Free Republic

I'm James Kvaal, the new policy director for President Obama's 2012 campaign. You'll be hearing from me occasionally about the President's policies and those of our opponents, and how we can all help bring about change for our country. Yesterday, we accomplished one major change when President Obama announced that all American troops in Iraq will be home before the holidays. With that action, the Iraq war will end. And one of the President's central promises will have been kept. Both as Americans and as supporters of President Obama, this is something for us to reflect on, and be proud...

For those who don't want either Romney or Perry, even if you'd never vote for either.

Democrat Jim Moran says US military cannot win the war in Afghanistan. Remember when G.W. Bush was president, and it seemed like every other Democrat would declare that the US can’t win the war…whether that was in Iraq or Afghanistan? Well, now that Barack Obama is president, the Democrats are still as anti-war and anti-military as ever, the only difference being that the mainstream media doesn’t report on their statements of comfort and aid to the enemy nearly as much as when Bush was president. On Friday’s "Hardball," Moran, who’s a congressman from Virginia, declared that Afghanistan was not a...

....when paired with its summer 2010 remake, the two movies offer a parable on the transformation of the global economy, the end of the American century and the changing balance of power between the United States and Asia. Between Jackie Chan's sly digs about global warming and Jaden Smith's status as a refugee of the U.S. economy, you can almost feel the world's center of gravity shifting. ... you'll recall that, back then, California was still the promised land, the place where the film's teenage protagonist, Daniel LaRusso, and his mom had moved from New Jersey to start a new...

“The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating,” said President Obama, as he announced deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops. “I’m absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region, solely through military means.” “(T)here is no military solution in Afghanistan,” says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Said U.S. Commander Gen. David McKiernan yesterday, U.S. and NATO forces are “stalemated.” Such admissions by our military and political leadership in a time of war call to mind other words heard back in 1951, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur delivered his farewell address to the...

There are many ways to lose a presidential election. John McCain is losing in a way that threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him. A year ago, the Arizona senator's team made a crucial strategic decision. McCain would run on his (impressive) personal biography. On policy, he'd hew mostly to conservative orthodoxy, with a few deviations -- most notably, his support for legalization for illegal immigrants. But this strategy wasn't yielding results in the general election. So in August, McCain tried a bold new gambit: He would reach out to independents and women with an exciting and...

I gave up on network news channels back in the '80s. I enjoyed CNN at the start and thought that they did a credible job for several years. They really pi$$ed me off during the '94 campaign when their political guru Bob Franken called the Republican agenda,(the contract for America), The contract on America. That was pure political propaganda. It has gotten much worse since then.

BAGHDAD - The overall U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 4,000 after four soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad, a grim milestone that is likely to fuel calls for the withdrawal of American forces as the war enters its sixth year. The American deaths occurred Sunday, the same day rockets and mortars pounded the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad and a wave of attacks left at least 61 Iraqis dead nationwide. An Iraqi military spokesman said Monday that troops had found rocket launching pads in different areas in predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad that had been used...

Nuff said...

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said many interesting things in today's Jerusalem Post interview. Most striking, however, is not a particular remark but the contrast between his (unwittingly?) rather defeatist message and the strength that he ascribes to Israel's current position in the world. Olmert described Israel's position as struggling to implement a two-state solution because the alternative is to be demographically swamped by a one-state solution. He then pointed out that even the "world that is friendly to Israel - not the world comprised of fanatics and extremists - ... speaks of Israel in terms of the '67 borders. It...

In January 2005, Hillary Clinton's "goon squad" at Media Matters for America came after me because I pointed out on a national television broadcast that the New York Democrat was "divorced from reality"(TM) for her statements asserting that Social Security was solvent for the long term and the economy "was on the verge of collapse." In "The Question" posed to President Bush that fateful day, I also noted that Sen. Harry Reid suffered the same separation from logic and fact. On Monday, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader reconfirmed his disconnect from the world everyone else inhabits in making the statement:...

I began by asking myself the question linked inevitably to the survival of the United States as a trusted nation in the 21st century: Why can't America admit defeat? What is it in the American psyche that seems to dictate the necessity to be proven not only right, but superior in dealings with the outside world? I have lived the better part of 40 years in Japan, a country whose nationalistic ardor and patriotic zeal once easily matched that of the U.S. If the Japanese government has not sufficiently apologized for the utter brutality their nation inflicted in Asia and...

This past summer during one of the last episodes of HBO's mega-hit "The Sopranos," A.J., the whiny suicidal son of the show's mafia boss anti-hero, was heard to worry about what he saw as the certain bombing of Iran by President Bush. "You don't know that," his mafia princess sister responded. Though this stray snippet, which was widely noted in reviews of the show, did not offer any clues as to the fate of the fictional leaders of the North Jersey mafia, it may have heralded the beginning of a new twist on what it means to be "anti-war" in...

The numbers are so staggering that they are hard to process mentally and impossible to process logistically: each month some 60,000 Iraqis are voting with their feet against the surge of U.S. forces by fleeing their homes. Since the invasion, more than 2.5 million Iraqis have left for neighboring countries, while 2.2 million have been forcibly displaced within Iraq - too poor to escape the country or blocked from transitioning through more peaceful provinces, which in recent months have erected checkpoints to keep them out. To put it in stark historical terms: the war has created the largest refugee crisis...

Total defeatism seems to be the normative attitude towards Chinese dominion and American and Western collapse in the English language press. People eat up countless breathless reports about China's growing might without a murmur even as American leaders are openly selling out the last vestiges of the nation's defense capacity and economic independence to the enemy. All of this is "justified" by endless appeals to free trade, anti-imperialism, fairness, ancient history, third-worldism, moralism, anti-Americanism, thinly veiled Asian supremacism and every other ideology imaginable. Serious analysis about what these developments mean for us and what to do about them is rare...

LONDON (Reuters) - Six years after the September 11 attacks, a few cautious voices are beginning to suggest the unthinkable -- maybe it is time to consider talking to al Qaeda. The idea will revolt some people and raises obvious questions -- through what channels could such a dialogue take place and what would there be to negotiate? But proponents say al Qaeda has established itself as a de facto power, whether the West likes it or not, and history shows militant movements are best neutralized by negotiation, not war. "No insurgency or terrorism has been defeated by warfare or...

I must say that I sympathize with the bind that Democratic leaders are in somewhat. Defeatism is forced upon them by their base. That's why they have no choice but but to insist that Iraq is going disastrously badly, that it was all a mistake, and that we should get out now. Where they have no choice but to acknowledge that progress has been made, they must insist at all costs that President Bush's policies have had nothing to do with it. It is a matter of political reality. Their base will throw them back into the minority if they...

D for Democrat, D for Defeatist

"One of the things I learned during the war was never to pick up my pen to transmit my own despair."       - Albert Camus So we've got a candidate who is among the most radical ever to stand for the presidency. One who was furthermore at the very center of the most corrupt administration in modern history. Who has a lengthy trail of dubious (to put it mildly) deals and arrangements behind her. Whose record as a senator is conspicuous for lack of any serious accomplishment. Who is, above all, one of the most unappealing personalities to run for...

I don't know if this is a precipice from which there is any return for the party of Pelosi and Reid. These are turncoats in the truest form of the word. These are people who are secretly – and, now, not so secretly – praying for, hoping for and acting in the best interests of victory for Osama bin Laden and his cohorts who would chop off their heads just as fast as they would chop off yours and mine. Imagine political power meaning so much to you that you would sell out your own country – perhaps even the...