The Washington Post today has Bob Novak doing a 3.5 pike-triple axle-with a twist; George Will tries to tut-tut global warming; and low and behold
Liz Cheney returns to the newspaper to do her father's bidding in writing a Nancy Pelosi smear-piece.
And how is she listed?
The writer was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2002 through 2003 and principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2005 to 2006.Not as the Vice-President's daughter. Writing a piece decrying talking to Bashar Assad (something she again implies ONLY Nancy Pelosi did) while not mentioning you too got your job because of who your daddy is takes irony to another level. It's almost as ironic as if the Supreme Court had put the learning-disabled child of another former leader in the White House.
more By Liz Cheney
Thursday, April 12, 2007; Page A27
Anyone familiar with the past two years of Lebanese politics would never claim, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did in Damascus last week, that "the road to Damascus is a road to peace." Her assertion must have seemed especially naive to the people of Lebanon, where the list of the slain reads like a "Who's Who" of Syria's most vocal and effective opponents.
This round of murders began at 12:56 p.m. on Feb. 14, 2005, when 2,000 pounds of TNT exploded outside the St. George Hotel in Beirut, killing former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri and 22 others. Hariri's crime? He was increasingly outspoken in opposition to Syria's involvement in Lebanon. Basil Fleihan, a member of the Lebanese parliament, was riding with Hariri that day. Burned over 95 percent of his body, he was recognized only when someone heard him whisper "Yasma," his wife's name. Fleihan died two weeks later.
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It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.
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Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.
By George F. Will
Thursday, April 12, 2007; Page A27
In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming. Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans, 83 percent of whom now call global warming a " serious problem." Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with professions of seriousness.
For example, Democrats could demand that the president send the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate so they can embrace it. In 1997, the Senate voted95 to 0 in opposition to any agreement that would, like the protocol, require significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in America and some other developed nations but that would involve no "specific scheduled commitments" for 129 "developing" countries, including the second-, fourth-, 10th-, 11th-, 13th- and 15th-largest economies (China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and Indonesia). Forty-two of the senators serving in 1997 are gone. Let's find out if the new senators disagree with the 1997 vote.
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Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it requires electricity-guzzling refrigeration and four gallons of milk produced by cows that simultaneously produce eight gallons of manure and flatulence with eight gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming trains and trucks.
Newsweek says most food travels at least 1,200 miles to get to Americans' plates, so buying local food will save fuel. Do not order halibut in Omaha.
Speaking of Hummers, perhaps it is environmentally responsible to buy one and squash a Prius with it. The Prius hybrid is, of course, fuel-efficient. There are, however, environmental costs to mining and smelting (in Canada) 1,000 tons a year of zinc for the battery-powered second motor, and the shipping of the zinc 10,000 miles -- trailing a cloud of carbon dioxide -- to Wales for refining and then to China for turning it into the component that is then sent to a battery factory in Japan.
more By Robert D. Novak
Thursday, April 12, 2007; Page A27
Seated at the Washington Gridiron Club dinner on March 31, I was interrupted by a man crouching at my feet and dressed Air Force formal with the four stars of a full general. It was CIA Director Michael Hayden, and he complained to me profanely that he was misrepresented in my March 22 column on the Valerie Plame Wilson case. Denying that he favors Democrats, Hayden indicated that he had not authorized Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman to say Mrs. Wilson had been a "covert" CIA employee, as Waxman claimed, but only that she was "undercover."
Keeping busy at a Gridiron evening supposedly devoted to frivolity, Hayden made similar points to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the House intelligence committee's ranking Republican; Republican lawyer Victoria Toensing, an expert in national security law; and White House counsel Fred Fielding. Yet, 10 days later, the CIA and its director asserted to me that the wife of Bush critic Joseph Wilson indeed had been "covert."
The designation could strengthen erroneous claims that she came under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Nobody will ever be prosecuted under the act for revealing that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA. But Hayden has raised Republican suspicions that he is angling to become intelligence czar -- director of national intelligence -- under a Democratic president. While Hayden proclaims himself free of politics, his handling of the Plame case is puzzling.
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At the hearing, Waxman menacingly challenged Toensing's sworn testimony that Mrs. Wilson was not "covert" under the act. Accordingly, she asked Hayden to inform Waxman that "you never approved of his using the term 'covert.' " The confusion deepened when I obtained Waxman's talking points for the hearing. The draft typed after the Hayden-Waxman conversation said, "Ms. Wilson had a career as an undercover agent of the CIA." This was crossed out, the handwritten change saying she "was a covert employee of the CIA."
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