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War Strategy: When Bush and Petraeus proposed the surge in Iraq, Democrats demanded that the general testify before Congress. So why has the Senate blocked a similar invitation to our commander in Afghanistan? Those with memories longer than the 24-hour news cycle recall that in the dark days of the Iraq War, David Petraeus was summoned to Washington to explain the surge strategy that would eventually lead to victory in Iraq. Democrats hoped for a show trial. MoveOn.org took out a full-page ad in the New York Times labeling the commanding general of our efforts in Iraq "General Betray-us." Then...

Here is video of Sen. John McCain nearly two years ago saying that President Harry Truman did the right thing in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945. McCain was asked if it was the right thing to do while campaigning in New Hampshire on August 10, 2007, and he responded that it was. McCain pointed out that the decision actually saved both American and Japanese lives. EXIT QUESTION: I wonder how President Obama would answer that question if asked today? . . . . . (Watch Video)

The first country to recognize the State of Israel was the United States. That recognition almost didn't happen. It was by the will of the President, Harry Truman, that the UN Partition Plan was implemented. Throughout the months leading up to May 1948, the president made his wishes clear, he wanted a Homeland for the Jewish People, not because of political reasons, but because it was the right and moral thing to do. The Secretary of State who Truman called the greatest living American, was just as opposed to the creation of the nascent Jewish state as the president supported...

Poe: "They are leftists, dedicated to overthrowing our Constitutional system," and "they will go to any length to conceal their radicalism from the public." Understanding the Alinsky Method of "Community Organizing" Written by Bob Dill Sep 24, 2008 at 12:00 AM Meet the Real Obama and Cult of Alinsky " The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV) It is becoming readily apparent that the "change" being proposed vaguely by Sen. Barack Obama is...

Full Article at Political Capital Before you read this article, take a couple steps back from your political opinions - because I can already hear the partisan bickering. I want you to approach this and analyze it in an antiseptic, neutral way - regardless of whether you are a Bush lover or Bush hater. I think both camps will find things to love, and hate in this article. But, reserve judgment please - because this is an article about how history will remember George W. Bush, it is not a political judgment on his presidency. Indeed, you will find several...

After 50 years, an American state secret has been revealed, about the arrest of 12,000 people because of Hoover’s “red” paranoia. The former director of the FBI, Edgar Hoover made plans for the arrest of 12,000 American citizens which he considered to be threats to national security – documents reveals that no longer bear the status of state secret. Hoover sent this request to the president at the time Harry Truman at the beginning of the Korean war during the 50s. He justified the move as necessary for protection from “treason, spies and sabotage”. For now there is no evidence...

This morning I received an e-mail from a crusty lady in Sheridan Wyoming who happens to be a Fred Thompson supporter. This lady has e-mailed me before adding a little to each of my articles supporting Fred Thompson. Charlotte isn’t the only one who tells me they are behind Fred Thompson 100%. I would have used the popular Democratic statistic of 110% except like so many things Democratic 110% doesn’t exist. Democrats are always trying to convince the voters they can go several steps beyond what’s physically possible. Every time Hillary opens her mouth she goes 110% beyond reality, she’s...

Former President Harry Truman has received much opprobrium from left-wing circles in the U.S. and elsewhere for his decision to substitute two atomic bombs in place of a D-Day type invasion of Japan in 1945. It was interesting to me to observe during Ken Burn’s current documentary, “War”, that Burns reported that credible estimates of the human cost of such an invasion were in the neighborhood of 500,000 dead Americans and 6,000,000 dead Japanese.

The official presidential portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy tells quite a story. His pensive expression, curled shoulders and folded arms are not mere emblems of the physical ailments he so manfully absorbed; they help cut the figure of a northeastern liberal -- a Democrat -- who through inspired oratory and steely resolve faced down Soviet communism. This, at a time when many were resigned to the inevitability of its expansion. But Kennedy -- historic though his presidency was, and beatified though it has become -- in his time was not breaking the mould of the Democratic party in the United...

When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1821 Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain, quoted in A.B. Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (Harper, 1912, Vol. 2, page 724). The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. --...

