Haditha Marines exonerated
Posted By Uncle Jimbo

I've been doing a bit of interesting reading, specifically the Investigating Officer's Report for Lcpl Tatum who was one of those charged with murder in the deaths of Iraqi civilians in two houses in Haditha.

Many have sounded off about this, Rep. Murtha went so far as to say these Marines had killed in cold blood. How actions in response to a fatal IED attack could occur in cold blood I will leave to the lummox to explain. The report has testimony from those involved both US and Iraqi, and this is the conclusion the investigating officer came to. ...

There are several related links at the top of yesterday's roundup here.

Now We’re Getting Somewhere
The Iraq debate comes to Earth.
By Charles Krauthammer

After months of surreality, the Iraq debate has quite abruptly acquired a relationship to reality. Following the Democratic victory last November, panicked Republican senators began rifling the thesaurus to find exactly the right phrase to express exactly the right nuance to establish exactly the right distance from the president’s Iraq policy, while Murtha Democrats searched for exactly the right legislative ruse to force a retreat from Iraq without appearing to do so.

In the last month, however, as a consensus has emerged about realities on the ground in Iraq, a reasoned debate has begun. A number of fair-minded observers, both critics and supporters of the war, agree that the surge has yielded considerable military progress, while at the national political level the Maliki government remains a disaster. ...

Below the fold:

• How Dare They?
• News of the Future: "President Hillary Clinton Surrenders America"

Quick hits:

• Winning The Jimmy Carter Sweepstakes
  Ed Morrissey: The Barack Obama campaign won an endorsement that sounds more like a kiss of death to anyone who survived the Jimmy Carter era. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who oversaw the disastrous foreign policy of the Carter administration, picked Obama to be the next Carter: ...
• Another Strike Against Obambi
  More evidence Obambi is a mental midget on foreign policy. He got an endorsement from a guy most of younger than 40 have never heard of. If you don't know the name at first, keep reading. ...
• Brzezinski Embraces Obama Over Clinton for President
  Don Surber: An imaginary conversation....

• The week that was
  Don Surber -- Story Of The Week: President Bush to his critics: “You want to play ‘Iraq-is-Vietnam’? OK, fine. We’ll play that. Boat people. Re-education camps. Killing fields. No free speech. No religious freedom. A per capita income 30 years later that’s below every neighboring state. Yea, that was some ‘peace’ the Democrats brought there.” ...

How Dare They?
John Hinderaker

Freedom's Watch has produced a series of television commercials supporting our efforts in Iraq, and urging Congress not to pull the plug on our troops. You can watch them here; this is a sample: [video link].

The ads are good, with a simple message that the war in Iraq is important, and there is no acceptable substitute for success. They will be, I hope, a useful antidote to the far larger number of ads that have been paid for by antiwar groups. In its article about the ads, however, ABC News didn't see them that way. The network's hostile tone is striking; ABC begins by focusing, not on the content of the ads, but on the fact that they were paid for by Republicans: ...

News of the Future: "President Hillary Clinton Surrenders America"
By Douglas MacKinnon (Hat tip: Roberto Prinselaar)

It can credibly be argued that the presidential election of 2008 is the most important in the history of our Republic. Why? Because if we get this one wrong, Islamic terrorists will almost certainly strike into the heart of America. That is their stated goal. That is why they are paying so much attention to this election.

Political correctness has made us a weaker nation because it has killed some truths. The paramount truth most liberals, and most in the media, will not allow to be spoken, is that if you are in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, if you are in favor of ending or scaling back the “Patriot Act,” if you are in favor of stopping or even criminalizing warrantless wiretaps, if you are in favor of preventing our spy satellites from being used to protect our homeland, if you are in favor of never using facilities such as Guantanamo Bay to house murderous terrorists, if you are in favor of never letting our allies interrogate terrorists, then you are opening up the United States to a horrific terrorist attack. Period.

A second truth being that Senator Hillary Clinton is a far-left liberal who is in favor of all of the above. ...