Today, George W. Bush sounded like the leader of the free world:

This [humanitarian] assistance is easing burdens for many Cuban families. But the sad fact is that life will not improve for the Cuban people until their system of government changes. It will not improve by exchanging one dictator for another. It will not improve if we prop up the same tyranny for the false promise of so-called stability.

As I told the Cuban people last October, a new day for Cuba will come. And we will know when it’s here. We will know it’s here when jailers go to the cells where Cuban prisoners of conscience are held and set them free….Until that day comes, the United States will continue to shine a bright and revealing light on Cuba’s abuses. We will continue to tell the stories of Cuba’s people, even when a lot of the world doesn’t want to hear them. And we will carry this refrain in our hearts: Viva Cuba Libre.

( Contentions)

[[This is a repost (also retitled) of something I wrote earlier and which got garbled by the ether. It's old news by Blogosphere Time standards---at least a few hours old; but that's the way the cookie crumbles.]]

So it turns out, according to Samantha Power, that Barack Obama doesn’t really intend to pull our troops out of Iraq right away. The Politico reports on an interview she gave the BBC [e.a.]:

For all the chatter about Obama adviser Samantha Power’s calling Clinton a “monster,” another set of remarks made on her book tour in the United Kingdom may be equally threatening to the Obama campaign: Comments in a BBC interview that express a lack of confidence that Obama will be able to carry through his plan to withdraw troops from Iraq within 16 months.

“He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator,” she said at one point in the interview.

Power downplayed Obama’s commitment to quick withdrawal from Iraq on Hard Talk, a program that often exceeds any of the U.S. talk shows in the rigor of its grillings. She was challenged on Obama’s Iraq plan, as it appears on his website, which says that Obama “will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.”

“What he’s actually said, after meting with the generals and meeting with intelligence professionals, is that you – at best case scenario – will be able to withdraw one to two combat brigades each month. That’s what they’re telling him. He will revisit it when he becomes president,” Power says.

The host, Stephen Sackur, challenged her:”So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out in 16 months isn’t a commitment isn’t it?”

“You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009,” she said. “He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator. He will rely upon a plan – an operational plan – that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think – it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, ‘Well, I said it, therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.’”

“It’s a best-case scenario,” she said again.

All of this is excellent news to me, and I wouldn’t expect any other kind of advice from the self-styled “genocide chick” Power. She is a very, very intelligent woman.

Which is why I’m wondering why she went so far off the reservation in so many ways and in so many places.

Obama’s campaign has been about doing things a new way—which begins and ends with not lying to the concerned citizens and residents of the United States of America. And here is one of his foreign policy advisers telling us that in fact he has been lying to people on the campaign trail.

A tour of the leftosphere leaves me with the impression that the wonks and wannabes think this is a bum rap for Power and for Obama. Certainly it’s a shame for Obama, because he does have smart advisers. But apparently you can’t take them anywhere. They haven’t an ounce of political sense.

This may seem like a breath of fresh air—I guess truth-telling out of the glare of the cameras is the vaunted “New Politics”—but it gives the Obama campaign a Romper Room aura. It is pitiful. And it marks him as a loser for surrounding himself with folks who’ve got their heads in the clouds (or up their asses: take your pick).

Meanwhile, where is Obama? He seems to have taken a powder when he should be all over the media fighting to get back in the race.

The folks at the Corner smell blood.

For the first time in a long time, it looks like she might take him down. Test that campaign for steroids, because they’ve gotten back into fighting shape in a mysteriously fast manner.

As for me … well, a heavy cloud of doom envelops me as, for the first time, I consider the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Josh Marshall explains what happens when the New Politics confronts the Old:

Late Tuesday night I wrote that the upshot of the March 4th contests was that Clinton had beaten Obama up a bit and he hadn’t responded. She’d not only bloodied up his poll numbers a bit by throwing all sorts of stuff at him. She also showed that it wasn’t at all clear that Obama was enough of a fighter to stand up to this stuff or get back in her face. More than the delegate numbers, that was the challenge March 4th had left him with.

