As a frequent critic of President Obama, I feel duty-bound to have his back when he gets something right.  Obama has been criticized from both the left and the right over the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a treasonous American citizen killed by a drone-fired missile in Yemen.  But in addition to being a tactical victory, that operation is a welcome reminder that the President understands we are at war.

Or at least, on some days he understands it.  Occasionally his “I’m-not-Bush” compulsions overwhelm his commander-in-chiefness, as when he pre-announces a retreat while announcing a surge, or when he floats the indefensible idea of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a few hundred yards away from Ground Zero.  But eventually he backed off both of those bad ideas, as well as his grand-standing promise to close Guantanamo.  On a more positive note, the take-down of Osama bin Laden was a gutsy call and a genuine triumph for the Obama presidency.

Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen is troubled by the legal ramifications of killing an American citizen, although he admits that “a little ‘yippee’ emitted from me when I heard the news.”

Something big and possibly dangerous has happened . . . in secret. Government’s most awesome power — to take a life — has been exercised on one of its own citizens without benefit of trial. A guy named Barron and another named Lederman apparently said it was okay. Maybe it was. But I’d sure like to hear the attorney general or the president explain why.

Two thoughts:  I’d like to hear that explanation as well, but I’m not holding my breath during an election campaign.  And, somehow I’m pretty confident that these two “guys” in  the Justice Department, who apparently drafted a legal memo supporting the legality of  killing al-Awlaki, will not end up demonized in anything like the manner of John Yoo.

I voted against Mr. Obama, and intend to do so again, but from the start I’ve been looking for silver linings in his presidency.  Here’s one: Taken as a whole, the Obama presidency is tugging America in the direction of bipartisan support for the war against Islamic fascism.  America may become safer as a result.

Tagged with: Afghanistan • Counterterrorism • Islamic Fascism • KSM • Obama

Eleven years ago today, on a perfect sunny autumn afternoon, the Web Goddess and I were married at St. George’s Church.

The first time I sang to her was a couple of years before that.

My singing voice is best suited to humming, but sometimes snatches of lyrics bubble up in my mind and demand to be sung. We were sitting at the dining room table in her apartment one evening, playing Scrabble with the radio on.  Without any planning or conscious thought, I found myself singing along with Anne Murray:

Even though we ain’t got money,
I’m so in love with you, honey,
Everything will bring a chain of love.
And in the morning, when I rise,
You bring a tear of joy to my eyes
And tell me everything is gonna be alright.

She liked it enough that I started looking for other worthy musical tributes.  On our wedding weekend, we were sitting around that same dining room table, now in our Maplewood home, casually eating pizza with a few guests from out of town.  The Web Goddess mentioned that I sometimes sing goofy love songs to her, and of course one of her friends said instantly, “sing one for us.”

Shania Twain sings it better but doesn’t feel it any stronger:

You’re the reason I believe in love
And you’re the answer to my prayers from up above.
All we need is just the two of us
My dreams came true… because of you

My favorite line may be the one in the headline.  Much of the rest of the Dead’s Sugar Magnolia is wholly unsuitable for this purpose, but that line works. Our first date was in the summer, and the relationship kindled that evening has sustained me through every change of season.

Happy anniversary, Sweetie.  I love you.

(Photo by the Web Goddess — holding the camera in her left hand)

Tagged with: Maplewood • St. George's • Web Goddess

At The Corner, within about 90 minutes of the announcement that Steve Jobs had died, Kevin D. Williamson posted a thoughtful celebration of the miraculous system of industry and commerce that both benefited from and made possible Jobs’s success.  An excerpt:

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates. … Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too.

Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates.

Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can only satisfy economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

(Photo from Wikipedia)

Tagged with: Capitalism

Herman Cain, a Tea Party favorite

What does it mean that Herman Cain, a black candidate for President, overwhelmingly won the recent Florida straw poll with Tea Party support?

Why, it means the Tea Party is racist, of course.

Just ask Janeane Garofalo.  Garofalo, a comedian, C-list actress and wanna-be pundit, appeared on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” a nightly smarm-fest that landed on something called Current TV after Olbermann was fired by MSNBC.

