Hewitt Blog

Here is the article that could lose the war in Afghanistan.

I have already booked AEI's Michael Rubin for today's show and will try and reach others in the Beltway tribe of Afghanistan experts for the program. (Update:  I'll also be joined by Max Boot, Michael O'Hanlon,  and Frank Gaffney.)

If the general is sacked because of bruised egos flowing from a magazine article, the complete lack of seriousness of the Obama Administration will be revealed.  There is almost no chance that another similarly committed senior commander would be dispatched with an intention of winning the crucial battle with the Taliban and their Islamist extremist allies.

President Obama is already a non-participant in the "losing" of Turkey. as well as with the isolation of Israel  The Rolling Stone piece may provide him the excuse to bolt Afghanistan under the cover of a drone-only strategy.  This is the moment when Robert Gates can step up and defend victory by defending the general  in private even as he scolds him in public.  The vice president may make his only lasting contribution to victory in the war if he too steps up and dismisses McChrystal's remarks as the ordinary stuff of military-civilian relations, which it most certainly is.

Thank you, Michael Hasting, and whichever staffer allowed the snake into the general's space.

UPDATE: An email from a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan:

We can all agree that McChrystal was imprudent to allow a freelancer (for Rolling Stone!) access to himself and his inner circle.  He has admitted as much.  But the hysteria is seriously overwrought:
UPDATE 2: Some background on Hastings, who wrote the piece.  .

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Here is the Amaze.fm song of the week: "In Between" by Brett Terry.

And for those of you who listened to the show today and wonder who provided the amazing bumper music?  Buddy Greene and Ashley Cleveland.  Greene and Cleveland performed this weekend at Laity Lodge along with some other wonderful musicians from Nashville.  Pick up their CDs and you'll hear why it was such a treat to be there.

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From USA Today:

The number of doctors refusing new Medicare patients because of low government payment rates is setting a new high, just six months before millions of Baby Boomers begin enrolling in the government health care program.

Recent surveys by national and state medical societies have found more doctors limiting Medicare patients, partly because Congress has failed to stop an automatic 21% cut in payments that doctors already regard as too low. The cut went into effect Friday, even as the Senate approved a six-month reprieve. The House has approved a different bill.

No wonder seniors, near-seniors and their kids hate Obamacare and will turn out Democrats in droves come November.  Instead of fixing Medicare, the president and his Congressional allies have wrecked it.

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If this report is correct, yet another unilateral exercise in executive branch power is being substituted for Congressional action followed by a presidential signature.

This is deeply troubling, and for reasons that have nothing to do with gay rights or the lack thereof.  What a president can unilaterally bestow he can unilaterally take away.

The 1993 law that is being reinterpreted to mandate same-sex family leave benefits intended nothing of the sort.  This is a raw exercise of power by a hard-left collection of appointees who are simply in the business of doing what they want regardless of the Constitution's requirements for law making..

Does anyone really believe --can anyone say with a straight face-- that Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich wouldn't have noticed such an intent in the law?  That gay rights groups would have been silent on the oversight for nearly two decades?

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The Times Square terrorist --who should never be heard from again after this week-- pleads guilty and raises the obvious question of why, nearly nine years after 9/11, it is still possible to launch a terrorist attack Times Square and not be subject to the death penalty.

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My new Washington Examiner column is posted.





The complete line is here. 

The Monday morning column from Clark Judge:

Gulf Oil Speech: Administration Dead in the Water
By Clark S. Judge, managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc, (www.whwg.com) and chairman, Pacific Research Institute (www.pacificresearch.org)

It is no news now, but on Tuesday last week, President Obama delivered the least effective Oval Office address since Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech.  Why?

It wasn’t just the awkward us of his hands.  The hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal “if we could land a man on the moon” drivel.  All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech’s fiction.  These — shall we call them misspeakings — were coupled with more of the administration’s increasingly off-putting crisis default setting: That everything bad was Bush’s fault.  Our son was two when we stopped accepting that kind of excuse in our house.  This administration is almost two, but it’s been talking for longer than our son had at that age.

Here is a list of questions that occurred to me during the speech and that even the most junior White House speechwriters should have seen as implicit in the text and hit the delete button:

• The speech suggested that the Administration was on top of the oil-spill situation from day one, with the Energy Secretary (co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light") heading the effort to trap oil gushing from the Gulf floor and floating toward our southern shores.  Doesn’t that mean that hundreds of elected officials in the states involved, thousands of journalists, and millions of Americans failed to notice this all out effort until last night?

 Read More...

From the Globe and Mail.

For a companion piece useful to the  illustration of the vanity of environmentalists, read this as well.

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Before my wife and I head off to the Laity Lodge, where our friend Mark D. Roberts is part of the leadership team, I'll be broadcasting from San Antonio's KLUP 930, and the program will include Mark Steyn (and the transcript of that conversation will be posted here later) Dino Rossi, Newt Gingrich and others.  My Townhall.com colleague Carol Platt Liebau will be guest hosting for me tomorrow, and as the portion of the Hill County of Texas where I am headed is not wireless friendly, posting will be light this Father's Day Weekend.  Have a great weekend with your dad or granddad. 

I will conclude Thursday's show with an hour long conversation with former Congressman John Kasich --who many believe will be Ohio's next governor.

Kasich has a new book out, and it has almost nothing to do with politics.  Every Other Monday, Twenty Years of Life, Lunch, Faith and Friendship is the biography a Christian small group of which Kasich has been a member for more than 20 years.  It is a remarkable read, and will I think inspire many, many men to either join or renew their commitment to such a spiritual discipline while providing a very practical and inspiring model of what such a group means and how it operates.

Every Other Monday is a great Father's Day present as well.



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The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, the third of the Narnia movies, hits the big screens on December 10th. But if you just can't wait until then, we have arranged a one-day only sneak preview if you click on the Narnia banner link above. 

And I do mean one day only. If you don't click on it today, it will disappear tomorrow. Enjoy.