In a blatant pander to Hispanic voters, Barack Obama endorsed the idea of a national holiday for farm labor union organizer Cesar Chavez.

“As farmworkers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages, we find strength in what Cesar Chavez accomplished so many years ago,” Obama said in a statement from his campaign. “And we should honor him for what he’s taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation.

“That’s why I support the call to make Cesar Chavez’s birthday a national holiday. It’s time to recognize the contributions of this American icon to the ongoing efforts to perfect our union.”

That’s not really why; the real objective is to peel a few Hispanic votes out of Hillary Clinton’s column.

But Chavez is not a national icon – a President Lincoln or Washington, or a Martin Luther King, Jr., who changed the social and political landscape – on that level. He may have been influential in the farm labor sector, but outside of that, not so much. The only reason to name a national holiday for Chavez is as a payoff for Hispanic voters, as rank identity politics – blacks have MLK, so Latinos are owed a holiday too. Identity politics based on race or ethnicity is not “a new kind of politics.”

However, we can’t imagine there would be any opposition to the idea (or very, very little). Latinos are the hot, sought after voter demographic right now, and no politician is going to risk offending them, or risk being pilloried mercilessly in the press and by the Democrats for his racial insensitivity, etc., based on any principle. So look forward to another day off in the next year or two.

In another meaningless symbolic gesture of the sort we expect from the left, people all over the world were encouraged yesterday to turn off their lights for an hour to “inspire people to take action on climate change”.

An hour? One measly hour? That’s nothing. We turned off all our lights all day yesterday. We plan on doing so all day today as well. Take that, enviro-weenies.

…and by implication accuses Barack Obama of “character assassination” as well. After all, Obama has now also condemned the hateful statements of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Senator Obama called Wright’s comments “inflammatory and appalling” (ironically on left-wing hate site The Huffington Post).

From Politico.com:

The Chicago church attended by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) issued a statement Sunday contending that coverage of his pastor’s inflammatory remarks amounted to character assassination and “an attack on … the history of the African American church.”

….

The statement begins: “Nearly three weeks before the 40th commemorative anniversary of the murder of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe.”

This statement is sickening, a diversion and a lie. The “African American Church” is not being attacked, no one is being attacked for “preaching the social gospel…” and Rev. Wright’s character is certainly not being assassinated. The Rev. Wright’s own bigoted and hateful words are being criticized and condemned because they fully deserved to be condemned. And invoking the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is pretty despicable as well. This sort of defensive outburst from his church certainly won’t help Senator Obama either. It also demonstrates that the problem at the church is not limited to one man.

…and the corrupt and/or incompetent DeMSM grossly misrepresent its findings –

The headline from ABC News: “Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda”

From the NY Times: “Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link”

From CNN: “The U.S. military’s first and only study looking into ties between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda showed no connection between the two, according to a military report released by the Pentagon.”

But from the actual report from the Pentagon (via The Weekly Standard):

The Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) review of captured Iraqi documents
uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional
and global terrorism. Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many
terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the United States. At
times these organizations worked together, trading access for capability. In the
period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex
and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging
pan-Islamic radical movements. The relationship between Iraq and forces of
pan-Arab socialism was well known and was in fact one of the defining qualities
of the Ba’ath movement.

But the relationships between Iraq and the groups advocating
radical pan-Islamic doctrines are much more complex. This study found no
“smoking gun” (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda.
Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety
of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. Some
in the regime recognized the potential high internal and external costs of maintaining
relationships with radical Islamic groups, yet they concluded that in some
cases, the benefits of association outweighed the risks.

….

When attacking Western interests, the competitive terror cartel
came into play, particularly in the late 1990s. Captured documents reveal that the
regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al
Qaeda – as long as that organization’s near-term goals supported Saddam’s longterm
vision.

….

Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-Iraqi non-state actors was
spread across a wide variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic
terrorist organizations. For years, Saddam maintained training camps for foreign
“fighters” drawn from these diverse groups. In some cases, particularly for Palestinians,
Saddam was also a strong financial supporter. Saddam supported groups
that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad,
led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally
shared al Qaeda’s stated goals and objectives.

No unbiased, objective reading of the report justifies the headlines used by ABC News or the NY Times, period.

UPDATE: Stephen F. Hayes has a detailed article on the Pentagon report at The Weekly Standard.

Others:
Hot Air
The Corner

One of the favorite myths of the Left is that President Bush has harmed our reputation in the world, and alienated America from our allies. But the world doesn’t hate America, the Left hates America. In believing their myth, the American Left ignores inconvenient truths like the elections of Merkel and Sarkozy in Germany and France respectively, and the adulation that greeted President Bush on his recent trip to Africa. To the extent that some abroad have taken a dimmer view of America, the last seven years of Democrats’ lying and bad-mouthing their own country certainly haven’t helped.

