Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds with some reminders:

* Obama hand picked McChrystal!
* During the 2008 election cycle the Far Left called Gen. Petraeus “General Betrayus.” But now MoveOn has, well, moved on. I guess Obama gets a pass from them on that. (Flashback of this great parody of MoveOn — General LiesandPower.)
* Hillary Clinton questioned Petraeus’ character.

There are lies, there are damned lies, and there’s Barack Obama. His presidential address to the nation regarding the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak was filled with some big fibs.

Starting with:

“But make no mistake:  We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. .. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

If the Obama administration is doing “whatever’s necessary,” then why has he not granted a waiver for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, “a protectionist law that requires vessels working in US waters be built in the US and be crewed by US workers”? The federal head of the cleanup effort, National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has previously stated that there hasn’t been a need for this? Really? Tell that to the people of the Gulf coast. As Fox’s Brian Wilson explains, “But that [the foreign assistance currently used] is largely technology transferred to US vessels. Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used.”

Even the typical cheerleader for liberal Democrats, Time Magazine, agreed that the refusal for help was bizarre. Also hurting Obama is that President George W. Bush waived the Jones Act during Katrina response, which perhaps explains why a recent poll of Louisianians found that Bush had higher ratings than Obama, including among 31% of Democrats polled.

It gets worse — the Dutch, for example, made a pair of offers of assistance. First to build the very sand berms along the Gulf coast like those Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindel requested from Obama. And second, sophisticated ships designed to filter oil from water via huge vacuum arms. Both offers were initially rejected. It’s, of course too late for the berms. The oil has arrived. But now, more than 50 days after the accident, the Obama administration has accepted the Dutch equipment, which works by sucking in oily water and pumping it back into the ocean after filtering.

What was the holdup? Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.” Greg Yardale comments, “Get it? The EPA wouldn’t let them suck lots of oil out of the ocean because they would be returning small amounts of oil into the ocean.” Wow, and these bureaucratic types want to run your health care too!

And they said Bush was incompetent? Here are some numbers as to what the Dutch could have done on day 3 of the leak: “One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.”

That’s just the first lie. Here’s the next:

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource.”

It is? Can he offer some proof? The truth is not only can no scientist prove that oil is finite, but scientists aren’t even sure regarding the source of oil. Decades ago some scientists theorized it came from billions of years of dead things, thus “fossil fuels.” But that’s been largely disproved, particularly through a NASA discovery that found a moon of Saturn, Titan, made up of LPG, or liquefied petroleum gas. Gee, were there dinosaurs on Titan too? Hardly, say the discoverers. Titan, after all, averages temperatures of negative 180-degrees Centigrade.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told the NYT in 2005. If it’s geologic on Titan, it could be geologic on Earth as well. And if it’s geologic, that means oil could be perpetually produced for as long as the Earth’s core stays molten. (And even if it did come from dead things, are we to believe we used up 4+ billion years of dead things in just a century or so?)

No, rather the Peak Oil theory is based on the same scare-tactic politicization of science, central economic planning, and artificial scarcities as the  population disaster of Thomas Malthus, or the current Climate Change fearmongering.

Back to the Fibber in Chief:

Obama: “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. “

This might be the most brazen of his lies, because the above statements are only true due to the direct interference by government and environmental extremists. The truth is we have no idea what our proven oil reserves are because the government and environmentalists forbid our energy companies the ability to explore and drill to the extent the market demands! The only reason these companies are attempting to drill 5,000 feet deep is because the government and environmentalists deny them the ability to drill in shallower water or on land. One word: ANWR!

More Obama: “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Here’s where the Crony Corporate machine — the strange bedfellows of government and corporation — effectively lie to even liberals: Those who drool at the mouth to get off oil and coal in order to stick it to the petroleum companies don’t realize that those same companies are poised to make grand profits off of Cap-and-Trade and similar schemes designed to punish carbon output and push “renewable” energy.

Indeed, BP’s head, Lord Tony Hayward, wsa critical in formulating the Cap-and-Trade system. BP Chairman Lamar McKay supports it. As does Shell President Marvin Odum, and ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva (very Seinfeld, btw). As did former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, whose subordinates “buried a an Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming!” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

But why?

