Isn't it enormously ironic that Barack Obama now finds himself the unintended beneficiary of the Iraq surge that he so vocally -- and wrongly -- opposed?

It seems that Obama's untimely calls for a withdrawal timetable have lingered long enough to have some merit in the eyes of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Al-Maliki told Der Spiegel, a German magazine, that U.S. troops should withdraw from Iraq "as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Assuming al-Maliki said it, and there has been some dispute, it doesn't make Obama right -- even now. But it's hard to imagine al-Maliki would be saying anything helpful to Obama's campaign today if the United States had followed Obama's disgraceful surrender policy instead of implementing the surge in 2007 -- over his strenuous objections.

Obama Democrats have been adamantly opposed to our intervention in Iraq from the beginning, including when they voted for it for political expediency and then later claimed they were duped into it.

One would have hoped that Barack Obama's presumptive capturing of the Democratic presidential nomination would have dampened the mainstream media's obsession with race, but instead, they've figured out a way to obsess even further about it since Obama's putative victory.

You almost can't read election headlines in a major newspaper without some reference to race issues. Earlier this week, Google News featured three back-to-back stories in its "Elections" section highlighting race:

"McCain looks to make gains among black voters," "Race, Foreign-Policy Plant Doubts for Obama" and "Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race."

The last one is a New York Times article analyzing results from the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. It proves the Times just can't let race go, whether it's because of the liberal guilt of its reporters and editors or because they want to keep the racial pot stirred for purposes of newspaper sales or because they deem racial polarization advantageous to Obama.

The story's lead paragraph reads: "Americans are sharply divided by race heading into the first election in which an African-American will be a major-party presidential nominee, with blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society, according to the ... poll."

Sunday July 20, 2008 will likely be a fairly typical summer day in America. People will get up, go to Church, and maybe hold a barbeque in the back yard. Perhaps the more industrious amongst us will wash the family car. Calmness, serenity, and above all, normality will rule the day. And in a way, that is an awful shame.

Thirty nine years ago on that date (also a Sunday), the nation was anything but normal. Americans huddled around their TV sets and radios, listening to the almost unintelligible exchange of technical jargon, watching crude network animations, trying desperately to comprehend the unfolding events a quarter of a million miles away. Few realized just how close the mission was to total failure, with only seconds of fuel remaining in the spacecraft.

Then, at 4:53 pm eastern time, after a heart-stopping momentary hush, an eight word message, crisp, clear, and easily discernable, crackled across the void of space and into the homes and businesses of anxiously awaiting Americans. Eight words that, from that day forward, might well have irrefutably defined the course of this nation, its history, and its legacy in terms of “before” and “after.” “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” In the aftermath of Neil Armstrong’s brief declaration, some aspects of life on earth would be changed forever.

During the following twenty one hours, a fantastic drama unfolded as Armstrong set foot on the moon, accompanied a few moments later by his co-pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. A crude black-and-white television transmission allowed earthlings to share in the occasion, as the astronauts collected samples, raised the American flag over lunar soil, and talked with the President via telephone from the Oval Office. Finally they launched their spacecraft back towards their awaiting colleague overhead for the journey home.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or as she is called on the Big Dogs blog, "the worst speaker in the history of Congress," explained the cause of high oil prices back in 2006: "We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect."

Yes, that would explain why the price of oral sex, cigars and Hustler magazine skyrocketed during the Clinton years. Also, I note that Speaker Pelosi is a hotelier ... and the price of a hotel room in New York is $1,000 a night! I think she might be onto something.

Is that why a barrel of oil costs mere pennies in all those other countries in the world that are not run by "oilmen"? Wait -- it doesn't cost pennies to them? That's weird.

In response to the 2003 blackout throughout the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada, Pelosi blamed: "President Bush and Rep. Tom DeLay's oil-company interests." The blackout was a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing to do with oil. And I'm not even "an oilman."

But yes -- good point: What a disaster having people in government who haven't spent their entire lives in politics! That explains everything. A government official with relevant experience or knowledge about an issue is obviously a crisis of gargantuan proportions.

I can't pinpoint the precise date I met Tony Snow, but I remember it was over the telephone. We talked about one of his passions: radio. And we became fast friends. From that point on, we talked every few months, until about three or four months ago when I could only get his voice mail.

I knew something was up because he was always good about returning calls. Still, I probably would have chalked it up to his busy schedule, except that I read news reports that he was forced to cancel a number of speeches because of illness.

I remember e-mailing a few mutual friends: Lucianne Goldberg and Kathryn Lopez. Both shared similar concerns, but we were all cautiously relieved when follow-up news stories reported Tony was OK.