Now there’s evidence that the Democratic presidential hopefuls, contrary to their rhetoric about “restoring our reputation in the world”, are already causing friction with other nations themselves. Via Newsweek:

Despite their spirited squabbling, the two Democratic candidates are united in the view that one of the big benefits of electing either of them would be an improvement in America’s reputation and relations with the world. Hillary Clinton promises to send special envoys to foreign capitals the day after she’s elected. Barack Obama offers to reach out to America’s foes as well as friends. Unfortunately none of this will matter if they continue to spout dangerous and ill-informed rhetoric about trade.

For the rest of the world””particularly poorer countries””nice speeches about multilateralism are well and good. But what they really want is for the United States to continue its historic role in opening up the world economy. For a struggling farmer in Kenya, access to world markets is far more important than foreign aid or U.N. programs. If the candidates think they will charm the world while adopting protectionist policies, they are in for a surprise.

Already the mood is shifting abroad. Listening to the Democrats on trade “is enough to send jitters down the spine of most in India,” says the Times Now TV channel in New Delhi. The Canadian press has shared in the global swoon for Obama, but is now beginning to ask questions. “What he is actually saying””and how it might affect Canada””may come as a surprise to otherwise devout Barack boosters,” writes Greg Weston in the Edmonton Sun. The African press has been reporting on George W. Bush’s visit there with affection and, in some cases, by contrasting his views on trade with the Democratic candidates’. The Bangkok Post has compared the Democrats unfavorably with John McCain and his vision of an East Asia bound together, and to the United States, by expanding trade ties.

….

From Byron York at The Corner on National Review Online:

Wes Clark: McCain Doesn’t Have the Right Kind of Military Experience To Be Commander-in-Chief

“…having served as a fighter pilot – and I know my experience as a company commander in Vietnam – that doesn’t prepare you to be commander-in-chief in terms of dealing with the national strategic issues that are involved.”

Fair enough. Simply having served in the military doesn’t necessarily give one a better national security vision. It would be absurd to conclude that every person who has ever served in the military is automatically qualified to be Commander in Chief. We need only to look back at the Carter vs. Reagan race to prove the point.

But then Clark loses the point by arguing that a little VIP tourism does offer the kind of experience the CiC needs:

If you look at what Hillary Clinton has done during her time as the First Lady of the United States, her travel to 80 countries, her representing the us abroad, plus her years in the Senate, I think she’s the most experienced and capable person in the race…

But of course Senator McCain has traveled the globe as well, and served in the Senate much longer, so Mrs. Clinton loses even on that score, pretty much leaving Clark without much of a point.

It will be interesting to hear the spin from these Democrat, retired military officers when McCain is running against Barack Obama, who has no foreign policy or national security credentials to speak of, even less than Hillary Clinton’s very thin record. And aren’t these some of the same people who were telling us in 2004 how meaningful John Kerry’s 4.5 months in Vietnam were?

From the AP (via Yahoo News):

The U.N. Security Council issued a media statement early Sunday condemning the escalation of fighting in southern Israel and Gaza and urging Israelis and Palestinians “to immediately cease all acts of violence.”

So after the Palestinians rain down thousands of missiles into Israeli neighborhoods month after month, as soon as the Israelis take any action in self defense the UN finally gets interested in a non-judgmental call for an end to “all acts of violence”. This is typical and unsurprising from the UN, an institution for which becoming merely useless would be a step up.

The statement, though not a formal resolution, also stressed that the violence “must not be allowed to deter the political process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority aimed at establishing two states – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security.”

But this is based on a basic untruth. The Palestinians, or at least certainly their “government”, have shown no sign that their aim is to establish two states. They still express the idea that they want one state, “Palestine”, after destroying Israel. And it cannot really now be claimed that the “government” of “Palestine” does not represent the views of the Palestinian people, because they elected two terrorist organizations, Fatah and Hamas, to head their “government”.

Such resolutions have failed repeatedly in the past because of U.S. and European objections that they are not balanced in their condemnation “” and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters as he left the meeting that “it’s not a balanced resolution, certainly.”

But what is needed is not “balance”, but acknowledgment that there is a right and a wrong here: the Palestinians are the terrorist aggressors, and the Israelis are trying to defend themselves. We didn’t demand a “balanced condemnation” of the U.S. and al Qaeda after 9/11. There should be no promises of recognition of a state of Palestine until they fully renounce terrorism and recognize the right of Israel to exist.