Because, as Michael Morris, the CEO of the largest national coal-burning utility, American Electric Power, told Forbes Magazine (without shame), the way the carbon trading schemes are organized the company gets to pass the entire cost of the regulation on to the consumers, padded for additional profit through “administrative” fees. The more it costs them the more they make. And the more you pay. [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Added Exelon’s John Rowe, “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Despicable, eh? All enabled by your president. It’s to be expected. The insurance companies helped craft his health care legislation, just as the “Trusts” of yesteryear co-authored legislation with Teddy Roosevelt regarding trust-busting and industrial regulation. They do this because the large companies can handle the costs while the nimble smaller companies must pack it in. You see, the one thing large corporations fear more than government is free-market competition. In this way, the federal government picks the winners and losers. By the way, the American consumer is always the loser.

Let’s wrap it up.

Obama:  “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.”

Ah, the Democrats are always such Chinaphiles, aren’t they? Actually, this is just a half-truth by Obama. The full truth is that we import most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. In other words, our neighbors are happy to drill and sell us oil in territories where we could be doing the same. The full truth is that China is importing massive quantities of oil from countries like Iraq. Chinese companies (i.e., state-owned) are also attempting to purchase European-owned oil facilities operating in the Gulf of Mexico. China intends to drill in the Gulf even if we don’t.

This begs the question: If it’s good enough for one billion Chinese…

Here’s Bill Kristol on Joe Biden’s queer historical revisionism:

Vice President Biden — who was for the Iraq war before he was against it, and who then argued that the surge could never work before he decided (in retrospect) that it did — said this to Larry King on Wednesday night:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Iraq is “one of the great achievements of this administration”? Well, any port in a political storm — even if it means taking credit for the success of policies of the previous administration, policies you opposed. In politics, after all, success acquires many fathers. And that’s fine, if it means the Obama administration is careful over the next couple of years not to toss away American troops’ achievements in Iraq.

Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.

That’s quite the 180-degree flip-flop from our president in the same paragraph. In one breath Barack Obama makes an apology for the invasion of Iraq (war of choice) and in the next he says Iraqis are better off.

It sounds like he’s apologizing for Iraqis being better off.

New Alliances In Iraq Cross Sectarian Lines
Political Jockeying Suggests An Emerging Axis of Power

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 20, 2009; A01

BAGHDAD, March 19 — Six weeks after provincial elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has allied himself with an outspoken Sunni leader in several provinces and broached a coalition with a militant, anti-American cleric, suggesting the emergence of a new axis of power in Iraq centered on a strong central government and nationalism.

Negotiations are still underway in most provinces, distrust remains entrenched among nearly all the players, and agreements could crumble. But the jockeying after the Jan. 31 elections indicates that politicians are assembling coalitions that cross the sectarian divide ahead of parliamentary elections later this year, a vote that will shape the country as the U.S. military withdraws.

“There is a new political map,” said Anwar al-Luheibi, a Sunni adviser to Maliki, who is a Shiite. “And I anticipate this map will be far better than the one we had before.”

The negotiations and dealmaking mark a departure from politics that have hewed almost exclusively to ethnic and sectarian lines, fomenting the discord that brought Iraq to the precipice of civil war in 2006 and 2007. They represent the first round of a great game that may resolve a question unanswered since Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003: What coalition of interests will find the formula to wield power in Iraq from Baghdad?

What’s significant about this article? First is that The Washington Post actually bothered to publish any good Iraq news on page one. Had McCain won the presidency one wonders if that would have been the case. But even more significant is that it undercuts the pre-war notions championed by the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department that “externals” or Iraqi exiles and exile groups would never have the popular support needed to lead the country after Saddam Hussein’s removal from power.

In his memoirs, Former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith labeled the notion a “prejudice” against externals. What’s interesting is that neither the State Department, nor especially the CIA, had any factual evidence to support their claim. It started prior to the War in Afghanistan when a former CIA operative named Milton Bearden made the argument in a end of year 2001 Foreign Affairs magazine that the U.S. should not utilize the Northern Alliance because they were seen as too outcast in the eyes of common Afghans. Feith reminds us that “our partnership with the Northern Alliance neither pushed the Pashtun tribes into the Taliban’s arms nor rekindled a civil war” that Bearden and others argued would occur.

Fast forward in time to the debate on the Iraq War. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage moved preemptively to disenfranchise whatever possible voice Iraqi externals might have when he shut down the Information Collection Program, the program with which the Iraqi National Congress (INC) provided American intelligence services with both physical and human intelligence (spies). The INC was the most prominent of Iraqi external groups, but it was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, who decided in the mid-1990s to follow through with a CIA-prepared coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, even though the Clinton administration pulled U.S. (and CIA) backing right after learning about it. Fortunately the Defense Department would later start the ICP back up. Even so, Armitage continued to argue that the externals in Iraq had less “weight” than, say, in Afghanistan.

