
::::
January 1.2008 : Sunday Show Roundup
Wisdom from Merriam
Pathetic
Main Entry:
pa·thet·ic Listen to the pronunciation of pathetic
Pronunciation: \pə-ˈthe-tik\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French or Late Latin; Middle French pathetique, from Late Latin patheticus, from Greek pathētikos capable of feeling, pathetic, from paschein (aor. pathein) to experience, suffer — more at pathos
Date: 1598
1 : having a capacity to move one to either compassionate or contemptuous pity 2 : marked by sorrow or melancholy : sad 3 : pitifully inferior or inadequate the restaurant's pathetic service 4 : absurd laughable a pathetic costume
::::
Reuters : Pictures of the Year 2007
::::
A Long War In a Nutshell
By Victor Davis Hanson | December 27, 2007
* as with most all of his writings, you must go and read it all - snippets do it injustice and ever more in this case*
[vdh] : Views on the war in Iraq now transcend reasonable discussion. The war rests in the realm of emotion, warped by the hysteria of partisan bickering.
The result is that we have forgotten why we invaded Iraq in long-ago 2003. We cannot agree why we had problems after the stunning removal of Saddam Hussein. And we are not sure either whether we are winning — or why we even should. [...]
Though the Congress in October 2002 formulated 23 different reasons why Saddam posed a threat to our security, the administration — in easy hindsight, quite wrongly — mostly privileged and exaggerated just one writ: Saddam’s arsenals of weapons of mass destruction might enhance Middle East terrorist operations enough to trump even what we had witnessed on 9/11.
Supporters of a narrow war to remove WMDs relied on a past, though false consensus of such an existential threat; it was one, however, that had nevertheless prompted embargoes, sanctions, no-fly zones, and periodic bombing. Perhaps they were sure of such a WMD danger because it had been formulated at home in the 1990s and echoed abroad by both European and Middle Eastern agencies — and alone would galvanize the public in a way the other sanctioned casus belli might not.
Nevertheless, when such weapons were not found in Iraq, and the insurgency imperiled the brilliant three-week victory, the case for the war, in the eyes of many, collapsed. It did so on both moral and practical grounds. For some reason, no one cared that the other twenty-some Congressional causes were still as valid as when they had been first approved in October 2002. [...]
For all our sophisticated media and nuanced politics, simply winning or losing still shapes views on war. There have been three radical positions on Iraq: a general support when it looked won; a general opposition went it looked lost; and a slow return to grudging reappraisal when it looks re-won. Politicians, academics, and pundits are hardly immune from, or embarrassed by, their own contorted reactions to these primordial emotions, as we now witness as columnists and politicians scramble to stake out new third positions sort of, kind of supporting the war...
The felony of untruth and distortion against a war counts far less than any misdemeanor in support of one. Photoshopped pictures, fraudulent documentaries, printed lies about flushed Korans, or bogus published stories about atrocities turn off the public less than a single untruth or hedge by a military officer or government official.
While the success of a war hinges on the military’s destruction of the enemy and our ability to win the hearts and minds of the population, critical time and support for those efforts are won only by non-stop explication, not periodic assertion.
In an age of glitzy graphics, e-mail, instantaneous blogs, and minute-by-minute news updates, there is still no substitute for wartime oratory and brutal candor. We should assume in any future war, those in the media, the universities, and the arts will ipso facto oppose the use of force, which in turn can only be supported by arguments that are as moral and ethical as they are logically, honestly, and elegantly presented.
::::
Baghdad calm one year after Saddam's death
[telegraph] : Baghdad will mark the first anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s execution on Sunday as a city transformed, largely as a result of thousands of his loyalists forging new alliances with the American military. [...]
“We fought the terrorists and we won,” said Shami Karim, a 27-year-old fruit stall holder and gun-toting Knight of Mesopotamia, the name given to the £150-a-month guards co-opted to control the district.
“We like to live in peace and are glad that no one in Baghdad can call us terrorists. It has taken a long time but we appreciate the Americans.” [...]
While the potential for bloodshed remains, many Iraqis would appear to agree with the assessment.
Haji Abdullah Hussein, an elderly baker, is one of the thousands to have taken up the burden of America’s efforts to revive Baghdad as a thriving and peaceful city.
In early December Mr Hussein, 76, opened his shuttered bakery on formerly bustling al-Jamiyat street for the first time this year.
“I’ve been a baker for 22 years,” said Mr Hussein. “I hung on for as long as I could but I was forced out until now. The Americans proved that ordinary life was possible here again.” [...]