Via Real Clear Politics, which watches Olbermann so that I don’t have to, here’s Garofalo’s analysis:

Janeane Garofalo: “Herman Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican party. Conservative movement and tea party movement, one in the same.

“People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.’”

Fiendishly clever, these Tea Partyers.  You can almost hear the wheels turning in their twisted little minds.  “What’s the most effective way to camouflage my deep-seated racism?  Ha!  I’ll vote for the black guy!”

Allen West, R-Fla.

Cain’s showing continues a pattern of Tea Party support for black Republicans.  In 2010 the Tea Party helped elect two black candidates to the House of Representatives: Allen West of Florida and Tim Scott of South Carolina.  Anyone seeking to accuse the Tea Party of racism is invited to explain it first to Rep. West and Rep. Scott.

Tim Scott, R-S.C.

In a white-majority country that has already elected a black president, it’s getting harder and harder to take racism charges seriously.  The Left’s “Tea Party Racism” meme is not just lazy and false; it is corrupt.  By reflexively leveling racism charges, the Left elevates a factor that should be irrelevant into a wedge issue, and sets back the very cause it supposedly supports.

(Photos from Wikipedia)

Tagged with: Conservatism • Tea Party

President Obama plans to “call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers,” according to the New York Times.

Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages.

Buffett made this complaint most recently last month, in an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.”  The sound bite you hear most often is that Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.  (Sometimes this gets distorted as “Buffett pays less tax than his secretary,” which certainly is false.)  Here’s how Buffett put it in the op-ed:

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. [Ya think?-KP] But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

The reason, of course, is that most of Buffett’s income comes from dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at what Buffett calls a “bargain rate” of 15%.  Buffett neglects to mention why investment gains are taxed at a lower rate.  It’s because this income already has been taxed at the corporate level before it ever gets to the investor.  At Commentary’s blog, John Steele Gordon does the math, and makes two good points:

It has nothing to do with fairness, it has everything to do with class warfare, for this would be nothing more nor less than a whacking great tax increase on capital gains and dividends on those who earn more than $1 million a year. In other words, they would be penalized for their success at creating wealth.

And:

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corporation paid $5.6 billion in corporate taxes last year on income of $19 billion, a 29 percent rate. … Warren Buffett owns about 30 percent of Berkshire Hathaway, so he, in a very real sense, paid not just the $6[.9] million in federal taxes he claimed in his Times article, but $1.68 billion more in the form of corporate taxes.

For the “nonsense” I mention in the headline, let’s go back to Buffett’s op-ed.  In addition to ignoring the reality of corporate taxation, Buffett makes this stunningly dishonest statement:

I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off.

Really, Mr. Buffett? Not even at the margins? Of course, if I’m 95% sure an investment will double in value in X years, I’ll place that bet whether the tax rate is 15% or 40%.  But how often does anybody have that level of certainty?

A venture capitalist may invest in dozens of startups, knowing that most will go bust, but willing to bet that one or two will pay off big enough to make it all worthwhile.  Are you saying tax rates are not part of the calculus at all?  Really?

Are you saying tax changes don’t affect behavior? Really?

Here’s the reality, as articulated by Rep. Paul Ryan on one of the Sunday news programs:  “Look, if you tax something more, Chris, you get less. If you tax job creators more, you get less job creation. If you tax investment more, you get less investment.” (Hat tip: The Corner.)

I am not a no-tax-hike absolutist.  The Democratic orgy of spending on the phony “stimulus” package has us deep enough in the hole that I think some tax increases are inevitable.  But spare me the pious claptrap from the Oracle of Omaha.

(White House public domain photo of Buffett and Obama, via Wikipedia)

I just came from the Episcopal Cathedral in Newark, where I helped the Web Goddess record for posterity an interfaith service marking the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.  There were solemn remembrances, of course, but also proclamations of faith and hope for the future.  There was even laughter, as there should be whenever human beings of whatever faith come together in community.

I was in the balcony videotaping the entire service.  In her role as Director of Communications and Technology for the Diocese of Newark, the Web Goddess will find a variety of uses for parts of the footage (pixelage?).  Her boss, the Right Reverend Mark Beckwith, Bishop of Newark, was one of three speakers, the others being a rabbi and an imam who serve with Bishop Beckwith on an interfaith coalition.