According to Feith, “This was a momentous conclusion to reach on the basis of a vague metaphor — without supporting evidence.”

In light of the insurgency, it is remarkable that key U.S. officials believed that the Iraqi externals were the chief danger the United States had to guard against in post-Saddam Iraq. Yet the main idea behind the transitional civil authority was precisely to guard against the externals dominating the post-Saddam political scene in Iraq.Why should that have been a goal of U.S. policy at all? When challenged on this point, top State and CIA officials responded that all the leaders of the external groups were not skilled enough and, moreover, lacked legitimacy.

Calling this view “presumptuous and dangerous,” Feith remarks that within a few short years after Saddam’s removal those very external leaders were indeed elected by popular majority to rule Iraq, which “belies the influential CIA theory — one might call a prejudice — that the externals would be incapable of winning electoral support inside Iraq.”

The leaders included:

President Jalal Talabani (elected and reelected)
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (appointed in June 2004… later elected twice to parliament)
Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari
Abdulaziz el-Hakim (leader of Iraq’s main Shia political party)

In light of the Washington Post article last week (that began this post), one wonders at what point the CIA and State Department will ever concede their inaccuracy. If ever.

Then again, since we’re keeping score, it appears that the Obama Administration’s declaration that we’ll “save” money by “ending” a war in Iraq that appears already won — or at least won with continued management started by General David Petraeus — is far off base, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded recently that will “increase rather than lower Iraq-related expenditures during the withdrawal and for several years after its completion,” according to the report.

Finally, who was right or wrong and on what argument will become all for naught should this foolish release of detainees from Iraqi prisons occur with too much haste or without proper vetting. This report seems the equivalent of our border catch-and-release program, despite the gains of our surge, dangerous men such as Mohammed Ali Mourad are let go either by incompetence or for more nefarious reasons.

In other words, victory and defeat in Iraq can be a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy.

Although only a small fraction of the supposedly countercyclical stimulus will be spent by the end of the year, the budget assumes that by then the economy will have perked up, and that it will grow robustly — 3.2 percent, 4 percent and 4.6 percent — in the next three years. Growth supposedly will cut the deficit in half — growth and the $1.6 trillion “saved” by first assuming, and then “canceling,” a 10-year continuation of the surge in Iraq. Why, one wonders, not “save” $5 trillion by proposing to spend that amount to cover the moon with yogurt and then canceling the proposal?

– George Will.

Tom Ricks of The Washington Post has a feature regarding the trials and tribulations (and political b.s.) that General David Petraeus had to go through. It’s worth the read. Here’s an excerpt:

Petraeus and [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan] Crocker liked to go running together, and during their runs in the summer of 2007 they spent considerable time talking about how they would handle their joint appearance before Congress in September. It was Petraeus’s calculation that the debate in the United States over the war was stalemated, especially over the consequences of a troop pullout from Iraq.

For months, congressional Democrats had expected the hearings to be a decisive moment in the war. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) had said in May, “If we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, September is going to be a very bleak month for this administration.”

Even some Republican allies of Bush agreed that the Iraq strategy was doomed. But Col. Steve Boylan, Petraeus’s communications adviser, believed that congressional Democrats, not the general and the president, were the ones in a bind.

“My feeling was that Congress wouldn’t be able to put together enough votes to override a presidential veto, because then they’d own it,” he said, putting his finger on the Democrats’ basic dilemma: how to end the war without being blamed for how it ended.

Petraeus and Crocker were determined to deliver a sober assessment of the situation in Iraq that would not open them up to the charges of blind optimism that had undermined the credibility of past officials. At the Pentagon, Boylan set up a “murder board” to help Petraeus rehearse the weekend before his testimony. Boylan’s most pointed question was “Sir, explain to me why we have to lose one more American life in Iraq.”

Petraeus responded, “Okay, what’s your answer?”

Boylan didn’t have one — but he wanted Petraeus to think about it.

On Sept. 10, the day the hearings began, MoveOn.org, an antiwar group influential in the Democratic Party, ran its now-famous full-page advertisement in the New York Times mocking Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” Petraeus, the ad charged, was “at war with the facts.” And the facts, as MoveOn saw them, showed that “the surge strategy has failed.” In addition, it said, “General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

That morning, Rapp rode with Petraeus in a car from Fort Belvoir, near George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, to the Capitol. “Petraeus did a good job of not showing it, but I know it stung,” he said. “He was just a little quieter than usual.”