But since then she’s just been slapping this guy around like crazy. She’s on the offense every day, dictating the terms of the discussion and getting results.

This “monster” thing is a good case in point. That’s a pretty over-the-top thing for a key campaign advisor to say. But what it tells me more than that is that the Clinton campaign has these guys rattled really bad. Some of this is no doubt due to the fact that Power is a bit out of her element. She’s more from the academic/policy world than the political/policy world. But, again, rattled. The Clinton folks have been bashing Obama like crazy. Now they follow up by explicitly demanding that Obama fire one of his key foreign policy advisors and … how, long did it take? An hour? And she’s gone.

If boxing is our metaphor she’s got him cornered on the ropes on one side of the ring and she’s just landing punch after punch. And all he can manage are the defensive moves that her constant attacks dictate.

Now just imagine Obama as commander in chief fighting real wars. That is the point that the Evil Clintons are trying to make: if he can’t take her disorienting punches coming from all directions …

This is about getting inside Obama’s (the collective Obama, let’s say) head, psyching him out, forcing mistakes and then going right back on the attack all over again. Getting the Obama folks pissed and gritting their teeth and off their game is precisely the point.

The Obama folks can either withdraw to a world where the ‘new politics’ reigns or focus on the fact that here in the real world there are two ‘old politics’ practitioners standing between him and the presidency and he needs to decide how he’s going to deal with that fact.

Once Obama is in the Oval Office, of course, there will be no “world where the ‘new politics’ reigns. Instead, there is the grim reality of Iraq and Iran and Hamas and China and Pakistan and Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, not to mention gloom on the economic front, a problem with a restive population of 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and the health care crisis.

This why no egghead idealists—my absolutely favorite kind of people in real life—have ever made it to the White House: they’re not mean enough.

p.s. Though they’ll be disappointed, I don’t think America’s hopeful youth will be crushed.

My son—a good weathervane—already senses that “Hillary has stopped his momentum.” Kindhearted mother I am, I didn’t tell him that I think Obama is dead in the water. Why add to his misery?

But I do think that, and it hurts me too. Because I like Obama a lot, and I believe that he does want to do the right things, for the right reasons. He’s just not ready for prime time—not yet.

And the cyber-gremlins ate a good chunk of my last post, titled “There Goes the Youth Vote.”

I’ll repost it later from another computer.

Saying it was a “routine” operation, Hamas claimed responsibility for the horrifying attack on a Jerusalem religious school yesterday, in which 8 students were killed:

ABC News reports:

An emergency worker who was one of the first on the scene described how the shooting was still going on in the building when he arrived. He told ABC News that when he got inside he discovered a horrific scene with many of the young religious students lying on the ground, covered in blood, some of them clutching their books.

“There was lots of blood over there,” he said. “It was a terrible scene to look at – they were all young guys in there.”

Amnesty International, while condemning the attack, warned Israel not to retaliate:

“The Israeli authorities must adhere to international humanitarian law and human rights standards in any action they take in response to last night’s attack, even though that attack demonstrated a disregard for the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.

“Abuses by one side, no matter how serious, cannot ever justify abuses by the other side,” said Smart.

AI’s spokesperson seems to forget that, well, Jews are not Christians. Jews don’t believe in turning the other cheek.

However, since the biens-pensants of the world make such a fetish about the nobility of turning the other cheek, the Israeli government has decided to do what they have never done before—distribute photos from the scene of the crime, where their martyred young men died for their religion.

Israel has decided to take advantage of Thursday’s bloody terror attack in Jerusalem in order to launch an aggressive campaign against Hamas.

Yedioth Ahronoth has learned that the political echelon instructed the Government Press Office to distribute the shocking images from the yeshiva shooting worldwide, including pictures of holy books perforated with bullets, a blood-stained praying shawl and the terrorist’s body inside the yeshiva.

