But Wright casts his critique in such an extreme way that the possibility of redemption, the evidence that America can and has and will change for the better, is never considered…. Watching Wright and Moyers I also couldn’t help thinking: Is Wright trying to ruin Obama?” — Joan Walsh, editor of the liberal website Salon.com.

On the other end of the political spectrum is this from Jim Geraghty at NRO’s Campaign Spot:

And now, for a really far-out theory… Wright goes out, makes even more outrageous remarks, and it gives Obama the opportunity to finally sever the ties. A statement like, “I loved this man, but I cannot abide what he is saying now… I am leaving that church and must disavow Jeremiah Wright.”

Issue resolved. Obama is given credit for being a healer, for a courageous move, for standing up against divisiveness at great personal emotional expense, etc. …

Can’s say it’s dull, anyway.

Leslie Stahl interviewed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for 60 Minutes. She was overmatched.

Part one (about 15 minutes):

Part two (about 15 minutes):

(Hat tip: Matthew J. Franck at NRO’s Bench Memos.)