Restaurant owner Hamid Ilsan took his celebrated al-Rabiyah restaurant to Damascus three years ago but is now putting the finishing touches to a re-launch back in Baghdad.
“You can feel it,” he said. “It’s better than it has been for a long time. There’s 12 checkpoints on this street and lots of traffic jams. Customers are piling up out front.”
Cigarette seller Abdul Salih, who set up his stall on the fly, said the night still belongs to the group.
“I still hear the sound of shooting especially after midnight. I would like us to have the same system as Amariyah. Here al-Qa’eda passes us in ordinary cars not detected by the law.”
The supreme coalition commander, General David Petraeus, has refused to declare victory. He believes the situation is precarious because many al-Qa’eda sympathisers have fled north to the third city Mosul and thus pose a continuing threat.
With the number of American troops in Baghdad is already shrinking after hitting a peak last month, the clock is ticking on how long GIs in combat outposts and security stations across Baghdad can maintain a blanket presence.
Even with its reduced foothold al-Qa’eda remained capable of disruptive acts of violence.
“There isn’t one act that will cause everything to be perfect,” said a US officer in Baghdad. “It’s not done yet.”
But even those pessimistic about Iraq’s long-term prospects believe insurgents can’t quickly recover from the pummelling meted out in the surge.
Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq analyst at the International Crisis Group said: “Petraeus has accomplished enough militarily for the level of stability we’re seeing to persist beyond the end of the surge in the summer. I think he’s gained enough time for President Bush to leave office claiming Iraq is stable.”
::::

ramirez
::::
Benazir Bhutto assassinated
[cnn] Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday outside a large gathering of her supporters where a suicide bomber also killed at least 14, doctors and a spokesman for her party said. [...]
The attack came just hours after four supporters of former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif died when members of another political party opened fire on them at a rally near the Islamabad airport Thursday, Pakistan police said.
Several other members of Sharif's party were wounded, police said.
Bhutto, who led Paksitan from 1988 to 1990 and was the first female prime minister of any Islamic nation, was participating in the parliamentary election set for January 8, hoping for a third term.
Furthermore...
[cnn] : Benazir Bhutto died from a fractured skull caused by hitting her head on part of her car's sunroof as a bomb ripped through a crowd of her supporters, a spokesman for Pakistan's Interior Ministry said Friday.
When she was thrown by the force of the shockwave of the explosion, unfortunately one of the levers of the sunroof hit her," said spokesman Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema.
The explanation is the latest from the Interior Ministry. It initially said Bhutto was killed by shots fired by the bomber, and then, via the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan, it said the cause of death was a shrapnel injury.
But Farzana Raja of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party told CNN the government's explanation is "a pack of lies," she told CNN. Raja also accused the government of a "total security lapse."
At a news conference, Cheema showed images of Bhutto in a car, standing up through an open sunroof, looking out at the crowd as she was about to be driven away.
When the gunshots rang out and the explosion occurred, Bhutto "fell down or perhaps ducked" and apparently hit her head on a lever, Cheema said, adding that the lever was stained with blood.
::::
Benazir Bhutto : 1953-2007On December 2, 1988, Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as prime minister of Pakistan, becoming the first woman to head the government of an Islamic state. Born in Karachi in 1953, she attended Harvard and Oxford Universities. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, served as prime minister during the mid 1970s and was overthrown and executed in 1979. In the following period of political struggle, Bhutto spent nearly six years either in prison or under house arrest for her leadership of the then-opposition Pakistan People's Party. Bhutto's first period as prime minister ended in 1990. She returned to power in 1993 for three years. Pakistan People's Party. [scu]
::::
Mark Steyn : 24 December 2007
[steynonline] [...] Here's my bottom line: I don't accept that free-born Canadian citizens need the permission of the Canadian state to read my columns. What's offensive is not the accusations of Dr Elmasry and his pals, but the willingness of Canada's pseudo-courts to take them seriously. So I couldn't care less about the verdict - except insofar as an acquittal would be more likely to bolster the cause of those who think it's entirely reasonable for the state to serve as editor-in-chief of privately owned magazines. As David Warren put it, the punishment is not the verdict but the process. To spend gazillions of dollars to get a win on points would do nothing for the cause of freedom of speech: It would signal to newspaper editors and book publishers and store owners that it's more trouble than it's worth publishing and printing and distributing and displaying anything on this subject, and so it would contribute to the shriveling of freedom in Canada.
