Morning Report: 2008-04-23

The Senator from New York scores a win, and presents the keystone of her Middle East strategy; and more.

Pennsylvania Democrats cling to guns, religion, and Hillary Clinton. She may not have "totally obliterated" her opponent, but Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did score a decisive victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary. GayPatriot:

As I am about to retire this evening, Hillary Clinton has won Pennsylvania and is nurturing a 9% lead and about a 150,000 vote margin — which has increased by 50,000 in the past hour. Being a Pennsylvania native I know a lot about the state, and I observe that MANY of the rural counties (including a couple of the Philly burbs) aren’t reporting all results yet. I suspect Hillary will top 10%, if not more once all the votes are counted.

MSNBC: 'Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday won Pennsylvania’s presidential primary, a victory that analysts said she had to have if she were to remain a credible candidate for the Democratic nomination. Clinton, independent analysts and the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois had predicted ahead of time that Clinton would win the state, where she enjoyed large leads in opinion polls until recently. But after closing the deficit in the last few weeks, Obama’s advisers said he would have the momentum unless Clinton won by a sizable margin.'

US citizen arrested on charges of spying for Israel. Debka: 'DEBKAfile’s Washington sources report the charge is serious enough to affect President George W. Bush’s plan to attend Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations next month. Connecticut-born Ben-Ami Kadish, now 84, is accused of giving an Israeli consulate employee classified documents about nuclear weapons, an F-15 fighter jet and the US Patriot system in the 1980s. The US justice department describes Kadish's Israeli handler as the same man who handled convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. This handler, identified only as “co-conspirator 1” left the US after Pollard’s exposure but stayed in touch with him until March of this year. Israeli cabinet minister Raffi Eytan, known as Pollard’s handler, said he had no idea of what this was about. One of the four counts against Kadish is of participating in a conspiracy to disclose documents related to national defense in the years 1979-1985...' Arutz Sheva: 'Foreign Ministry spokesman Aryeh Mekel officially denied knowledge of a report Tuesday night that the US has arrested an American Jew on charges of spying for the Jewish State from 1979 to 1985. Mekel said the ministry learned of the affair from media reports.'

Zawahiri: Tehran gives Jews credit for 9/11, steals our thunder. Tammy Bruce:

Al-Qaida #2 psychopathic murderer Zawahiri is tired of AQ not getting the credit they deserve for being the most depraved beasts on Earth. That's right, damn it--Zawahiri is really mad at Iran especially for spreading the lie that Israel and the Jews were responsible for the abomination of September 11th, when AQ worked so hard to murder as many innocent, unarmed civilians as possible. But for some reason the other psychopathic Islamists aren't giving AQ the respect they deserve. Is that a tiny tear rolling down my face? Why, yes it is! From laughter.

Full story here.

"Out" of touch. GayPatriotWest on that "Out" Republican hit piece by Charles Kaiser:

Having read the piece, I am amazed at little its author actually knows about gay Republicans (kind of like Dobson and gay people). He devotes a good chunk of his article to Terry Dolan, the one-time head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) by day and supposedly notorious leather queen by night. Dolan died over two decades ago, just over six years before Log Cabin set up its national office in Washington and years before Republican Congressmen Jim Kolbe continued to win reelection in Arizona even after coming out as gay.

Given the fact that Dolan died when Reagan was president, you’d think he’d hold less interest to a reporter covering gay Republicans in 2008 than an openly gay Republican Congressman who chaired a House subcommittee in the current Bush Administration. But, Kolbe gets nary a mention in this article while Kaiser quotes a “Democratic political consultant” for an anecdote about Dolan.

Read the rest at the link.

Commentary. I have some thoughts on Hillary Clinton's promise to "totally obliterate" Iran if that country launched a nuclear attack on Israel, but I'll package those in a separate post. For now, I'll just quote James Lewis at American Thinker:

Hillary is trying to sound like a Neanderthal about nukes, presumably because that's what she thinks will appeal to the God, guns, and beer guzzling folk buried deep in those small towns. It is a clear signal of her contempt for Americans who are serious about national security. ...

Contrary to Hillary's militant outburst, there are no sane conservatives who want to nuke Iran. No neocons and no paleocons, no con-cons. No sane people, period. Ronald Reagan hated the nuclear standoff with the Soviets, and seized the first opportunity to negotiate mutually stabilizing reductions on offensive weapons. Reagan had no desire to hurt people -- either our self-declared enemies or Americans; unless, of course, it had to be done as a last resort. That is why he always believed in building up viable missile defenses. It has been the Left, for deeply irrational reasons, that has consistently resisted anti-missile technology for the last thirty years.

If Iran attacks Israel, the latter has an estimated 200 well-tested nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Israel can retaliate with overwhelming force on its own if Iran attacks; which is why the Iranians have been operating through proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas. With its cruise missile subs, the IDF has a second-strike capacity even for the worst case attack that is now conceivable. But even a nuclear defensive response by Israel would exact a terrible political price. Nukes are truly a weapon of last resort.

The real point, of course, is to block the development of Iranian nukes in the first place so that the threat will never arise. ...

So Hillary's militant-sounding promise to "obliterate" Iran is not just phony but obscene. You don't threaten to kill a nation, except for your own survival in the very worst case. Hillary is not in such a desperate survival corner, and if we are lucky, she will never be President and be charged with that terrifying responsibility.

So this was a particularly disgusting piece of political theater. John McCain has seen war and suffered from it. One thing we can expect from him, should he become president, is a decent respect for the seriousness of the military choices a president may have to make.

Go read this very fine piece in its entirety.

Senator Clinton has provided a spectacularly fine illustration of the Belmont Club's Three Conjectures. As Richard Fernandez argues in a new post,

I wrote in the Three Conjectures that the eventual cost of not fighting the War on Terror selectively and aggressively would be the necessity to obliterate enemy populations indiscriminately. In other words, the price of rejecting a targeted, active strategy would be the eventual acceptance of a Hillary Clinton strategy. It's true that "we would be able to totally obliterate them" after Israel is incinerated. But that kind of misses the point.