We’ve seen this show before: specious attempts to connect Barack Obama with corrupt or controversial figures in Chicago, followed, then, by a Republican and establishment media outcry for the president-elect to denounce and reject them.
A friend wrote earlier today:
I’m pretty sure you can tie Obama to the first Daley administration and its attendant corruption. Also, wasn’t Obama somehow connected to Chicago crime boss Al Capone? And are you going to tell me that Chicago-based Obama was never involved in milking Mrs. O’Leary’s arsonist cow?
We just can’t be sure, can we? To be on the safe side, perhaps the president-elect ought to denounce and reject the cow anyway. Forcefully. Several times. While he’s at it, how about rejecting Principal Rooney from the Chicago-based movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Breaking and entering the Bueller household through the dog door? I mean, come on, Mr. President-elect! That’s not only a felony but also an egregious abuse of high school administrative power, sir, and you must denounce it.
It began yesterday with the RNC demanding to know the full extent of the president-elect’s relationship with Blagojevich even though Patrick Fitzgerald was perfectly clear about the relationship when he said on national television that the president-elect had nothing to do with any of it. But to suggest that the former junior senator from Illinois never communicated with the governor of Illinois is ridiculous on its face — of course there was the usual level of professional communication there, though it entirely fails to prove or even implicate any corruption on the part of Barack Obama. Then again, since when does reality matter?
Britain Says Most Troops to Leave Iraq
Posted in Commentary, tagged Britain Says Most Troops to Leave Iraq on December 10, 2008| 1 Comment »
By JOHN F. BURNS | nytimes.com | December 10, 2008
LONDON — Britain’s remaining troops in Iraq will begin withdrawing from the country in March on a timetable that will aim to leave only a small training force of 300 to 400 by June, according to Defense Ministry officials quoted by the BBC and several of Britain’s major newspapers on Wednesday.
The long-expected drawdown of the British force next year from its current level of 4,100 troops will bring an effective end to Britain’s role as the principal partner of the United States in the occupation of Iraq. In the invasion in March 2003, a British force of more than 46,000 troops participated in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
In July, Prime Minister Gordon Brown outlined a tentative plan for withdrawing most of Britain’s remaining troops early in 2009 but gave no fixed timetable and left open the number of troops who would be returning home. The Defense Ministry issued a statement after the flurry of news reports about the withdrawal that did not deny their accuracy. Although the ministry did not confirm that the drawdown would begin in March, it confirmed that the ministry was “expecting to see a fundamental change of mission in early 2009.”
As for the timetable involved in the withdrawal, the statement added, “Our position remains that we will judge it on military advice at the time.”
The leaking of the British withdrawal plan appeared to have been prompted, at least in part, by President-elect Barack Obama’s triumph in the election last month and his plans to draw up a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
Original article
Share this:
Like this:
Read Full Post »