Right after watching the CGI re-enactment of Richard Candelaria’s 1945 dogfight in a P-51 Mustang with 2 ME-262s and 15 ME-109s, I read Roger Simon’s observation that McCain was apparently demonstrating a willingness to take more political risks, by choosing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for his running mate, than the One. “John McCain has once again shown he is willing to, in fact eager to, move in a positive and (relatively) unexpected direction. He is his own man. Obama - the agent of change - picked the most conventional of the conventional.” I think that’s only half true: McCain will take risks, but only after figuring the odds. Those who watch the video will notice that Richard Candelaria took two huge risks in his epic dogfight, once against the ME-262 and another against an ME-109 flown by a better pilot than he was. They were calculated risks; but once taken were pursued without hesitation or reservation.
The parallels between any pilot and McCain are going to be obvious. He has the ability to wait patiently until his opponent commits himself to a move then ruthlessly strikes to exploit it. He gives nothing away to clue his opponent on which way he is going to turn. Then suddenly he snaps the stick. A collection of links by Glenn Reynolds reveals a sudden appreciation by McCain’s opponents of his unpredictability. Some are hesitating to criticize Palin’s relative youth and inexperience, lest they fall into the Trap. What trap? A classic AP head says it all: Analysis: Palin’s age, inexperience rival Obama’s.
But the other piece of combat experience McCain endured, separate from his pilot training, one which every jailbird will appreciate, was his experience as a POW. Resistance in prison is one of the hardest forms of combat there is. As a prisoner you are always in the slower plane; the guard is always, by definition in the ME-262. A prisoner has only two friends: his mind and his nerve. McCain survived years of this and some of the skills he learned may have been on display just now. A number of political commentators thought John McCain would be easy meat for BHO. Maybe. Maybe not. Candelaria got the ME-262.
The National Review has a long piece addressing two questions: a) whether examining a Presidential candidate’s public background is ever legitimate journalism and b) what happens when you do and the candidate is Barack Obama. Describing the importance of Kurtz’s look into the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) the National Review wrote:
The Star Bulletin writes how a wooden boat which brought Vietnamese refugees to a beach in the Philippines more than 26 years ago is coming to Hawaii as part of an exhibition.
“The vessel, which has traveled to 48 states, will be displayed at Kewalo Basin Park this weekend as part of a “Freedom Boat” exhibition. It will celebrate the journeys of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled their country’s communist rule by venturing into the Pacific Ocean on unsafe boats in the wake of the Vietnam War. Not all who tried to escape from Vietnam were as fortunate, and it is estimated that as many as half a million people drowned or were killed by pirates in the South China Sea, according to Madalenna Lai, a Vietnamese who spent four days in 1975 in a vessel at sea with her four children before they were found by an American ship and taken to Guam.”
With Iraq fast vanishing from the headlines, Georgia has become a political issue. It’s outbreak has implicity helped John McCain because it highlighted Barack Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience, as shown for example, by this ad. Putin, perhaps realizing this, is now trying to blame the Republicans. One of the great traditions established by Vietnam is that foreign dictators get to take sides in US electoral politics. CNN reports:
“Putin told CNN his defense officials had told him it was done to benefit a presidential candidate — Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are competing to succeed George W. Bush — although he presented no evidence to back it up.”
Townhall links to a video in which civil rights activist Percy Sutton claimed he was asked by a certain “Dr. Khalid al Mansour”, supposed adviser to ‘one of the richest men in the world’, to write a letter of reccomendation on behalf of Barack Obama to help him gain acceptance to the Harvard Law Review many years ago. Mansour was raising money for Obama at the time,according to Sutton, a circumstance strange enough in itself. Townhall identifies the Mansour in question as a preacher from Islam Studios. A video purporting to show Dr. Mansour exemplifies his somewhat comical style of preaching. However, it seems at first glance that Townhall may have erred in its identification of the right Mansour for the Islamic preacher featured in the video seems unlikely to have been any kind of adviser to billionaries. A search on the Internet showed another Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al-Mansour’s whose biographical details fit the Sutton profile much better.
John Kerry’s “finest moment”, according to Bill Ayers, (YouTube link) was the day he threw his medals away. Should we listen to him? Is it possible to even discuss the video without somehow being accused of bigotry? Some have implied that society’s “finest moment” should be the ability to throw the information about what is implied about Ayers, as exemplified by the anecdote he himself tells, away. Yet Ayers himself doesn’t cast aside the information, but shouts it from the housetops as in the recent interview. How does one listen, yet not listen to Bill Ayers? The implied answer is to wear a filter where the Ayers story about Kerry becomes a noble anecdote — a kind of modern Horatius Not At the Bridge story.
North Korea has decided to suspend the decommissioning of its nuclear facilities because the United States has insisted on verification before removing it from the list of the state sponsors of terrorism. This new crisis comes on the heels of Georgia and events in Pakistan. About the only good news is ironically from Iraq. What’s going on? The question is whether we are still in the End of History, at “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal,” or whether the stars are veiled; a sleepless malice is stirring, and a new menace is taking shape, not for the last time but in our time.
Tip Jar.
Major Garrett at Fox News reports from Denver backrooms. “Top Clinton strategists, gathered by Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager Maggie Williams, met privately late Monday in Denver to plot convention strategy. The main topic: what to do about Wednesday’s roll call vote.” And the answer will not surprise you.
Readers of the old Belmont Club site will remember this post on the logistical problems inherent in moving large numbers of men into Afghanistan. I wrote in February 2008, “One factor rarely mentioned in describing Afghan logistical problems or considered in relation to Barack Obama’s assertion that Afghanistan should have absorbed troops bound for Iraq is that the theater is landlocked and accessible to the sea only through Pakistan and Iran. There are in factserious concerns that troops in Afghanistan can be cut off should a hostile regime emerge in Pakistan.” Well logistics has now come front and center, not simply because of the political changes in Pakistan, where Benazir’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari is poised to take power, but because of the upheaval in Georgia. The Times Online reports that Russia is threatening to cut off a vital supply route to Afghanistan.
As the Presidential campaign heats up, efforts by Obama to attract new voters have to be matched by measures to keep his base intact and maintain internal cohesion in the face of John McCain’s attacks along his seams. With Obama losing momentum in the past few weeks, the game seems to have switched, to use a basketball metaphor, to defense. Although Obama is sure to use the Denver convention as a platform to attack his opponent and his policies, he is not neglecting measures to keep his troops in line. One priority is to blunt any attacks before they open up a gap that can be exploited. If sweet talk won’t work, then threats will be employed. The Politico reports that Barack Obama’s campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the “American Issues Project,” which sponsored an ad linking the candidate with William Ayers. Obama general counsel Bob Bauer argued “that by advocating Obama’s defeat, the ad should be subject to the contribution limits of federal campaign law, not the anything-goes regime of issue advocacy. …”
