Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Krauthammer's Take   [NRO Staff]

From last night's All-Stars.

 

On the situation in Afghanistan:

I think that is the key issue, where is the political will? Does Obama or the Democrats have it?

 

Mort, you talked about the good war, as the Democrats see it. Bob Shrum, who was a high political operative who worked on the Kerry campaign in '04, wrote a very interesting article in December of last year in which he talked about that campaign, and he said, at the time, the Democrats raised the issue of Afghanistan — and they made it into "the right war" and "the good war" as a way to attack Bush on Iraq.

 

In retrospect, he writes, that it was, perhaps, he said, misleading. Certainly it was not very wise.

 

What he really meant to say — or at least I would interpret it — it was utterly cynical. In other words, he's confessing, in a way, that the Democrats never really supported the Afghan war. It was simply a club with which to bash the [Bush] administration on the Iraq war and pretend that Democrats aren't anti-war in general, just against the wrong war.

 

Well, now they are in power, and they are trapped in a box as a result of that, pretending [when] in opposition that Afghanistan is the good war, the war you have to win, the central war in the war on terror. And obviously [they are] now not terribly interested in it, but stuck.

 

And that's why Obama has this dilemma. He said explicitly on ABC a few weeks ago that he wouldn't even use the word "victory" in conjunction with Afghanistan.

 

And Democrats in Congress have said: If you don't win this in one year, we're out of here. He can't win the war in a year. Everybody knows that, which means he [Obama] has no way out.

On the focus of the health-care debate shifting to town-hall protesters:

The Democrats are pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and the Republicans (or conservatives) are handing the Democrats the rabbit. The Democrats have no argument. They have no facts. They don't even really have a bill.

 

And if people were just to stand up and quietly and civilly raise questions — "the money doesn't add up," "the CBO has said that you say it is going to control costs, but it increases it by $1 trillion," all of this stuff, it's really out there — they would be winning this debate as they were before the town halls.

 

What's happening is this is causing a backlash. It's completely unnecessary. It is shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to demonstrate, you want to shout, you do it outside carrying signs. When you walk inside [the town hall meeting], you ask questions.

 

This is going to have two effects. Public opinion will make people, if anything, rather unsympathetic to those who oppose the bills.

 

And secondly, it's going to give a great excuse for the Democrats, when Congress returns, to push a partisan bill with no Republican support and say it's because the opposition is not — is simply oppositionist without any arguments and is acting in an irresponsible way.

08/11 11:16 AMShare