I was too busy fiddling with the video camera to take notes on the reflections of the three clerics, all of which were grounded in the knowledge that Christians, Jews and Muslims all worship the same God.  Newark Mayor Cory Booker attended and made brief remarks, and the Star-Ledger sent a reporter, a photographer and a videographer.  [The video by Nyier Abdou was particularly well done. For A.T.I.N. groupies, there's a quick glimpse of the Web Goddess at the left at 0:24, and of me with a video camera on a tripod in the balcony at 1:04, and at 2:47.]

To me, perhaps the most moving part of the service came near the very beginning. The muezzin from a major mosque in Irvington walked to the lectern in this Episcopal church and chanted the Muslim call to worship, a hauntingly beautiful recital I had never heard in person before.

The service bulletin thoughtfully provided an English translation of the call to prayer, which begins and ends with “Allahu Akbar.”  Tragically, that phrase is associated in my mind with the hatred and anger of too many terrorist attacks. It was a blessing on this day to hear in those words an affirmation of our common humanity.

(Mr. Sabir Salaam of Masjid Waarith ud Deen in Irvington chants the Muslim call to prayer at Trinity & St. Philips Cathedral in Newark.  Photo by the Web Goddess, of course.)

Tagged with: Episcopalian Issues • Islam • Web Goddess

I’m publishing this post for the fourth time — every September 11 since I began blogging in 2008.  For the first time I’ll offer brief reflections at the end.  In the meantime, the post is dedicated to the men and women of the United States armed forces, and to every firefighter who has ever run into a burning building — 343 of them in particular.

Some day soon I need to write more extensively about the name of this blog. It comes from something that English statesman Edmund Burke apparently did not actually say, so I’ve felt free to modernize the language:

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”

Regardless of who said it first, that sentence is the purest possible distillation of my worldview, and September 11 is a powerful annual reminder of why I regard it as an enduring truth.

The events of 9/11 were the legacy of more than two decades of doing nothing, or next to nothing, in response to attacks from fascists in Islamic guise.

Militant Islamists declared war on America in November 1979 by taking hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. This was followed by 1983 attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut; the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie in 1988; the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993; the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996; the simultaneous 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania; and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000; along with smaller atrocities too numerous to list.

Only after 9/11 did America, led by a President who despite his substantial flaws was resolute enough to call evil by its name, finally mount a sustained response and take the battle to the enemy. And no, Saddam was not behind the 9/11 attacks — but liberating Iraq and planting a (still-fragile) democracy in the heart of the Islamic Middle East is an essential part of the broader war.

All of this is why, despite profound disagreements with the Republican Party on social issues, despite voting for Bill Clinton three times (including 2000), I can no longer vote for Democrats for President. Not until the party has a standard-bearer who understands the cost of meekness in the face of fascism, and who is prepared to stay on the offensive against people for whom “death to America” is not a metaphor.

As the 10th anniversary arrives, I find myself going wobbly on that last paragraph.

President Obama, who won the Democratic nomination on a platform of surrender-at-all-costs, turned out to be less eager to lose a war once it was on his watch.  In fact, the Nobel Peace Prize winner bizarrely launched a third war, a war of choice in Libya, without bothering to get Congressional backing.  I still find the whole affair astonishing, but results matter, and Obama’s Libya adventure shows signs of turning out OK.

To Obama’s everlasting credit, and at considerable political risk, he gave the green light for sending in the Navy SEALS to take down Osama bin Laden — rather than launching a missile that might have left us uncertain about whether we had gotten the al Qaeda leader.  The operation was a triumph for America, and a triumph for the Obama presidency.

I’ll be voting for whichever flawed candidate the Republicans nominate, because  I think it’s essential to reverse this President’s domestic agenda, particularly Obamacare. (Economic decline eventually becomes a national security issue.) But if Obama is reelected, I’ll take some comfort from the knowledge that he doesn’t want to lose a war any more than any of his predecessors did.

