Worst Mistake in History

Al Gore has to be one of the most pompous windbags on today's political scene. On the Today show this morning he opined that the Iraq war was "the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States".

A question comes to mind: How does Mr. Gore know that the Iraq war is not going to result in the long run in a much less dangerous government in Iraq replacing the tyranny of Saddam Hussein? He doesn't, of course. But even if Iraq does turn out badly, to call this the worst strategic mistake in our history is just false. Even if we cut and run and leave the job unfinished it won't be as big a strategic blunder as was the Vietnam war which cost us over 50,000 lives and won us nothing. It may not even be as big a mistake as JFK's failure to support the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Gore was then asked if he would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq even it was seen as a defeat for the U.S., but he dodged the question. His limp response was that were he president, he would have "the full flow of information" and he would be able to test these ideas.

What does that mean other than that Mr. Gore lacks the courage to follow his convictions to their logical conclusions?

It's easy to take shots when you don't have the responsibility of actually making crucial decisions. Gore is a Monday morning quarterback who thinks he should be in the White House, and who insists on reminding us almost every time he speaks why we should be thankful that he's not.

Hubble Space Photos

One of yesterday's posts featured a photo of deep space taken by the Hubble Space telescope. A friend passes along this link to the entire gallery of photos taken by Hubble. The pictures are breathtakingly beautiful and majestic.

Voting Democrat in '08

This will cause some readers to think I'm either delirious or that I'm joking, but actually I'm neither. Well, at least I'm not joking. If the highly improbable, virtually impossible, happens and the Democrats nominate a fairly conservative candidate for the presidency in 2008 I will probably vote for him (her) even if the Republican candidate is equally as conservative. Here's why:

No matter how conservative a Republican president is, the left in this country, in the media and in the Democrat party, make it almost impossible for him to accomplish much good. Of the most important issues facing us today - the war in Iraq, the war on terror, the economy, immigration, social security reform and federal judgeships - Democrats are in a position to block every initiative a Republican president advances. And they will, just as they have in the past.

So why vote for a Democrat candidate? Because if a conservative (don't ask me who that could possibly be) were nominated by the Democrat party, both the media and congress would be much less hostile to his initiatives because they wouldn't see battling them as a partisan duty, and Republicans would, for the good of the country, be cooperative. In other words, a Democrat conservative in the White House could advance the same policies as a George Bush on social security reform, employ the same measures on the war on terror, wage the same war on the insurgents in Iraq, nominate a John Roberts to the Supreme Court, and keep the Bush tax cuts, and he would doubtless meet with little serious opposition from the establishment left (The Michael Moore left is a different matter, but without the MSM and congress they wouldn't be much of a factor).

Just as no one but a hardline anti-communist like Richard Nixon could achieve a rapprochement with communist China, so, too, it will probably take a Democrat president to achieve social security and immigration reform since congressional Democrats will not allow a Republican to solve these problems. Moreover, no Republican conservative would be likely to do much on another issue important to me personally - land use, conservation and preservation - but a Democrat might.

It may be, then, that our best hope to get anything worth doing accomplished in the next ten years is for the Democrats to pull a conservative rabbit out of the hat for '08. Unfortunately, however, that's about as likely as George Bush winning the Most Admired Man in Blue State America award. Since Zell Miller retired there just aren't any conservatives of prominence left in that party.