The Washington Times

There is nothing wrong with George W. Bush’s re-election prospects that a little conspicuous success wouldn’t cure. The economy is now delivering the goods – and the jobs – and it is probably only a matter of time before Mr. Bush gets credit for basic competence in its management. The most recent Associated Press/Ipsos poll shows that a solid majority of Americans, 57 percent, think the economy has lost jobs in the past six months, when in fact employment has grown by 1.2 million. Perception eventually will move more into line with reality.

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The Washington Times

The legacy of an American politician has two main components. One of them relates to policy, the way in which the country’s affairs, its position in the world and world order itself changed as a result of the politician’s guiding hand. On this score, Ronald Reagan looms larger with each passing year. The second component is only slightly less consequential: It is a politician’s political legacy. If politics is the art of the possible, then a great politician has an effect on what is possible not only during his own term in office but also in the years that follow. By now, the imprint that Mr. Reagan left has been visible for fully a generation and shows few signs of fading anytime soon.

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The Washington Times

One gets some sense of the heavy political weather President Bush was flying in Monday night by the pre-speech observation of a cable news anchor. He condescendingly observed that it must have escaped the White House’s attention that the war college where Mr. Bush was to speak was close to Gettysburg, Pa., where Abraham Lincoln delivered his magnificent Gettysburg Address, compared with which Mr. Bush’s speech would doubtlessly be found wanting. Talk about a tough audience. What is worse, that comment was on Fox News Channel – which passes for friendly journalism in Mr. Bush’s Washington today.

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The Washington Times

So, ask yourself this question: In the absence of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison, how much credence would you have attached or did you attach to reports of abuse of the detainees there? How credible did you find the complaints of mistreatment? Asked to guess how the U.S. military was treating prisoners, in your wildest imagination would you have conjured up the image of a female U.S. soldier leading a hooded, naked Iraqi around on a leash?

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The Washington Times

As a siren and flashing lights stream past an outdoor cafe here, my Israeli dinner companion, an acute observer of manners, tells me to watch the way our Israeli fellow patrons’ heads turn – first in the direction in which the emergency vehicle was going, next in the direction whence it came. Why look back? Well, my dinner companion explains, if other emergency vehicles aren’t following the first one, it’s routine, maybe a heart attack or something. Only if more are following could it be a terrorist attack.

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The Washington Times

Forget about the “fog of war” for a while – that is, the inability to know what’s going on in the heat of battle. Let us turn our attention instead to the “fog of occupation.”

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The Washington Times

From the people who brought you “Howard Dean will be the nominee,” “George W. Bush is vulnerable,” “Ralph Nader doesn’t matter” and “the news conference bombed,” we now have, more or less, “John Kerry can’t win.” Good grief.

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The Washington Times

The second-guessing of the Bush administration over Iraq has been a part of the background noise since, really, the start of major combat operations, if not indeed before. Shouldn’t the United States have done more to try to secure a northern invasion route into Iraq out of Turkey? Did U.S. forces move too quickly into Iraq, leaving their supply lines dangerously exposed as they became bogged down in a sandstorm?

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The Washington Times

Trying times in Iraq make it worthwhile to explain the basics once again: Saddam Hussein was a security problem, a legal problem and a moral problem. That’s why we took him out. But that’s not why we are in Iraq today.

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