Fun With the Op-Ed Page

Kathleen Parker

Opinion Writer

Perry, Cain and a parade of painful moments

Admit it. You miss Sarah Palin just a little: The wink, the red shoes, the pointing finger, the heck-with-ya attitude and, given the performance of some of her Republican colleagues, her Taser-like intelligence. 

Yes, her intelligence is Taser-like, in that the Taser is an inanimate object that requires a handler to operate it.

It helped — a lot — that Palin was an attractive woman. A man winks during a debate for the highest or second-highest office in the land, and he’s not cute or flirty — or sending sparks ricocheting around the living rooms of conservative magazine editors. He’s an idiot. 

Um, the same rule applies to women, no matter how attractive. Being "cute" or "flirty" while running to be the second-in-command of the most pwerful nation on Earth is just plain idiotic, no matter how many right-wing boners it inspires.

Even a presidential candidate suffers no dishonor by sometimes admitting he doesn’t know an answer. Giving Cain credit to the limited extent due, he has made clear that he doesn’t know every little thing but has promised to hire smart people who do.

Oh, no. We fell for that once.

 

Never again.

The Second Coming of Gingrich

By ROSS DOUTHAT

 

 

When Newt Gingrich kicked off his presidential campaign in May by criticizing Congressman Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms as “right-wing social engineering,” thus incurring the wrath of the very conservatives that he presumably needed to win over, there was a rush to write the former House speaker’s political obituary. . .

. . . We all laughed at this here in Washington, swirling our martinis and nibbling our canapés at our fancy cocktail parties. But who’s laughing now? 

Um, pretty much everybody.

True, Gingrich’s rise in the polls may be temporary. There’s still time for Rick Santorum or even Jon Huntsman to surge, or for Ron Paul to expand his support beyond his small, fierce circle of admirers.

Also, there's still time for Lincoln to come back from the grave and throw his stovepipe hat into the ring, and that's just about as likely.  Come on, Rick Santorum?

 

I'm Surging! This is what I look like when I'm surging!

Charles Krauthammer

Opinion Writer

Who lost Iraq?

Barack Obama was a principled opponent of the Iraq war from its beginning. But when he became president in January 2009, he was handed a war that was won. 

And once you've won a war, the sensible thing to do is stop fighting it. Unless you're Charles Krauthammer.

The surge had succeeded. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed, driven to humiliating defeat by an Anbar Awakening of Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the infidel Americans. Even more remarkably, the Shiite militias had been taken down, with U.S. backing, by the forces of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They crushed the Sadr militias from Basra to Sadr City. Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. 

An entire country of flowers and kittens. Shia and Sunni holding hands and just in love with America, oh it was grand!

(artist's rendition, Iraq 2008)

Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.

He blew it.

Goddammit, he blew our chance to have our soldiers stay in that godforsaken hell-hole in perpetuity?

Oh, and it should probably be mentioned that the Palestinians have a democracy, even if you don't like who they vote for.

He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of Dec. 31, the U.S. military presence in Iraq will be liquidated.

In other words, our boys are coming home? What a tragedy!

And it’s not as if that deadline snuck up on Obama. He had three years to prepare for it. Everyone involved, Iraqi and American, knew that the 2008 SOFA calling for full U.S. withdrawal was meant to be renegotiated.

Really? Says who? Why would we make a deal not intending to honor it?

 

Don't get me started!