I had no idea Tony had taken a turn for the worse, so the news of his death Saturday completely shocked me. The last time I talked to Tony about his disease, he was entirely upbeat and optimistic.

In retrospect, I have to wonder whether he wasn't sparing some of his friends the extent of his illness because he never wanted to dwell on himself and certainly was never seeking sympathy.

Some say Obama's critics have taken their eye off the ball in focusing on his associations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, thus giving his far-left policies a pass. But that's a false choice.

Those criticisms would have more validity but for the fact that Obama's associations and his approach to policy are inextricably intertwined, flowing from a particular -- and consistent -- mindset.

It's no accident that Obama sat for 20 years and had his children baptized in a church whose pastor revved up his congregation by denouncing America with expletives, that he had a working relationship with a professor who expressed pride in his past anti-American terrorism, or even that his wife admitted a first-time pride in the United States with the advent of her husband's electoral success.

Repeated references to Obama's close connections with these people and others are not drive-by attacks designed to incriminate Obama merely by association. Their purpose is to shine a spotlight on Obama to help determine whether he embraces or is sympathetic to the same negative views about America as his soul mates.

When you couple Obama's associations with his many statements and policies, a disturbing picture emerges, suggesting Obama might lack a robust pride in America -- at least in what he considers to be its present state. This point was driven home again this week, as Obama expressed "embarrassment" that American children can't speak foreign languages while European children can speak English.

Last Friday, on the Fourth of July, the great patriot Jesse Helms passed away. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also went to their great reward on Independence Day, so this is further proof of God.

Helms is now the second great American patriot I've always wanted to meet and never will, at least in this lifetime. The only other one is the magnificent Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger. (Wikipedia quote: "I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.")

After a week of hundreds of Helms obituaries -- one or two of which were not completely dishonest -- I will mention just a few items that were not addressed or given sufficient attention.

The two most obsessively discussed topics among Senate staffers are: (1) Who is the stupidest senator? (Sen. Barbara Boxer pulled into the lead when Sen. Lincoln Chafee retired), and (2) which senators are beastly and which are wonderful to their staff?

When I worked in the Senate in the '90s, the two senators famous for being absolute princes to work for were Sen. Helms and -- it pains me to tell you this, so you know it has to be true -- Sen. Teddy Kennedy. (He was so nice to his staffers, he frequently offered them rides home in his car after parties.)

I never knew -- and you never knew, unless you read one of the two honest obituaries this past week -- that in 1962 Helms and his wife "Dot" adopted a 9-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy. They already had two daughters and Helms was 41 years old at the time. But it was Christmastime and they read about Charlie in a newspaper. He said all he wanted for Christmas was a mother and father.

In the 1976 North Carolina Republican primary, Helms engineered Ronald Reagan's upset victory over Gerald Ford, the sitting president. That victory carried Reagan to the convention and made him the front-runner in 1980. The night Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, Helms famously uttered the beautiful words: "God has given America one more chance."

How long can Congressional Democrats hope to continue their anti-capitalist, anti-American agenda without facing accountability from the voting public? Current indicators are that they intend to hold firm on their signature issues, believing that the public will simply not recognize the correlation between their actions of recent years, and the horrendous economic fallout that ensued as a direct result. And nowhere can this relationship be seen more clearly than in the skyrocketing energy prices currently threatening to squeeze the vitality from the American middle class.

Simple economics, the principles of which are becoming painfully apparent to every American who stops to fill up the family sedan, dictate that when disproportionate multitudes of customers have to compete for a limited supply of fossil fuels, prices will rise. Thus all of the liberal/environmentalist efforts to curtail the availability of the world’s oil, specifically by hamstringing America’s ability to exploit its own natural resources, have only succeeded in driving up the cost of those resources for all who want or need them.

Concurrently, liberals are showcasing their disingenuousness by making two distinctly disparate claims regarding the economic repercussions of their actions. On the one hand, they castigate market speculators as the ultimate culprits of the current price spike. Yet in the very next breath, they deny any possible immediate benefits from renewed exploration, drilling and production by Americans. Rather, they insist that any advantage from expanded supplies would not be realized for at least a decade, as if those evil speculators could somehow remain totally blind to consequent changes in the oil market until newly produced American gasoline is running in the streets.

While everyone is focusing on Barack Obama's shifting positions on issues such as campaign finance, NAFTA, telecom immunity and Iraq, we're missing his incursion into enemy territory to capture those reviled, though politically coveted values voters.

His recent proposal to adopt a modified version of President Bush's faith-based initiative is just another piece of his strategic plan to seduce evangelical voters to his cause.

Obama is aiming for a threefer: wooing values voters, reconciling with small-town Americans, and neutralizing the taint of Jeremiah Wright and turning the religious issue into a net plus for his campaign. Hey, no one says this guy is politically naive.