This is a political prosecution and it should be fought politically. The "plaintiffs" certainly understand that, ever since the day they went in to see Ken Whyte and demanded money from Maclean's. I want the constitutionality of this process overturned, so that Canadians are free to reach the same judgments about my writing as Americans and Britons and Australians and it stands or falls in the marketplace of ideas. The notion that a Norwegian imam can make a statement in Norway but if a Canadian magazine quotes that statement in Canada it's a "hate crime" should be deeply shaming to all Canadians.
::::
Suing for silence
David Warren
December 9, 2007
[ottawacitizen] The right to free expression of opinion and belief -- though constrained in its extremes during wartime -- is not something that can be negotiated in a free country. For it is the most fundamental right -- the queen bee in the hive, as it were. Every other freedom depends on this freedom. Take it away, and we no longer have a free country.
[...] “Freedom of expression” did not develop in the West from purely idealistic motives. Nor is it necessarily a pretty thing. Like so much in civil society, we put up with it because the alternative is worse, and we'd rather cope with free speech, than with the free intimidation that results from its suppression.
And I make this point in light of the case that has been brought against Mark Steyn and Maclean's magazine, before Human Rights Commissions for Canada, British Columbia, and Ontario, by the Canadian Islamic Congress, led by Mohamed Elmasry. The first two commissions have already agreed to hear the case, and thus rule on whether Mark Steyn had the right to express the opinions and beliefs in his bestselling book, America Alone, and specifically in the excerpt entitled, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” which ran in Maclean's last year. According to the complaint, by expressing his opinions and beliefs, Mark Steyn “subjects Canadian Muslims to hatred and Islamophobia.”
[...] For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgements on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.
My hope is that this case against Mark Steyn and Maclean's will be fruitful. It will be, if it inspires enough people -- especially journalists, of all political persuasions -- to express outrage at what has been done; and inspires Canada's free citizens into the necessary political action to put an end to the human rights commissions themselves. The worst possible result, is if the case fails to produce this response.
::::
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson
August 25 1925 - December 23 2007

[cbc] Jazz fans and Canadians both home and abroad are mourning the death of Oscar Peterson, the virtuoso known globally as one of the most talented musicians ever to play jazz piano.
Peterson died at his home in Mississauga, Ont., from kidney failure. He was 82.

::::
The Huckster in Iowa : Cites Dr. Seuss as Favorite Author
[NYT] [...] Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister who rose to the first tier of Republican presidential candidates on the strength of his Christian bona fides, was received by supporters as he returned to Iowa this week like the second coming of Santa Claus.At rallies, they posed their red-sweatered children on his knee for photographs, as if he were the man in the red suit at the mall. They gave him standing ovations when he said the words they wanted to hear.
“I know this is probably a very controversial thing, but may I say to you, Merry Christmas!” Mr. Huckabee told an audience of 200 in Marshalltown on Thursday morning, as the crowd rose to its feet.
“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.
Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.
In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.
“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.
*emphasis ours
::::
Fred Thompson's Holiday Message
Hillary Clinton's Holiday Message
::::
National Geographics Top Ten News Stories of 2007
1. Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says (February 28, 2007)
[nationalgeograph] Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to a controversial theory.
::::
Women must stop admiring men who drive sports cars if they want to join the fight against global warming, the Government's chief scientist has urged
[uktelegraph] : Professor Sir David King said governments could only do so much to control greenhouse gas emissions and it was time for a cultural change among the British public.
And he singled out women who find supercar drivers "sexy", adding that they should divert their affections to men who live more environmentally-friendly lives.
His comments were greeted with anger by sports car drivers who insisted that their vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions were tiny compared with those from four-wheel-drive vehicles.
Sir David, who is due to retire as the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser at the end of the year, said individuals needed to change their behaviour.
"I was asked at a lecture by a young woman about what she could do and I told her to stop admiring young men in Ferraris," he said.
"What I was saying is that you have got to admire people who are conserving energy and not those willfully using it."
::::
Scientists Challenge The Goracle View
[wtimes] : More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says.
The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet. [...]
insert customary, rote assertion that 'Big Oil' is paying them off - Ed
In the Senate report, environmental scientist David W. Schnare of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said he was skeptical because "conclusions about the cause of the apparent warming stand on the shoulders of incredibly uncertain data and models. ... As a policy matter, one has to be less willing to take extreme actions when data are highly uncertain."
The hundreds of others in the report — climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, glaciologists, physicists and paleoclimatologists — voice varying degrees of criticism of the popular global-warming theory. Their testimony challenges the idea that the climate-change debate is "settled" and runs counter to the claim that the number of skeptical scientists is dwindling.