From The American Forum During the Korean Conflict, press censorship went through different stages. Censorship was voluntary until the Chinese Army entered the war. U.S. military commanders complained that correspondents had released information about troop movements, recovery of American prisoners from the Chinese and the use of a new combat airplane. Tougher restraints were imposed upon the press. All news stories were required to submit news reports and film to Army and Air Force censors. On March 13, 1951, all news stories and film were also required to be approved by censors in Japan. In January 1953, a Joint Field...

An NRO Q&A Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, assistant professor of government and director of the Washington program at Claremont McKenna College calls Harry Truman the First Cold Warrior. She recently took questions from NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez about her book, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, And the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism. Kathryn Jean Lopez: Why isn’t FDR the first Cold Warrior? Elizabeth Edwards Spalding: FDR thought he could keep the Soviet Union satisfied through spheres of influence and his personal style of diplomacy. So FDR was willing to legitimate the Kremlin in a way that Truman never allowed. Even...

The Euston Manifesto refers to a coming together of a group of British liberals who have come to understand the extent of the threat to civilized values represented by the Islamic fundamentalists. They proclaimed their public recognition of this threat and, while not all of them support the war in Iraq, they proclaim their support of the British government's anti-terrorism programs. A group of American liberals, seeing the Euston Manifesto, and coming to similar conclusions, have decided to issue an American version of the Euston Manifesto, and have created a website where American liberals can add their voices and their...

Though it has been a long 53 years since former President Harry S. Truman was in office, he was the hot topic of conversation at The Hudson Institute on Monday, July 17, where a panel discussed his legacy and influence on current policies. Truman’s defense-laden foreign policy has recently been compared to President George W. Bush’s tactics for the War on Terror; an association that was a major point of discussion for the three members of the panel. While the speakers all had their own specific opinions of the Bush-Truman comparison, they all praised Truman’s policies while he was in...

President George W. Bush strides across the world stage as much as the U.S. dominates the world's stage. This is very good news for those of us who still believe in decency and democracy. So forget what some slanted opinion polls say about the leadership of the 43rd president and his patriot countrymen. Recall, Sir Winston Churchill was once one of the most detested men in Britain, then went on to save the free world. That's Churchill's undisputed legacy. In another era it may be Bush's legacy, too. This past week, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, one of America's strongest...

THOUSANDS OF TROOPS have died fighting a war he chose to fight--a war that increasingly appears to be a microcosm of something much larger than what the American people had bargained for. He seems to be stretching presidential power beyond what his predecessors ever imagined. His approval ratings hover around the freezing point. It's no coincidence that his party is beginning to stray from him, and the press is writing him off as a failure.What sounds like a thumbnail sketch of George W. Bush in 2006, is actually a description of Harry S. Truman's nightmarish 1950. In fact, these underestimated...

On Wednesday, January 18, I received an e-mail from someone identifying himself as “Ahmed.” He wrote to me that he was a “Muslim activist” and that he wanted me to come on his radio show to discuss my work, or, in his words, “to give [my] side of the story.” In doing a simple web search on his e-mail address, it turned out that this individual was none other than the Director of Communications for the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Ahmed Rehab. While I didn’t know his motives in contacting me, I had recalled when...

Description American Gunfight is the fast-paced, definitive, and breathtakingly suspenseful account of an extraordinary historical event -- the attempted assassination of President Harry Truman in 1950 by two Puerto Rican Nationalists and the bloody shoot-out in the streets of Washington, D.C., that saved the president's life. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Hunter, the widely admired and bestselling novelist and author of such books as Havana, Hot Springs, and Dirty White Boys, and John Bainbridge, Jr., an experienced journalist and lawyer, American Gunfight is at once a groundbreaking work of meticulous historical research and the vivid and dramatically told story of...

D U B Y A vs. B U B B A the truman factor by Mia T, 11.19.05 TRUMAN & BUSH Give 'em hell, Dubya? by Jay Ambrose New York Post (print edition) 11.19.05 George W. Bush's approval ratings are at an all-time low for his presidency--37 percent--and his politiial opponents, seeing that he is down, have begun kicking him especially hard, even to the point of doing their best to make us lose the war in Iraq. For comfort, the president might reflect that approval ratings are sometimes directly contradicted by later, more reflective judgment. He might think...