Tagged with: 2012 Election • Bush's Third Term • Iraq • Islamic Fascism • Libya • Obama

A few weeks ago I had my virtual fingers slapped by some Facebook friends.  It happened after I clicked, for the first time ever, one of those little “Like” buttons at the bottom of an op-ed.

Here is the paragraph in the op-ed that caught my eye:

To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening,” all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?

You of course are free to agree or disagree, but I thought the paragraph did a good job of describing how a first-term Senator with a thin resume and a dodgy taste in friends was able to convince 69 million Americans that he should be elected to the most powerful office in the world.  I saw the Like button, I clicked it, and I went on to something else.

I’m not sure what I thought the Like button would do, but I soon found out.  It copied the headline and subhead of that Norman Podhoretz op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to my Facebook wall, topped by an unambiguous statement of my approval.  Thus:

Kirk Petersen likes a link:

“What Happened to Obama? Absolutely Nothing.
He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president.”

The first response came from a civil and fair-minded friend, who pointedly asked, “What is it you like about that, Kirk?”  Other offended friends, thoughtful people one and all, weighed in, and I quickly realized I had fallen into the common trap of overlooking the rhetorical excesses of someone with whom I otherwise largely agreed.

Labeling Obama a leftist is certainly fair game, but calling him anti-American borders on calling him a traitor. Besides being unfair, it’s counterproductive. It’s the type of drive-by slur guaranteed to alienate virtually all of those 69 million Americans, some of whom might otherwise be open to a more measured critique of the Obama presidency.

So after a feeble attempt to defend my beliefs while regretting Podhoretz’s choice of words, I deleted the link and posted this instead:

Two lessons learned tonight: 1) Inflammatory language inflames people. 2) Impulsively clicking a “Like” button on an op-ed can be an insufficiently nuanced way of expressing an opinion.

Three weeks later, also in the Wall Street Journal, Shelby Steele provided the missing nuance.  It is not that Mr. Obama is anti-American, but rather that he rejects the very idea of America as the one indispensable nation.

Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his “leading from behind” profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. …

So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.

In 2009, during his “global apology tour” shortly after taking office, Obama was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism.  His answer showed that either he did not understand the term, or that he was carefully pretending not to understand it:  “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  Obama thereby signaled that he rejected a belief of America’s role in the world that goes back more than 170 years, to Alexis de Tocqueville.

As Shelby writes,

Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America’s bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.

To describe Mr. Obama’s attitude as anti-American is to caricature it.  But he does seem motivated by a vision of America as just one more unremarkable country among many.  That point of view has a constituency — but I’m not part of it.

Tagged with: America • Facebook • Obama

Irene, Schmirene — let’s talk web traffic, baby!

I’ve just been notified that as of August 24, 2011, I have entered the august and distinguished pantheon of professional bloggers.  Specifically, I received my first payment from Google AdSense.  My autograph is now available for purchase.

It’s taken a lot of hard work and dedication to get to this point.  Since May 29, 2009, when I launched my first AdSense ads, I’ve made more than 300 posts to my blog.  Almost all of them involved a fair amount of research, writing and editing.  I keep  telling myself that I should do more quickie blog posts with just a single observation about a single aspect of an issue.  But once I get started, it nearly always turns into an essay — I described this slippery slope in “Mary Meeker, Entitlements, Wikipedia Drift, and Why It Takes Me Three Hours to Write a Blog Post.”

My average time investment is certainly less than three hours (although that post took longer than that).  Let’s call it 90 minutes.  That adds up to more than 450 hours of blogging, plus an indeterminate but not trivial amount of time spent backing up, upgrading and enhancing the design and recovering from hackers.  500 hours is a reasonable estimate.

During that time, the blog helped launch “My International Consulting Practice,” although I don’t count that vast revenue stream as a direct payment for blogging.  Unfortunately, my two biggest traffic days — an Instalanch and a Sullivalanch — both occurred before I got started with AdSense.

Enough background.  So how much is this lush AdSense payout that makes all the effort worthwhile?  If you know anything about AdSense, you know what’s coming.  Drumroll, please…

$102.34.  That, as my AdSense dashboard so helpfully calculates, is an average of $0.13 per day since I began publishing ads.  (I can almost hear you thinking: “Thirteen cents a day? Gotta get me summa that!”)