The report's authors expect some of the scientists will recant their remarks under intense pressure from the public and from within professional circles to conform to the global-warming theory, a committee staffer said.
Several scientists in the report said many colleagues share their skepticism about man-made climate change but don't speak out publicly for fear of retribution, according to the report.
"Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," atmospheric scientist Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the report.
•"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double, man would not perceive the temperature impact."
Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences
•"The hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The [greenhouse-gas] hypothesis does not do this. ... The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."
David Wojick, expert reviewer for U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
•"The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming."
Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo-Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
• “To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for major changes in the FOD (First Order Draft) and sent me the SOD (Second Order Draft) with essentially the same text as the FOD. None of the authors of the chapter bothered to directly communicate with me (or with other expert reviewers with whom I communicate on a regular basis) on many issues that were raised in my review. This is not an acceptable scientific review process.”
Canada: IPCC 2007 Expert Reviewer Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D meteorologist, a scientist with the Natural Resources Stewardship Project who has over 45 years experience in climatology, meteorology and oceanography, and who has published nearly 100 papers, reports, book reviews and a book on Ocean Wave Analysis and Modeling
::::
Thompson : Habeas Corpus
[redstate] : From ABCNews this morning:
Explaining that detainees at Guantánamo Bay are "enemies of this nation" and should not be entitled to habeas corpus, the former Tennessee senator expressed distaste for "one the fellows running for the GOP nomination saying that we should shut down Guantánamo and bring those prisoners over here."
"I don't know if he realizes this or not, when they touch American soil, they're gonna get rights they would otherwise not have," Thompson said.
Still not naming his rival, he added: "I wonder if he understands how the world really operates. Well, I don't wonder either. I already have a pretty good idea."
A spokesman later clarified that Thompson was referring to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, on his campaign blog, says he believes "the facility has become a distraction from our Global War on Terror," but that one of his top priorities, if elected, would be to ensure "that all suspected terrorists remain in our custody."
Thompson -- visibly engaged in his lengthy discourse on the subject of habeas corpus -- told the audience that "we should not tie our hands and make ourselves vulnerable to these people" by the process of discovery.
"The constitution is not a suicide pact ... We should have rules and should protect basic rights, but do not damage the United States in the process," Thompson said.
::::
Why Isn't Government Health Care the Answer?
[FMC] In this paper, we explore the government temptation. Far from being an elegant solution, we find that government-run health care systems are universally plagued with deep problems. Whether we look to Canada or Britain or Germany, we find that single payer is a fanciful temptation, like hoping that a new house will save a troubled marriage.
Confessions of a Former Believer
He had the arrogance, but I had the knowledge. Some years ago, a Canadian organization invited me to debate Theodore Marmor, a Yale professor, on the future of single payer health care. Marmor is a tireless proponent of the Canadian-model for the United States. After a particularly heated exchange, Marmor looked up at the audience and declared, "well, I've been an observer of the Canadian system for 25 years." Marmor immediately smiled, as though he had just placed a full house on the poker table. Perhaps Marmor temporarily forgot one thing: I'm a Canadian doctor.
My thoughts on Canadian health care aren't based on casual observations, the sort of opinion one gathers by reading the occasional article in the New York Times or discussing the topic with like-minded graduate students. Personal experiences are the basis of my views — as a doctor and a patient.
My interest in health policy grew from these experiences. As a college student, I remember thinking little about medicare; I have a degree in Microbiology and Zoology. Like so many schooled in Canada, I simply accepted that medicare was a major success story, the fusion of compassion with pragmatism. All this changed on a crisp February day during my medical training.
Emergency rooms overcrowd in every city of the world. Usually there is some system of patient referral. Most Canadian hospitals will accept all patients when they aren't overtaxed; they will accept only very ill patients (such as those suffering heart attacks) when on "redirect"; they will decline all patients when on "critical care bypass." Obviously, the latter is used only when the ER is completely overwhelmed. On that February day in 1999, every hospital in Winnipeg went on critical care bypass for an eight hour period. "It's just this simple," an emergency doctor commented, "you just don't get a heart attack in Winnipeg. " Winnipeg, incidentally, isn't a small village buried in the Great White North — it's a town of roughly 800,000.
What was more alarming about that February is the extent to which Canada's health care system collapsed from coast to coast.
A few examples:
* At Cite de la Sante, the largest hospital in suburban Laval, Quebec, staff took the unusual step of issuing a press release early in the month. The sick were asked not to come to the hospital.
