Anyone know anything about the guy who wrote the NYT op ed today to the effect that spying is fine, it is done in schools, and yes Dems should pay attention to what people back home might say about being soft on security (?). His name is Philip Bobbitt. He’s an attorney now at Columbia, and worked for the White House on security in 98-99 I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Bobbitt

I don’t think his students at the University of Texas School of Law would think that the Universities spying on them would be agreeable…nor do I know what he is talking about. Does UT look at it’s students sex-lives, spy on campus organizations, keep track of student financial records (involuntarily…when those students aren’t on financial need scholarship)? Perhaps Mr. Bobbitt has a methodology for spying on what his Law students do outside his classroom, and punishes them accordingly?

Maybe many of his students think that they know what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt’s lost member…it serves on their faculty!

…
Here it is. Even given the provenance of the quote, I don’t see how this could be taken out of context.

“It’s working. We’re just years too late in our tactics,” she said, referring to the beefed-up U.S. troop presence battling insurgents in Iraq, including war-torn Anbar province. “We can’t be fighting the last war. We have to keep preparing to fight the new war. We have to win. “I think the best way of honoring their service is bringing them home,” she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City.”

Forget her morality in helping start the war in the first place — can anyone here see the political wisdom in this? To us it says she approves of the surge, to them it says, “surrender”.

She should tell the truth. If she can’t do it on the campaign ‘trail’, then how would she ever do it in the White House.

It can’t be ’surrender’, there’s nobody to surrender to.

Exactly!!

The “we’re making progress” crowd seems to be dominant in Washington, even though our own Ambassador reports no progress on reconciliation, which was the principal objective of the President’s surge.

In short, the surge is working but not achieving its objective, i.e., we’re confusing motion with progress.

“We”, kemosabe? Maybe Hillary, but nobody else on the Dem side is confused. We can’t win a war where we have no enemy to combat and defeat. They have yet to show they are focused on Al Qaeda members in Iraq, so they’re just hangin’ around, gettin’ shot up, rearming the insurgents, f’in up — as Dubya has done his whole f’in life.

When i hear W talk about VN I immediately think Alabama Air National Guard and five deferment Dick. And the DRAFT.

The military service of George W. Bush was an issue in the 2000 presidential campaign and again in the 2004 presidential campaign. The controversy centers on the questions of how George W. Bush, now the President of the United States, came to be a member of the Texas Air National Guard, why he lost his flight status, and whether he fulfilled the requirements of his military service contract during the Vietnam War.

Does the rest of the world know that our news media is nothing but a propaganda machine? Do they laugh at us like we used to laugh at Pravda?

well, actually yes.

this is a must read, imho.

http://www.latimes.com/news/op…..4900.story

Here is another little nugget to take issue with:

“I propose increasing the size of our Army by 80,000 soldiers”

Why do you take issue with that?

Set aside for a moment the moral critique of the Iraq misadventure (a critique with which I wholeheartedly agree, FWIW).

The simple fact is that we could never have mounted a successful counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq, because we didn’t have enough soldiers available to do it the way that is known (from the British experience in what is now Malaysia in the 1950s) to work.

Do you disagree with the notion that if we’re going to undertake a military mission, we should have the resources necessary to succeed?

Or is your opposition to increasing the size of the military a proxy for some other position on some other issue, that you’re unilling to clearly acknowledge and discuss?