Tom Lantos channels Rudy Giuliani [e.a.]:

Dutch lawmakers who recently visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat. The lawmakers said that Rep. Tom Lantos (Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.” Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was responding to arguments that the United States should shut down the U.S. prison in Cuba, the lawmakers said. “You have to help us [in Afghanistan] because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany,” …

Plainspokenness seems to be catching on.

This, from Arianna Huffington, is only slightly less embarrassing than Obama’s cringe-inducing announcement that he’s going to get tough sometime soon:

The president took a preemptive shot across the bow on Monday, playing the funding-equals-troop-support card, and placing the ball squarely in Congress’ court. Democrats can’t afford to sit back on their heels and wait until next year to take on the president (or worse yet, have a replay of the 2007 supplemental funding fight and cave to the president’s phony “before the holidays” demands).

They need to begin reframing the funding fight now — hammering home the message that it’s the president’s obstinacy that is jeopardizing the well-being of our troops and the safety of our country.

This is not the time for caution and playing it safe. This is the time to force the president’s hand.

It’s rare to find Arianna behind the curve, but that’s where she is. Hasn’t she heard? Iraq is pacified, no longer the featured story (or even in the headlines), and for all intents and purposes, according to Reason’s Brian Doherty, the war is over:

Just as public perception of whether the war was worth it didn’t shift toward “no” until May 2004—the first month U.S. troop deaths broke 100 in a month—a continuing decline in Iraq violence seems likely to calm down American dudgeon over a war that, after all, in a draftless world, most of us are affected by only as tragic TV entertainment. It could well be the standard accepted opinion a year from now that Iraq, while perhaps not always managed best every step of the way, has turned out well enough in the end, or so far.

Yes—time marches on.

Iraq is yesterday’s war. Today and tomorrow are about Iran, and “World War III,” as Caroline Glick writes (alarmingly):

It goes without saying that if and when a decision is made in Jerusalem or Washington to carry out an attack against Iran’s nuclear installations the public will only learn of the decision in retrospect. All the same, over the last few weeks, it has been impossible to miss the fact that the Iranian nuclear program has become the subject of intense and ever increasing international scrutiny. This naturally gives rise to the impression that something is afoot.

Indeed.

This is painfully embarrassing:

Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton

I really like Obama, but it’s pretty clear that he has been—will be—eating Hillary’s dust. And, much as it I hate to say it, deservedly so.

George Packer recently came to much the same conclusion, via another route (by reading Arthur Schlesinger’s recently published journals):

Two months ago, I wrote that Obama, with his veneer of idealism and his pragmatic core, reminded me a bit of J.F.K. That might have been wrong. Since then, it’s become clear that Obama is not “a devious and, if necessary, ruthless man,” as Schlesinger called Kennedy. Democrats drawn to Obama’s camp project onto him the sense of politics as a higher calling that Stevenson pioneered in the early nineteen-fifties (whether there’s much substance to it in Obama isn’t completely clear). In the American liberal tradition, this means almost certain defeat. Clinton, on the other hand, appeals to those liberals who want to sleep with power and its compromises and have made their peace with it.

The exercise of power is an art. The powerful don’t announce their intentions. They act, and attack, without warning. That unpredictability is one source of their power.