A good rule of thumb is that when you hear someone say “it’s not about the money,” it’s usually about the money.  However, sometimes the check really is in the mail — and blogging, for me, is not about the money. Thanks for reading my blog.

Hey, did I mention that I’m now a professional blogger?

Tagged with: About This Blog • Social Media

Today is my birthday (never mind what year), I’m off from work, and the entire Northeast seaboard is preparing for Hurricane Irene.  (The Web Goddess snapped a picture this morning of the huge line of people at the local Home Depot, waiting for delivery of an undetermined number of portable generators, expected to arrive at an undetermined time.)  So what’s on my mind on this Kirk-and-Irene-themed day?

Libya, of course. Specifically, whether President Obama deserves any credit for what tentatively seems to be shaping up as a reasonably OK outcome in the war against Muammar Gadhafi.

E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post thinks he does, and snipes at those who are less enthusiastic: “It’s remarkable how reluctant Obama’s opponents are to acknowledge that despite all the predictions that his policy of limited engagement could never work, it actually did.”

Not so fast.  Assuming Gadhafi actually goes down, Obama’s policy may have “worked” in the narrow sense of deposing the tyrant — although that was not our stated goal. (As George Will aptly said, “In Libya, mission creep began before the mission did,” and remember that Obama pledged to turn over leadership of the effort “in a matter of days, not weeks.”)  It remains to be seen whether America’s intervention will succeed in the category that should trump all others: advancing America’s interests.

Max Boot, not an Obama fan, finds the appropriate level of nuance:

With Muammar Qaddafi​’s downfall imminent, does Barack Obama​ stand vindicated? To a certain extent, yes. Obama showed courage in intervening to prevent Qaddafi from retaking Benghazi and slaughtering its inhabitants. If he had not acted, it is doubtful Britain and France would have done so, and Qaddafi would have been in power for years to come. …

[However] …

[N]ews accounts from Tripoli describe a state of chaos and a power vacuum that could bode ill for Libya’s future. The immediate post-Qaddafi period will be an acid test of whether the administration and its allies did enough planning and preparation to avoid a prolonged insurgency of the kind that has plagued both Afghanistan and Iraq. …

[I]f the Libyans fail to get their act together, and their nation becomes a failed state, make no mistake: For all the talk about how Libyans must determine their own future, a share of the blame for a negative outcome will come to rest in Washington, London and Paris. Having provided the support that enabled the rebels to prevail, the NATO powers, and the U.S. most of all, can hardly wash its hands of the country. The wisdom of Obama’s decision to intervene still rests in the balance.

Just so.  There’s plenty to criticize in Obama’s intervention in Libya — starting with the fact that he sought permission from the UN and from the despots of the Arab League, but not from the U.S. Congress.  (President Bush, on the other hand, launched the war in Iraq with broad bipartisan support in Congress.)  However, now that our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president has entered a third war, I’m certainly rooting for a positive outcome.  As Victor Davis Hanson said, “the only thing worse than starting a stupid war is losing it.”

I continue to be astonished that Obama entered this war in the first place.  And while “stupid war” may be a bit harsh, I think on balance we should not have gotten involved.  As I wrote in March:

I’m obviously not opposed in principle to the use of military force by the United States.  I’ve never stopped supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But we can’t fix every problem everywhere, we’re stretched financially and militarily now, and I think the Libyan intervention was probably a mistake.

But now that we’ve done it, I hope it’s successful. I don’t root for any American president to fail, especially not in his role as commander-in-chief.  “Success” would mean Gadhafi goes quickly and gets replaced by a new tribe that’s at least marginally more democratic, and the U.S. gets disentangled in “weeks, not months,” to use a more realistic version of Obama’s timeline.  It could happen that way, but I’m not optimistic.

The hope for the timeline now has slipped still further, to “months, not years” — but I’m at least slightly more optimistic about the eventual outcome.

Tagged with: George Will • Libya • Mr. Obama's War • Web Goddess