Crocker, the lifelong diplomat, took an unemotional approach. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. As he read the ad again, his disbelief gave way to a grim smile. “They’ve screwed themselves,” he thought. He knew what Petraeus planned to say, and that it would amount to a “word-by-word rebuttal of that allegation.”

One would hope that such short-sighted erroneous nonsense from MoveOn.org would forever discard them to the ash heap of history, but probably not. At least the Post deserves some credit for highlighting their slanted stupidity.

Wall Street Journal again:

Mr. Wilson’s 2003 op-ed claiming that “the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat” was the supposed animus for the Administration’s leak of the identity of Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. As the leaking whodunit became a media frenzy and others ducked for cover, Mr. Libby was nearly alone in defending the Administration for being honest (if wrong) about prewar intelligence, an act that landed him in the net of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Mr. Libby didn’t leak Ms. Plame’s name to journalist Robert Novak; Mr. Armitage did that deed, though neither he nor his close friend, Mr. Powell, bothered to tell Mr. Bush or the world. Based on the trial record and our own long experience with Mr. Libby, we also don’t think Mr. Libby lied. As Mr. Fitzgerald’s prosecution circled back again and again, Mr. Libby’s defense that his memory faltered in recalling the details of long ago conversations is entirely plausible for a busy White House aide.

The case against him was based on conflicting accounts of a single conversation Mr. Libby had in July 2003 with each of three journalists. The judge threw out the count concerning his talk with Judith Miller, and the jury found him not guilty on the count involving Matthew Cooper. His conviction on four other counts comes down essentially to a dispute over Mr. Libby’s claim that Tim Russert had told him about Ms. Plame. Russert, the NBC journalist who has since died, initially told the FBI it was possible he told Mr. Libby, but by the time of the trial Russert said he was sure he had not done so. Neither man had notes from their call, and it is possible that Russert’s memory was as faulty as Mr. Libby’s.

Prosecutors claimed Mr. Libby was motivated to lie about what he’d heard from Russert on July 11 to protect himself against what he told Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper a day later. But if Mr. Libby didn’t lie about those conversations, as the case proved, his motive to lie about Russert vanishes. The trial also showed that Mr. Libby had spoken that same week with journalists Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, both of whom were asking questions about Ms. Plame and could have also become confused with Russert in Mr. Libby’s recollections.

Mr. Libby’s lawyers attempted to call an expert on memory as a witness at the trial, but the judge refused on the remarkable grounds that everyone knows about memory. The trial itself took place in early 2007 amid the passions of Mr. Bush’s decision to “surge” troops in Iraq, and there were protests on the Washington Mall. The judgment by a Washington, D.C. jury was more a verdict on the Bush Administration than it was about the confusing facts of Mr. Libby’s alleged deceit. The Plame affair was a proxy for the larger political dispute over Iraq, and Mr. Libby became the Beltway sacrifice. By trumpeting his guilt, critics were able to impugn Mr. Bush’s policies by insisting the President had “lied us into war.”

First, the main reason “journalists” in Saddam’s Iraq would never have thrown a shoe at a visiting dignitary is that they’d be tortured and executed for it. More importantly, can we just drop this fantasy-land nonsense that America was super-popular in the Mideast before George W. Bush came on the scene? I mean really, who is Reuters trying to kid?

Also, if someone throws a shoe at Barack Obama — at home or abroad — will that be used by the press to define Obama’s popularity, never mind his legacy? I mean if some nutter in Holland hucks a clog at Obama, does that mean all of the Netherlands, never mind all of Europe, hates Obama? Somehow I doubt that’s how Reuters et al would cover it. In a circumstance like that, we’ll be told how this was an act by one lone-shoe-man.

There’s a weird double standard buried deep in all of this, and I don’t just mean the biases against Bush. When conservatives hold up unsavory Muslims or Arabs as representative of the region’s problems, we’re told how simplistic and two-dimensional we’re being. But when the same sort of unsavory doofus behaves in ways that confirm liberal biases and coform to liberal passions, then suddenly this doofus speaks for millions.

– Jonah Goldberg.

“The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines can accomplish when they’re given the opportunity to fight. A small group of Marines met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in their own backyard. The insurgents told the townspeople that they were stronger than the Americans, and that day we showed them they were wrong.”

– An anonymous U.S. Marine sniper who personally killed 20 Taliban fighters in Shewan, Afghanistan.

Related: Embed Michael Yon reiterates, “The Iraq War is over.”