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I’ve just given the draft bailout bill a first read (link here; there’s apparently a more recent draft posted at the House Financial Services cmte website, but it’s currently inaccessible). There’s a lot of b.s. stuffed in it (more to come), but let’s start with one section that warrants your attention– Section 115 (c). It appears that Hank Paulson and the cackling Democrats have written in a provision that codifies the short-circuiting of the democratic process: (c) FAST TRACK CONSIDERATION.— (1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, the Secretary may not exercise any authority to make purchases under...

How did we go from winning the war in Iraq to losing overnight? Was this decided by the same committee that changed "Peking" to "Beijing"? These word changes are a fortiori evidence that liberals are part of a conspiracy. On what date did "horrible" and "actress" vanish from the English language to be replaced with "horrific" and "actor"? Who decided that? (Meanwhile, I'm still writing "Puff Daddy" in my nightly dream journal when everybody else has started calling him "Diddy.") When did "B.C." (before Christ) and "A.D." (anno Domini, "in the year of the Lord") get replaced with "BCE" (before...

Our source must remain covert, but we have gained access to a series of e-mails between James A. Baker III and Lee A. Hamilton, co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group. (Actually, the ISG designates them as "co-chairs," but even a cursory look shows neither of them to be furniture.) The messages' content sheds an interesting light on the ISG's 79 recommendations. We submit these messages below, without comment: Dear Jim: I've looked at the draft of the ISG recommendations. Do you think anybody will notice there aren't really 79, and that a bunch of them repeat or extend other recommendations?...

How did we go from winning the war in Iraq to losing overnight? Was this decided by the same committee that changed "Peking" to "Beijing"? These word changes are a fortiori evidence that liberals are part of a conspiracy. On what date did "horrible" and "actress" vanish from the English language to be replaced with "horrific" and "actor"? Who decided that? (Meanwhile, I'm still writing "Puff Daddy" in my nightly dream journal when everybody else has started calling him "Diddy.") When did "B.C." (before Christ) and "A.D." (anno Domini, "in the year of the Lord") get replaced with "BCE" (before...

I was rewriting history, while walking along some cold lakeshore the other day. My thought was: if Churchill had only come to power in 1937, Chamberlain would have been installed to replace him in 1940. Had Churchill been in power, and refused to sign Munich, he would have been blamed for the outbreak of war. I can just hear the prattle in an English pub, circa 1950. "He pushed Hitler to it! Had it not been for Churchill, Hitler would have been satisfied with the Sudetenland, and England would never have had to surrender. Everything was Churchill's fault!" Today, everything...

Upon further study, what strikes me most about the Iraq Study Group report, or ISGR, is its profound naivete. The group could better identify its operative philosophy as "unrealism," rather than realism. The modern form of foreign policy "realism" emerged, according to "The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World," in reaction to "idealism," an "approach which held that countries were united in an underlying harmony of interest – a view shattered by the outbreak of World War II." But there's more: "Rather than study the world as it might be, Realists maintained that a science of international politics must...

Well, the ISG -- the Illustrious Seniors' Group -- has released its 79-point plan. How unprecedented is it? Well, it seems Iraq is to come under something called the "Iraq International Support Group." If only Neville Chamberlain had thought to propose a "support group" for Czechoslovakia, he might still be in office. Or guest-hosting for Oprah. But, alas, such flashes of originality are few and far between in what's otherwise a testament to conventional wisdom. How conventional is the ISG's conventional wisdom? Try page 49: "RECOMMENDATION 5: The Support Group should consist of Iraq and all the states bordering Iraq,...

Steady condemnation from conservatives for the Iraq Study Group report may be providing some cover to the Bush administration as it completes its own review of strategy in Iraq, apparently with little enthusiasm for the panel's prescription of U.S. troop withdrawal and dialogue with Syria and Iran. The criticism of the panel, co-chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), has burst forth from the leading institutions of the right: the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard; conservative talk radio; and scholars at some of...

Top Democrats in Congress left a White House meeting with President Bush on Friday frustrated over what they perceived as his reluctance to embrace major recommendations from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. "I just didn't feel there today, the president in his words or his demeanor, that he is going to do anything right away to change things drastically," Senate Majority Leader-elect Harry Reid, D-Nev., said following the Oval Office meeting. "He is tepid in what he talks about doing. Someone has to get the message to this man that there have to be significant changes." Bush has been cool...

Former White House advisers to George H.W. Bush are keenly disappointed and concerned about the current President Bush's initial reaction to the report by the Iraq Study Group. They consider him rather dismissive of the group's conclusions, issued yesterday, which include the view that current Iraq policy is failing. The group recommends a variety of important changes, such as assigning U.S. troops to play more of an advisory and training role and less of a combat role. The ISG also recommends that the United States withdraw most of its combat brigades by early 2008 and that the administration increase diplomatic...

The "bipartisan" Iraq panel has recommended that Iran and Syria can help stabilize Iraq. You know, the way Germany and Russia helped stabilize Poland in '39. Now that Democrats have won the House, they can concentrate on losing the war. Despite all the phony conservative Democrats who got elected as gun-totin' hawks, the Democrats will uniformly vote to dismantle every aspect of the war on terrorism. They've started a runaway train and can't stop it now. The Democratic base is at a fever pitch with visions of storm troopers listening to their phone calls and ruthlessly torturing innocent accountants at...

RUSH: We will start with the Iraq surrender group, big press conference today chaired by Lee Hamilton and James Baker. I think one of the best ways to share with you my thoughts on this is to read to you an e-mail I got from an Air Force friend of mine, a veteran in Iraq watching this this morning. "Hey, Rush, I'm climbing out of my skin here, watching the Iraq surrender group unfold on TV, but they're missing the point. Iraq is not the problem. The hatred our enemy has for us, that's the problem. Iraq is only a...

Nearly four years after U.S. military forces toppled the Saddam Hussein regime, the United States faces a “grave and deteriorating” situation in Iraq and the Middle East, according to the bipartisan commission headed by the commission’s co-chairmen, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton. The report painted a grim picture of the situation in Iraq and delivered 79 recommended actions. “There is no path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved,” the report says. The commissioners warn that if the situation continues to deteriorate, there is a risk of a “slide...