Call It A Comeback
Congratulations Peter, you just made the President uneasy when he least needs it. Fitzgerald reported to the Daily Herald that the President said to him that he would order the assassination of Saddam Hussein if it were possible.
This is, ahem, a bush league mistake. Let the President make foreign policy pronouncements, not the junior Senator from Illinois.
Crain’s picks up the big question that Jesse Jackson Jr. and other supporters of Peotone refuse to answer, why not improve the third regional airport already in operation, that is a closer commute to downtown, covers the southern Chicago region well, and fits the size of the facility needed.
Chicago doesn’t need another world class airport, it needs an commuter airport to supplement Midway and make the city more competitive by allowing in more discount carriers. Peotone is a boondoggle of a project designed to compete with O’Hare, but it doesn’t have any major airlines supporting it–or even Southwest.
Then again, none of the major carriers may be around in 10 years.
And of course, if you don’t get the reference below, don’t make me feel old by pointing out what it is.
He’d think he’d want a good street brawl followed by a good drink is my guess. Kass laments the lack of opposition in Chicago Politics.
I’m not so sure. Certainly Harold would have wanted to see the corruption spotlighted–well as long as they weren’t his pals, but he started the path Chicago is on now and I think he’d love to see a city that might be imperfect, but is certainly maintaining itself as world class even in tough times. Does anyone miss Vrdolyak (well besides the Outfit)? Does anyone miss the overtly racist campaigns? Did anyone like the Chicago Public Schools having the worst in the nation as a modifier?
Kass is right in saying that the city needs a loyal opposition, but the city has come a long, long way since 1983 and Daley deserves some credit for that. So does Washington because he started a lot of the improvements. I think Harold is up in heaving smiling down at a beautiful city and watching Barak Obama and some other young turks who don’t have to associate with the thugs that used to run the South and West sides and thinking things will work out just fine….
And I’m pretty damn sure one can go to Instapundit, USS Clueless and any other host of right wing sites and find really much worse arguments for war than Kevin’s….
It appears the left of the blogosphere is piling up on center-left Kevin Drum at CalPundit for his comments about the war. Essentially Kevin argues that pulling out now would be disastrous sending a signal to the region and specifically Saddam that he can get away with flouting the inspection regime. And Kevin is right. Pulling out now will signal to Saddam that the US doesn’t have the backbone to fight. Like it or not, the reason inspections have gone as far as they have is because of the credible threat of US force. Backing down from that makes our threat to use force incredible and the credibility of our using force is keeping the Middle East and Korea from blowing up currently.
I would have like to have seen more deft coalition building process take place without as short of a timeline as we now see. I think getting Saddam to jerk around the inspectors would have eventually brought along more allies. That being said, I’m stuck with Bush and I don’t want to see a repeat of Somalia where the message was sent the US would back down from the good fight. And fighting a warlord happy to starve his own people was the good fight.
Of course, the war must first be moral for this argument to make any sense, and I argue it is. Saddam is a threat to international peace and security and continues to attempt to build weapons. Containment is unlikely to work against a man who has an uncanny ability to make bad decisions repeatedly. And he is a savage dictator to boot. Whether we need to go to war is a debatable point, but arguing that once you have made the conclusion the war would be moral, arguing that credibility requires it is a reasonable view. Most of the criticisms of Kevin fail to see the two step logic–Kevin already concluded such a war would be moral and then moves on to the issue of what we should do now.
He’s less right about the intelligence matter, but I think people are being unfair in their criticisms. I guess the first question there is does one accept that intelligence as a meaningful trait. All, but the Sowell article seem to dance around that question. I accept it as a meaningful trait. We can measure the difference in intelligence between different human beings. Sometimes our measures are quite crude, but that is a measurement issue. I guess if people are going to dispute his point, everyone should begin with this basic point. So let’s hear the comments. This point is completely separate from the hack work in the Bell Curve.
Blagojevich all of a sudden seems to have been smacked over the head by someone and given the Senate Republicans haven’t been able to see him, it must have been Dan Hynes pointing out how close to not being able to pay some bills the state is. Today, Blago ordered a 10% across the board cut in spending for this fiscal year. This is a good sign, though it would have made more sense the day he was inagurated. Better late than never, but every day he puts off making tough choices, the tougher the choices he will ultimately have to make.
Apparently the House is tired of taking the flak for it and are insisting it get out of the Senate before they bother. Profiles in courage!
The irony of making the Chicago schools relatively solvent is that when the next funding problems crept up, the suburbs and moderately funded downstate schools would be screaming for help from the state when it had been them screaming the loudest about Chicago.
I hope those districts teach irony well
Isn’t it strange how all these leaks from Chicago US Attorneys and FBI people go to Kass? Perhaps Patrick ‘the quiet’ Fitzgerald handles his press contacts a bit differently than he portrays in his press conferences.
It appears that Outfit operators are getting nervous as a former Outfit member’s prison records are now unable to be located. Kass points out to those of us with a bit less of clue, this is probably due to entering the Witness Protection Program.
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