* In Montreal, nurses at Sacre-Coeur staged a wildcat strike to protest the overcrowding, a problem experienced by every hospital in the city. For instance, at Maisonneuve-Rosemont - a hospital that had drawn national attention the year before because an elderly patient had died while waiting to be seen in its overcrowded emergency room - 79 patients jammed into a room designed to accommodate only 34.
* In Nelson, British Columbia, a 74-year-old ER patient was placed in a hospital storage area. No other room could be found for him at a time when patients were routinely placed in hallways and linen closets. And, in Victoria, facilities were running at 110% capacity - since the summer before.
Witnessing the overcrowding personally had a profound impact on me — no longer was health policy remote; the problems with Canadian health care were very real.
Over the years, there have been countless experiences that have re-enforced my concern. A quick example: a provincial government promised to abolish "hallway medicine" (the phenomena of hospital hallways being littered with patients on stretchers); by the end of its first term in office, it had established oxygen prongs in the hallways of various hospitals so that patients could at least get oxygen on their stretchers.
Slowly, over time, I reconsidered Canadian health care. No longer was I willing to accept that medicare functioned relatively well. And no longer was I willing to accept our politicians' prescription of more funding. These are the hard observations made by a medical student and, later, a physician.
::::
The Delta House Congress
The politics of futile gestures
[wsj] In the movie "Animal House," the fraternity brother known as Otter reacts to the Delta House's closure with the classic line, "I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part." To which Bluto, played by John Belushi, replies, "We're just the guys to do it." The movie ends by noting that Bluto becomes a Senator, so perhaps this explains the meltdown among Democrats on Capitol Hill.
As they careen toward the end of their first year in charge, Congressional leaders seem capable of nothing but futile gestures. Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid failed once again to get enough votes for an energy bill, having refused to remove a $21.8 billion tax increase on energy that President Bush has promised to veto in any case. Mr. Reid was vowing to try again as we went to press.
Meanwhile, in Nancy Pelosi's House of self-inflicted pain, the Blutarsky strategy played out yesterday in one more hopeless attempt to pass a tax increase to "pay for" Alternative Minimum Tax relief. The Senate has already voted 88-5 against any such tax hike, so this House bill is dead before arrival. But Ms. Pelosi's troops are just the guys to do it anyway.
Say what you will about Tom DeLay, at least he knew how to run the joint. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid are letting their left-wing troops and interest groups run all over them, with the result that their signal achievement this year is a higher minimum wage. Considering most of their policy goals, this failure is good for the country. But the dysfunction amply shows that Democrats are attempting to govern with an agenda that is too far left even for many in their own party, never mind the country.
Start with trying to end the war in Iraq, which Democrats claimed was their mandate from voters last November. That was a misinterpretation of their victory, which had as much to do with GOP corruption and overspending. But Democratic leaders nonetheless wasted weeks and no fewer than 63 votes trying to impose withdrawal deadlines, strategy changes, and other war-fighting micromanagement on Mr. Bush. Their only achievement has been to reinforce their image of national-security weakness for opposing the Baghdad "surge" that has been such a success. Recall Mr. Reid's memorable declaration in April that "This war is lost."
Even today, Democrats are caught between their antiwar left, which wants more futile gestures, and Members from swing districts who want to fund the troops. Democrats have delayed funding for so long that the Pentagon is issuing furlough notices to 100,000 civilian employees so it can shuffle operations funding to keep the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in ammunition.
Then there's the AMT fiasco. Without action by Congress, that hated second tax system will engulf 22 million middle-class Americans next year, most of them in high-tax, largely Democratic states. Congress has already been so dilatory that the IRS has said it may have to delay tax-return processing that is supposed to start in January. But so determined are House Democrats to raise taxes on somebody, anybody, to "pay for" this relief that they are holding out for Senate Democrats to walk the tax plank with them. In the end the House will surely back down, but not before Ms. Pelosi has put her moderate Members on record as tax raisers. Bluto strikes again.
And don't forget the warrantless wiretap program against al Qaeda that expires early next year if Congress fails to act. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is hardly dominated by hawks, passed a bipartisan bill in October. But it is now bogged down because Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy refuses to provide retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that cooperated with the U.S. government in the uncertain days after 9/11. The House bill is a similar bow to the ACLU, MoveOn.org and the party's antiwar left. If Republicans wanted to design a political battle that made Democrats look weak on security, they couldn't do it any better. [...]
::::