I await the world’s outrage.

A “memoir” is made up out of whole cloth and quickly withdrawn from bookstores.

Why does this keep happening? Because mundus vult decipi: people want to be deceived.

The last time I noted this long-known fact it was in relation to Barack Obama. I am not saying that he’s a fake. What I’m saying is that people want to believe in him so much that they invest him with a power he doesn’t have (the power to heal the hurtful rifts in America and across the globe).

In this particular case of the faked memoir, sophisticated readers—including agents, editors, copy editors, lawyers, and highly qualified reviewers—wanted to believe (no matter how unlikely it is) that a former fringe-dweller in American society is also very, very gifted author.

It’s a romantic mind-set. We’re human and we’d be lost if we didn’t have such a mind-set, because it is very human to want to hope and to want to believe and to want to trust.

We just need to put the brakes on sometimes, that’s all.

Will pictures like this help the Palestinians’ cause?

 

 Palestinian guerrillas celebrate in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp near the port city of Sidon in south Lebanon March 6, 2008, A Palestinian gunman opened fire in a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem on Thursday, killing at least eight people and wounding about 10 in the most lethal attack in Israel in two years, emergency services said.

What is wrong with these people?

Sen. Barack Obaman, D-Ill., may be reluctant to throw a punch at Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. — but at least one adviser doesn’t appear to be, at least when she thinks she’s off the record.

Samantha Power, the executive director and founder of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, is touring Europe to promote a book, and she gave an interview with The Scotsman, which quotes her saying of Clinton, “We f***** up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win. She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything.”

Power said, “you just look at her and think: ergh. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.

And this after Susan Rice put her foot in it yesterday.

Here’s the attempt at damage control over Samantha Power’s comments [e.a.]:

UPDATE: Statement from Samantha Power: These comments do not reflect my feelings about Sen. Clinton, whose leadership and public service I have long admired. I should not have made these comments and I deeply regret them. It is wrong for anyone to pursue this campaign in such negative and personal terms. I apologize to Sen. Clinton and to Sen. Obama, who has made very clear that these kinds of expressions should have no place in American politics.

Statement from Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton: Sen. Obama decries such characterizations, which have no place in this campaign.

There is no politics without mud, and it is dumb and bone-headed—to use the candidate’s own expressions—for anyone to pretend (and keep pretending) that he can run a purer-than-the-driven-snow campaign and be credible.

This is getting painful to watch.

It sounds like Hillary Clinton meant business when, announcing her candicacy, she said, “I’m in it to win it.”

It’s impossible to do justice to the spin war that exploded in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s triumph on Tuesday. I’ve been busy and haven’t read much of the commentary, but I did catch some of Hardball and Dan Abrams and the CNN evening line-up tonight. From that (limited) vantage point, it looks like they are somewhat easier on Obama tonight—trying to give him wiggle room by repeating his assertion that he doesn’t want to go negative—but basically they are all saying the same thing: he can’t take a punch, and he can’t throw one either.

Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t have that problem. With a military man seated on either side of her today in Washington, she went after Obama with relish today.

He was left asking what kind of “evidence” she can provide that she’s more qualified.

The evidence, dear Barack, is in her performance against you. It sends a message about her fighting spirit. Perhaps you didn’t pick up on that?

It’s a contest. Sit back and enjoy yourself, because, according to the Politico, you’re in a for a bumpy ride—but those of us who despise politicians while thrilling to their wicked antics will be having the time of our lives:

forget about any chance that this looming brawl will be quieted by claims from Obama and commentators that Clinton has no reasonable path to victory.

Yes, Obama’s math is impressive — more delegates, more popular vote support, more states won. But Clinton aides argue reasonably that a race this close can be altered by a virtually limitless number of tactical maneuvers, unexpected events, or shifts in public perception.

It’s amazing how much fun this is when you’re not insanely invested in the result.