You know you’re scraping bottom

White House Regroups on Guantanamo

Even before the inauguration, President Obama’s top advisers settled on a course of action they were counseled against: announcing that they would close the facility within one year. Today, officials are acknowledging that they will be hard-pressed to meet that goal.

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects at the prison.

Duh. All these idiots in the press and running for office and voting for hope and change went on and on and on about this. Close it down. How hard can it be?

Well, it ain’t easy.

I like this part:

[White House Counsel Gregory B.] Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. “I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives,” he said.

Ah. So it’s Bush’s fault that this rube didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

Speaking of rubes, I wonder how all the Obama voters are feeling about this.

McChrystal to resign if not given resources for Afghanistan

Bill Roggio:

Today, the military is perceiving that the administration is punting the question of a troop increase in Afghanistan, and the military is even questioning the administration’s commitment to succeed in Afghanistan. The leaking of the assessment and the report that McChrystal would resign if he is not given what is needed to succeed constitute some very public pushback against the administration’s waffling on Afghanistan.

Even Appeasers All Appeased Out

I can never figure out why so many people are opposed to missile defense.

Caving in more or less completely on the European shield is not a surprise, though.

This was the lead item on my Yahoo! home page today: Why Michelle Obama’s Hair Matters

Murdoc’s initial reactions was “It doesn’t matter.”

After reading about why it does, Murdoc has revised his reaction to “It REALLY doesn’t matter.”

Without getting too deep into it, Jenee Desmond-Harris of Time thinks it matters because hair is so important to black women. And therefore it matters enough to warrant press coverage.

You know, if Murdoc wrote something like that on his little site, he’d be instantly labeled a clueless white guy with dumb stereotypes and probably a racist. But in the pages of Time it’s deep insight.

If Michelle Obama’s hair style really matters, it’s over for America. Luckily for us all, it doesn’t matter.

Why Obama Will Bail On Afghanistan

Via Instapundit:

This war might still be winnable, but the notion that Afghanistan is somehow quickly going to turn around is a very bad bet. There’s good reason to believe we’ll be lucky to see any progress by the 2010 mid-terms. And anything looking like a successful resolution and a won war by 2012 is probably off the table.

So, does a very liberal Obama with a very liberal domestic policy he desperately wants to see enacted feel like carrying a potentially very unpopular war on his back at the same time?

I’ve always said that Afghanistan is not winnable in the way that Iraq is winnable, mostly because of the environment and the near-total lack of natural resources other than poppy fields. And I’ve always said that we won’t really know if Iraq was really won until 2023 (twenty years after the invasion). We may never know if Afghanistan was won, no matter how much better we manage to make things.

But we can lose in a couple of months.

Because of the difficult, long-term, and uncertain nature of victory in Afghanistan, the temptation is always going to be there to pull the plug. Might Obama’s falling approval ratings provide the motivation to do so soon?

From the 9/1/09 Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

Remember, despite the fact that we’ve all been treated to six years of “Iraq is the wrong war…Afghanistan is right!“, Afghanistan was certainly the wrong war in late 2001 and 2002. Now that things are dying down in Iraq and, for the time being, we appear to be nearly totally victorious, Afghanistan will become a bad war again.

Most red ink ever: $9 trillion over next decade

In a chilling forecast, the White House is predicting a 10-year federal deficit of $9 trillion — more than the sum of all previous deficits since America’s founding.

Dealers stiffed as clunkers pile up

Via Instapundit:

Some New Mexico auto dealers have backed out of the cash-for-clunkers program and more may do so as the federal government takes its time providing cash reimbursements.

Dealers across the state are owed more than $3.6 million, according to a dealers’ group which says that so far Uncle Sam has only written three checks totaling about $14,000.

The whole thing ran out of cash in a week, requiring fast legislation to keep it running. By voting to use more of your money. Now they’re screwing over dealers.

The G can’t run a used car operation but they want to run your healthcare?

Yah. Right.

UPDATE: Here’s a bit of understatement from MSNBC:

Cash for Clunkers success limited by its flaws
Bureaucracy, poor planning may mar the overall impression of the program

A few comments at GunPundit. Video via Sebastian.

Budget Deficits and a Squirrel

More here. Via Instapundit.

UPDATE: New and improved version now up. Just think how small that squirrel would have to be if he wanted to stand under the Obama era deficits.