            I stumbled over the website of the Committee on the Present Danger. [1] Senator Jon Kyl, Joseph Leiberman, George Schultz and James Woolsey are honorary Co-Chariman of the group. Believing the organization to be opposed to communism and other forms of terrorism I gave some thought to sending in my application for membership, but before doing so I decided to look into the group a bit further.            While I discovered that the intent and purpose of the group is sound, I am not quite certain what it has actually accomplished toward its objective.            I found that the original purpose...

 hat kind of president picks both John Roberts and Harriet Miers? They look like the ultimate odd couple. Roberts is not a Bush crony, he has a résumé to die for, and everyone who knows him says he's unbelievably smart. Miers is more than a crony but certainly not less--Fred Barnes says no president has ever known a Supreme Court appointee as well as Bush knows Miers, and he may be right. She has the kind of résumé you expect to see in the director of a not-very-important federal agency: president of the local bar, member of the Dallas City...

HIROSHIMA'S NUCLEAR LESSON bill clinton is no Harry Truman by Mia T, 8.06.05 [T]he threat nuclear weapons pose today is probably greater than ever before. That's not because they're more plentiful--thanks to the 2002 Moscow Treaty (negotiated by John Bolton), U.S. and Russian arsenals are being cut to levels not seen in 40 years. It's because nuclear know-how and technology have fallen into the hands of men such as A.Q. Khan and Kim Jong Il, and they, in turn, are but one degree of separation away from the jihadists who may someday detonate a bomb in Times or Trafalgar Square....

Sometimes a great nation changes its mind. Sometimes that's a good thing The most jarring thing I read last week was a headline. My guess is that the headline, in a British newspaper, may be the most jarring thing you read this week: Nixon Becomes Watergate Hero. Forget for a moment the argument, which is hard to summarize and even harder to support. The important thing is that the way we look at Watergate is changing even if only one fact about Watergate has changed. (That would be the identity of Deep Throat. He was former FBI official Mark Felt.)The...

Let’s talk about the stupidity of Senators. Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) is our Poster Child. First, there is no known lower limit on the stupidity of an individual Senator. For gross public dumb, it’s hard to beat a one-term Iowa Senator who went to a local massage parlor to have his ashes hauled. He was dumb enough to pay with a credit card. And dumb to have a staffer who was living in sin with an Iowa reporter. As a result, the credit card slip was published in a paper, and the gentleman’s career ended at six years. This...

The final item in the Sept. 30, 1944 "Activity Report of Virginia Hall," American intelligence agent, was No. XV: "Were you decorated in the Field?" "No," she had typed, "nor any reason to be." The answer was typical of her matter-of-fact sense of duty. But William J. Donovan, known to a generation of spies as "Wild Bill," begged to differ. On May 12, 1945, Maj. Gen. Donovan, director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, informed President Harry Truman that Hall was, for her extraordinary heroism, to receive the Distinguished Service Cross -- second only to the Medal of Honor....

I heard three men speak this week with apparent passion about subjects of great interest. Each of them was trying to be accepted as honest and clear in his speech. Two of them are obvious: George Bush and John Kerry, who took part in the first Presidential Debate of 2004 in Miami on Thursday. Almost all of you either saw the debate, read the transcripts afterward, or saw coverage of it. But to my view, the most honest, the most effective speaker, was the third man, Lemony Snicket, who appeared at a book signing at a Barnes and Noble north...

John Kerry gave a fire-breathing speech at Temple University in Philadelphia on Friday. In it he announced what will be his themes for the balance of the campaign, subject of course to 180-degree changes at any time. There was one problem with the speech. It was largely “fact-free,” as Dave Barry is wont to say. Here are the claims, and the relevant facts to each claim: “The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy -- Al Qaeda -- ...” Kerry may not have noticed, but your average college student ought to know that...

On May 9, the Toronto Star newspaper published an editorial entitled, “Donald Rumsfeld should resign now.” The demand was of course based on the media-manufactured “atrocities” of Abu Ghraib. That’s odd, I thought. I couldn’t recall ever seeing an American newspaper demand that an official of a foreign country resign. “Bush has apologized for the abuse, which he called ‘abhorrent.’ He says the soldiers responsible will be punished. But his words are not enough. They will not erase the anger raging throughout the Arab world, as well as across the United States, for the indignities inflicted upon the prisoners. Nor...

In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 300 pages, $25.95 In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the...

