Dems' convention flubs; attacks on McCain's military service; and more

It's all in another excellent letter from the best non-blogging blogger I know, Mike Williams.

Mike begins - - -

The Dems are having a tough time getting their upcoming convention in Denver out of the ditch. Ed Morrissey can barely contain himself:

…who could have hoped for a better demonstration of Democratic mismanagement? First, the host committee overspends while at the same time struggled to raise money for the convention. For a party that rails about deficit spending, they certainly don’t have a problem running up bills they cannot pay. Next, they let the nanny-state extremists in the party dictate the available food, rather than let the delegates and the guests make their own decisions on their diet, driving off private enterprise. They failed to reckon with the states when dictating environmental requirements, which sounds quite familiar indeed for those opposed to federalist principles. Most notoriously, they issued eco-friendly specs for fanny packs that demanded a product that didn’t exist.

Best of all, they put the demonstrators next to the media….

The Dems are also back after John McCain’s military service:

Bill Clinton is speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and he said just now, apropos of almost nothing (actually, during a long peroration on Nelson Mandela): “Every living soul on this planet has some highly-justified anger. Everyone. If you know anybody who was a P.O.W. for any time, they can be going on for years and all of a sudden something will happen that will trigger all those bad memories.”

Not too subtle.

Nope. Last week it was General Clark, and

In May, it was Bill Gillespie, another Obama backer in Georgia and a candidate for the House. In the same month, Senator Tom Harkin questioned McCain’s mental state for having willingly served in the military. In April, Jay Rockefeller accused McCain of being more or less a coward for being a military pilot, and again in May the New York Times quoted unnamed Senate colleagues of McCain suggesting that he didn’t understand the Vietnam War because he didn’t fight on the ground and spent most of it lounging around Hanoi in a POW camp.

Just don’t question their patriotism.

In Iraq:

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror….

That’s from Marie Colvin, reporting in Mosul for the UK Times Online. She has a really excellent piece here that would never see the light of day in a US rag. Strategy Page’s take is a little more sobering:

Although al Qaeda has officially abandoned Iraq, not everyone got the memo, or bothered to pay attention to it. Over the last two months, Iraqi and American forces have gone after the remaining 1,200 al Qaeda members, who have fled to the northern city of Mosul. Over half of the al Qaeda members have been killed or captured.

The problem is that a lot of the money, and foreign volunteers, coming into Iraq was for the purpose of "defeating the Iranians". Many Sunni Arabs in the Persian Gulf region see Iran as their most dangerous foe, and believe letting the Shia majority in Iraq run the government as nothing but a front for actual Iranian control of Iraq. The result is that nearly all the remaining terrorists are Iraqi Sunni Arabs, and are determined to fight to the death (theirs, and as many others as they can take with them). They have the will, and they have the money (and plenty of venal Iraqis willing to supply them with what they want, for a fee.) Most of their fellow Sunni Arabs have turned on the terrorists, so a lot of the terrorist activity is against Sunni Arab leaders. The Sunni Arab leadership knew this would happen when nearly all of them openly agreed to renounce terrorism last year.

There's a further complication in that some of the criminal gangs, who have long done big business providing services for the terrorists, are not willing to give up this business....

A very good read if you have some time. Let’s end it for today with this WSJ Online editorial. It starts off:

Here's a thought experiment: Assume that Iraq's democratic government declared it was nationalizing its oil industry, a la Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, while excluding American companies from the country. How do you think U.S. politicians would react? With angry cries of "ingratitude" and "this is what Americans died for"?

Of course they would, led no doubt by that critic for all reasons, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. So it is passing strange that Mr. Schumer and other Senators are now assailing Iraq precisely because it is opening up to foreign oil companies, especially to U.S. majors like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. For some American pols, everything that happens in Iraq is bad news, especially when it's good news for the U.S.

[…]

Worth repeating: Don’t drill! Sue OPEC! Badmouth the second biggest source of oil on the planet! Swiftboat McCain! Are you liking what you’re seeing so far in the politics of change?

Mike