. . . has shown the kind of compassion the American military has shown in Iraq: Marines launch rescue effort to save Hadithah girl Multi-National Force – West PAO CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq – Marines operating in Al Anbar Province airlifted a young Hadithah girl in desperate need of a life-saving surgery, and her mother to the Jordanian border Jan. 22. They were met there by a team of medical professionals who will escort them to Nashville, Tenn., for open-heart surgery. Amina Al’a Thabit, a three-year-old who suffers from a congenital heart defect, was discovered by Marines assigned to 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment, which is now part of Regimental Combat Team 5, patrolling the area as ...

There is a very good piece on John McCain by Bret Stephens in today's Wall Street Journal. He makes the case that McCain's candidacy is, in many ways about the defense of America's honor--an honor that was lost in Vietnam. Despite being shaky on immigration and an opponent of freedom of speech during campaigns, I hope this is why McCain is resonating: [Though] he continues to depend heavily on the votes of independents, his fundamental appeal is to American honor, which is also the trait he uniquely embodies among the GOP contenders. He seeks to turn his personal code of honor -- the "No Surrender" slogan -- into a national code. He rails against a ...

Mark Strichertz, author of "Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party." writes today at NRO that the "new" candidate, Obama, is singing the same old song for the Dems: The party continues to deny pro-life Democrats from reaching a national audience, the most famous victim being former governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania. Also, Obama, seemingly the most tolerant of the party’s major candidates, does not embrace diversity when it comes to social and cultural issues. Besides his unwavering support for abortion rights, he struggled to connect with rural Iowa voters: “[a]t many stops,” the New York Times reported, “he would face questions from conservative Democrats about gun control ...

At my fantasy dinner party, Dan Henninger makes it to the table. Henninger is not flashy but he's insightful and manages the best editorial page in the country. Henninger points out that the Dems are stuck in 1968--not a very good year. 1968: The Long Goodbye Can America rise above the divisions of the 1960s? Not yet. BY DANIEL HENNINGER Thursday, November 15, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST It's too bad Barack Obama wasn't able to meet Abbie Hoffman. I don't know if Hillary Clinton ever met Hoffman, who died in 1989, but like any young person up and running in America in the late 1960s, she knows him well.

Teaching America Do you know our heroes? By William J. Bennett These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our nation’s capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation’s young people; too many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to know this. The truth is, we’ve been in far worse shape in terms of what we’ve had to endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the basic facts of their own country’s history. This year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (our “Nation’s Report Card”) revealed that over 50-percent of our nation’s high-school students — our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their knowledge of U.S. History. Tragically, students do not begin their education careers in ignorance: if you track education progress in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades with the Nation’s Report Card, you will see students know more in the 4th grade, less in the 8th grade, and are failing by the time they are high-school seniors. Relative to what they should know at their grade level, the longer they live and grow up in America, the less they know about it. How did this happen? Why is knowledge of and about the greatest political story ever told so dim? Too many of our nation’s adults have taken too dark a view of their country and have not seen fit to transmit her story down to the next generation. Too many in our culture would rather point out our nation’s failings than its successes. And in our schools, too many textbooks on American history are politically one-sided (turning off those with opposing political views). Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring. Yet we know the study of our history can be bestseller material when presented with the glory and romance that resides in it. This is why historians such as David McCullough and Michael Beschloss, and networks like the History Channel, remain so popular. They capture our great triumphs and tragic failures with all the greatness of those triumphs and all the tragedy of those failures intact — they don’t redact, they don’t gloss over, and they don’t dull down.