President Bush's decision to invoke the Sept. 11 attacks in a campaign commercial has Democrats livid. But when it comes to politicizing America's wars, Bush has nothing on Democratic icon Harry Truman, who actually demonized his opponent by comparing him to Adolf Hitler in campaign speeches. The New York Times chronicled some of Truman's incendiary rhetoric in its Oct. 26, 1948 edition, in a report on a Truman campaign speech in Chicago against New York Republican Thomas Dewey. "President Likens Dewey to Hitler as Facists' Tool," read the Times headline, followed by the subhead, "Dictatorship Stressed." The Times headline writer...

Dem Hero Truman Exposed as Vicious Bigot NewsMax.com Friday, Aug. 1, 2003 Eight months ago, Democrats and their media friends pulled out all the stops to drive Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott from his post for saying kind words about the presidential candidacy of the late reformed Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. Most of these same politically correct crusaders, however, consider Thurmond's erstwhile opponent in the 1948 election, President Harry S. Truman, a genuine civil rights hero - even though in private Truman was a vicious bigot who advocated sending blacks back to Africa and reportedly once belonged to the Ku...

The battle over the significance of American communism and what to do about it was probably the biggest domestic controversy of the 20th century. It began shortly after the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 1946, with a series of investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and reached its first climax with the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury (in denying that he had been a Soviet spy) early in 1950. The battle was then taken over by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and roiled on for nearly five more years, reaching its second and final...

<p>He was once extremely popular. Right after the war, I’m talking unprecedented popular. He could do no wrong. He was a hero. Then things got messy.</p> <p>The easy victory turned into the messy rebuilding. The vanquished enemy wasn't entirely vanquished. There remained pockets of stubborn resistance. Soldiers died. Rebuilding took longer than thought. Cost more than thought. Created a lot more controversy than thought.</p>

Do we let Harry Truman off the hook because, despite his self-recorded anti-Semitism, he bucked his State Department and recognized Israel? That is the question in the aftermath of the discovery in the Truman Library of the most vicious remarks ever made about Jews by an American President. The early returns indicate that Truman gets a grudging pass, since his deed of recognizing Israel overcomes, if not obliterates, his private words. The underlying assumption is that by his decision to recognize the Jewish state, Truman was responsible for saving and even creating Israel. Against that, who cares what he thought?...

Harry Truman reached out from the grave last week and exposed the media’s double standard when it comes to judging Democrats and Republicans. A librarian at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, discovered a 1947 diary of Truman’s that had been sitting unopened on a shelf for some four decades. The book contained the following edifying remarks: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or...

The death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster – one of the most bizarre events of the Clinton years – was ruled a suicide by two independent counsels and considered a closed case by the mainstream media. Any suggestion that officials covered up the "murder" of Bill and Hillary Clinton's loyal aide and close friend has invited only scorn from lawmakers. Just a handful of media outlets have ever followed up on evidence and testimony from witnesses that contradict the conclusions of government investigators Robert Fiske and Kenneth Starr. But as the 10th anniversary of the July 20, 1993,...

Harry Truman reached out from the grave last week and exposed the media’s double standard when it comes to judging Democrats and Republicans. A librarian at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, discovered a 1947 diary of Truman’s that had been sitting unopened on a shelf for some four decades. The book contained the following edifying remarks: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or...

I'm for Harry Truman, the anti-Semite. Harry Truman was anti-Semitic. Who cares? Last week, archivists at the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., discovered several of Truman's 1947 diary entries. In the diary, Truman lambastes Jews. "The Jews, I find are very, very selfish," Truman wrote on July 21, 1947. "They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP (Displaced Persons) as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the...

ADL Shocked by Discovery of Anti-Semitic Passages in President Truman's Diary 7/11/03 1:55:00 PM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: National Desk Contact: Myrna Shinbaum, 212-885-7747 Todd Gutnick, 212-885-7755 both of the Anti-Defamation League NEW YORK, July 11 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today was shocked to learn that President Harry S. Truman, long regarded as a friend of the Jewish people for his support for a Jewish homeland in the years after the Holocaust, had given voice to ugly anti-Semitism in his personal diary. Newly released diary excerpts, including stern references to the classical anti-Semitic canard of Jews caring only...

A newly discovered diary written by the United States' 33rd president, Harry Truman, reveals a surprising tinge of irritation in discussing the plight of postwar Jewish refugees. Surprising, because Truman is revered by Zionists for lending crucial diplomatic support for Israel's founding, famously recognizing the state a scant 11 minutes after its founding. But although sympathetic, Truman's support for a Jewish state had been cautious and conditional. At a Chicago rally in 1944, then Senator Truman said, "Today, not tomorrow, we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven for all those who can be grasped from...

<p>"The Jews, I find are very, very selfish," President Harry S. Truman wrote in a 1947 diary that was recently discovered on the shelves of the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., and released by the National Archives yesterday.</p> <p>Written sporadically during a turbulent year of Truman's presidency, the diary contains about 5,500 words on topics ranging from the death of his mother to comic banter with a British aristocrat. But the most surprising comments were Truman's remarks on Jews, written on July 21, 1947, after the president had a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish former treasury secretary. Morgenthau called to talk about a Jewish ship in Palestine -- possibly the Exodus, the legendary ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees who were refused entry into Palestine by the British, then rulers of that land.</p>

washingtonpost.com Harry Truman's Forgotten Diary 1947 Writings Offer Fresh Insight on the President By Rebecca Dana and Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, July 11, 2003; Page A01 "The Jews, I find are very, very selfish," President Harry S. Truman wrote in a 1947 diary that was recently discovered on the shelves of the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., and released by the National Archives yesterday. Written sporadically during a turbulent year of Truman's presidency, the diary contains about 5,500 words on topics ranging from the death of his mother to comic banter with a British aristocrat. But the...

OK. Let's find Saddam Hussein - if he's alive - and put him back in power. Just kidding. But that would appear the preferred course for some of those still grousing about the Iraq war. If it isn't about the failure of allied forces thus far to find weapons of mass destruction, critics pick at the Bush and Blair administrations for supposedly botching Iraq's reconstruction. There is room, of course, to grumble. As a USA Today editorial pointed out Wednesday, the world needs a full accounting of what happened to Saddam's WMDs and material for making them. And an...

A number of valuable historic documents stolen from some of Israel's leading research institutions, including the Weizmann and Jabotinsky institutes, are being offered for sale in the United States, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Antiquities expert John Reznikoff, who owns and operates University Archives, an antiquities dealership in Westport, Connecticut, told the Post on Monday that "all the major archives in Israel are being looted, and the items are ending up here in the US. Jewish culture is being sold for pennies on the dollar, and there's a general malaise at the institutions in Israel about the situation. "I'm very...

CNN: President Truman, now that it's become clear that the occupation of Germany and Japan will be far more challenging than our military victory .HST: You ever been in the service, son? You have any idea how many good men gave their lives so you could stand up here and tell me how easy the war was compared to how hard the peace is going to be? Any of you people have a serious question?MSNBC: Mr. President, we have footage of a huge number of Japanese marching in an ancient religious procession that could turn into an anti-American riot any...

<p>Fifty years ago this month in Moscow, Josef Stalin died. He and his Red Army had been our allies (not formally but informally) in defeating Nazism and Fascism. Winston Churchill thought well of "old Joe" for a time. During the war American propaganda referred to his armies as "Our Heroic Soviet Allies," and President Roosevelt joshed that he was "Uncle Joe." Then we had a falling out with the mustachioed Georgian.</p>

TRENCHANT (I HOPE) COMMENTS ON THE LOTT AFFAIR By Don Feder December 22, 2002 At the outset, please note the following: 1) I am no fan of Trent Lott. As Senate Majority Leader, Lott was an unprincipled pragmatist. So much so, that when he first became majority leader, DC conservatives produced buttons proclaiming: “Lott For Sale, Will Build to Specifications.” At the height of the current manufactured crisis, the Mississippi invertebrate went of Black Entertainment Television to plead that he now supports affirmative action (racial quotas) “across board.” That declaration was more profoundly racist than anything the Senator said at...

Harry Truman would be Republican todayIt's a shame that the Democratic Party doesn't have a leader like Harry Truman. He didn't have a Harvard education but he had a lot of common sense. He said that U.S. foreign policy should be based on maintaining world peace.Since World War II we've endeavored to do this. Eventually idiots like Saddam Hussein will be eliminated just as Hitler and Mussolini were.Truman supported civil liberties, provided they didn't jeopardize the safety and general welfare of the community. He respected the Constitution and would never have thought, for example, that pornography and flag burning were...