This is one of the greatest American speeches I have ever read. And it was delivered by a Frenchman of Hungarian descent. It is passionate and beautiful.  Very French. Read it and weep. (Or watch it here on Amy Proctor's excellent blog.) Verbatim: 'America Can Count On France' By NICOLAS SARKOZY | Posted Wednesday, November 07, 2007 4:30 PM PT Following is the speech that French President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered Wednesday in a rare address by a foreign dignitary to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives. U.S. lawmakers gave the French leader a three-minute standing ovation and his address was met bursts of warm applause. Madam Speaker, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the United States Congress, Ladies and Gentlemen, the state of our friendship and our alliance is strong. Friendship, first and foremost, means being true to one's friends. Since the United States first appeared on the world scene, the loyalty between the French and American people has never failed. And far from being weakened by the vicissitudes of history, it has never ceased growing stronger. Friends may have differences; they may have disagreements; they may have disputes. But in times of difficulty, in times of hardship, friends stand together, side by side; they support each other; and help one another. In times of difficulty, in times of hardship, America and France have always stood side by side, supported one another, helped one another, fought for each other's freedom. The United States and France remain true to the memory of their common history, true to the blood spilled by their children in common battles. But they are not true merely to the memory of what they accomplished together in the past. They remain true, first and foremost, to the same ideal, the same principles, the same values that have always united them. The deliberations of your Congress are conducted under the double gaze of Washington and Lafayette. Lafayette, whose 250th birthday we are celebrating this year and who was the first foreign dignitary, in 1824, to address a joint session of Congress. What was it that brought these two men — so far apart in age and background — together, if not their faith in common values, the heritage of the Enlightenment, the same love for freedom and justice? Upon first meeting Washington, Lafayette told him: "I have come here to learn, not to teach." It was this new spirit and youth of the Old World seeking out the wisdom of the New World that opened a new era for all of humanity. From the very beginning, the American dream meant putting into practice the dreams of the Old World. From the very beginning, the American dream meant proving to all mankind that freedom, justice, human rights and democracy were no utopia but were rather the most realistic policy there is and the most likely to improve the fate of each and every person. America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who — with their hands, their intelligence and their heart — built the greatest nation in the world: "Come, and everything will be given to you." She said: "Come, and the only limits to what you'll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent." America embodies this extraordinary ability to grant each and every person a second chance. Here, both the humblest and most illustrious citizens alike know that nothing is owed to them and that everything has to be earned. That's what constitutes the moral value of America. America did not teach men the idea of freedom; she taught them how to practice it. And she fought for this freedom whenever she felt it to be threatened somewhere in the world. It was by watching America grow that men and women understood that freedom was possible. What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind. Ladies and gentlemen, the men and women of my generation heard their grandparents talk about how in 1917, America saved France at a time when it had reached the final limits of its strength, which it had exhausted in the most absurd and bloodiest of wars. The men and women of my generation heard their parents talk about how in 1944, America returned to free Europe from the horrifying tyranny that threatened to enslave it. Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young American soldiers lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as a whole. Fathers took their sons to the beaches where the young men of America had so heroically landed. They read them the admirable letters of farewell that those 20-year-old soldiers had written to their families before the battle to tell them: "We don't consider ourselves heroes. We want this war to be over. But however much dread we may feel, you can count on us." Before they landed, Eisenhower told them: "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you." And as they listened to their fathers, watched movies, read history books and the letters of soldiers who died on the beaches of Normandy and Provence, as they visited the cemeteries where the star-spangled banner flies, the children of my generation understood that these young Americans, 20 years old, were true heroes to whom they owed the fact that they were free people and not slaves. France will never forget the sacrifice of your children. To those 20-year-old heroes who gave us everything, to the families of those who never returned, to the children who mourned fathers they barely got a chance to know, I want to express France's eternal gratitude. On behalf of my generation, which did not experience war but knows how much it owes to their courage and their sacrifice; on behalf of our children, who must never forget; to all the veterans who are here today and, notably the seven I had the honor to decorate yesterday evening, one of whom, Senator Inouye, belongs to your Congress, I want to express the deep, sincere gratitude of the French people. I want to tell you that whenever an American soldier falls somewhere in the world, I think of what the American army did for France. I think of them and I am sad, as one is sad to lose a member of one's family. Ladies and gentlemen, the men and women of my generation remember the Marshall Plan that allowed their fathers to rebuild a devastated Europe. They remember the Cold War, during which America again stood as the bulwark of the Free World against the threat of new tyranny.

Benedict Reid and Judas Pelosi are back at it.  The Democrat resolution condemning Turkey, our most proximate ally in Iraq, for the Armenian Holocaust is another effort to undermine the Iraq war. Query: why are Dems more interested in condemning a century old genocide than in preventing another one? Thomas Sowell calls it what it is: sabotage. . . . [The Democrats] want a resolution to condemn what happened as “genocide” — a word that provokes instant anger among today’s Turks, since genocide means a deliberate government policy aimed at exterminating a whole people, as distinguished from horrors growing out of a widespread breakdown of law and order in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. These ...

And we thought it was a rhetorical question: since Columbia University is interested in hosting Ahmadinejad, we asked whether they would have invited Hitler during WWII. Turns out, they would. (H/T Drudge) This is why no one, NO ONE, should send their child to Columbia.

IBD's Michael Ramirez is the best editorial cartoonist in the world (see the post below.) Turns out he is also an exellent opinion editorialist. Today, he reviews the truth about Sadaam, WMD, and patience in war-time: Record Refutes Claim Of No WMD Just As History Counsels Patience By MICHAEL P. RAMIREZ Despite the progress that Gen. David Petraeus outlined in his much-awaited report on the surge, critics claim little has been accomplished in the four years since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Democratic leaders who have already declared the war lost continue to criticize Iraq's ruling coalition for a lack of political progress. They also cite impatience of the American public as the primary justification for unilateral withdrawal of all efforts to stabilize and secure Iraq. But one must question the arbitrary deadline of September, imposed by Congress just three months after all troops were put in place for the surge. It took 12 years of deception and the violation of 17 U.N. resolutions to undertake this war in the first place. We are at a critical juncture. Critics say Operation Iraqi Freedom has been a mistake, that we went to war based on false pretenses and that the administration lied about weapons of mass destruction. They see no link between events in Iraq and the global war on terror. And they say the war is producing only negative consequences for which removal of our troops is the only remedy. But the argument for surrender can be deconstructed by revisiting the reasons we went to war, assessing the war's positive impact and weighing the catastrophic consequences of defeat. The claim that Saddam Hussein had no WMD remains specious.

The Left would like us to believe that Iraq is another Vietnam. The way they are trying to pull us out prematurely solidifies the point. While they are wrong about most of the parallels they try to draw between Vietnam and Iraq, there are some notable connections. The most compelling is the straight line drawn by the leadership, courage, sacrifice, and example of Richard Rescorla (pictured above) which was highlighted this week by Chaplain Mark Penfold during the 1st Air Cavalry “Warrior” Brigade (ACB), 1st Cavalry Division, 9/11 prayer breakfast: The keynote speaker for the prayer breakfast was Chap. (Maj.) Mark Penfold, the “Warrior” brigade’s ...