You see, most liberals aren't really concerned about the intermixture of church and state unless it involves the Christian church, and only then if it involves the promotion of biblically based ideas and values. They have no problem with the government's endorsement of the values of other religions, New Age, or secular humanism. Even the state's or politicians' endorsement of nominally Christian values don't bother them, as long as they are watered down enough to detach them from any legitimate connection to Bible-centered Christianity and reframed to embrace the secular liberal worldview.

Sen. Barack Obama spoke on the subject of patriotism this past week in an effort to undo some of the damage he has already inflicted on his own image -- through his associations, his statements and policy positions -- and to obscure his liberalism.

Liberals rightly feel defensive about their patriotism because they always seem to find themselves blaming the United States for this or that, exhorting us to be more like the "enlightened" nations of Europe or forever shouting that we are a "laughing stock" in the eyes of other nations.

It was not a conservative who wrote in an editorial this week: "Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time. This year, America doesn't deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement. For we have sinned."

It was Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Chris Satullo, who, like so many liberals, is angry at America because he sees it as standing for torturing prisoners, imprisoning enemy combatants without hearings, rendition and other denials of human rights. According to Satullo, America isn't safer because our alleged abuses have "spawned new enemies by the thousands, made the jihadist rants ring true to so many ears. So put out no flags. Sing no patriotic hymns. We deserve no Fourth this year."

Sorry, but you just don't hear much of this type of rhetoric from conservatives. And Obama and the entire Democratic establishment know it.

As far back as Sun Tzu, military strategists have well understood the concept that victory in war does not require the destruction of one’s enemy, but merely convincing that enemy that destruction is inevitable if the fight continues. Similarly, in a dictatorship, absolute control is neither necessary nor, in most cases, even possible. All that is needed for the dictator to endure is the presumption among the underlings that the leader does indeed hold a monopoly of power.

It is a point that Americans ought to seriously ponder, as the future of their nation appears to increasingly rise and fall on the basis of a single vote in the United States Supreme Court.

This past June, the ever more prominent annual ritual played out in which the Court handed down its latest batch of “decisions,” which increasingly appear less as judicial considerations and more as edicts. More disturbing is that a growing number of Americans seem to be accepting the latest whims of the court as some sort of celestial standard, determining with absolute finality what America can or cannot be, and what Americans can or cannot do.

This was never intended to be the role of the courts. Rather, the founders clearly sought to prevent such unaccountable governing practices by consigning the ultimate power of legislating to the Congress which, among the three branches of government, would in turn be most accountable to the people.

Well, I guess we're all pretty relieved we didn't drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge back in 2002. What a disaster that would have been.

The vote on ANWR was almost entirely along partisan lines, with all Republicans, except a handful of "moderates," voting for drilling, and all Democrats, except a handful of sane Democrats like Zell Miller, voting against drilling.

John McCain opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because he polled soccer moms and found out they were against drilling. They thought it sounded too much like going to the dentist. McCain wanted to ensure that he remained beloved by the two pillars of his base: "centrists" and New York Times reporters.

Even Sen. Chuck Hagel voted for drilling in ANWR. But John McCain, "our" candidate, voted against it.

I guess we're beginning to see the problem of basing a political platform on the passing fancies of "centrists." These are people who have no opinions because they know nothing about national issues. They're the ones who check the "not sure/no opinion" box on polls regarding the legalization of cannibalism.

Be afraid; be very afraid. If you think Barack Obama is arrogant and leftist, you ought to see those he will have to cater to if elected -- and, according to them, even to get elected in the first place.

These leftist "netroots" are none too pleased with Obama's feint to the center the past few weeks, his "capitulation" on retroactive immunity for telecoms for cooperating with the government to monitor terrorist communications, his alleged disagreement with the Supreme Court for invalidating the death penalty for child rapists, and his flip-flop on the D.C. handgun case.

They are abuzz about the messiah's apparent abandonment of their orthodoxy. Interestingly, though, not many of the complainers really believe Obama has left them. Like Obama's longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, they realize Obama is quite willing to mask his inner self to get elected. But many are disgusted that he's even playing the game.

One blogger at The Huffington Post writes: "Sen. Barack Obama is risking his brand as a political reformer, according to reports today in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. In recent weeks, he has moderated or changed positions on a number of politically-charged issues, leading to criticism from demoralized Democratic activists."

Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, added, "I've been struck by the speed and decisiveness of his move to the center."

The Supreme Court's barring of the death penalty for child rapists in Kennedy v. Louisiana underscores the hazards in the court's abandonment of moral absolutes in favor of "evolving standards of decency" and the court's unbridled arrogance in substituting its subjective judgment for the legislatively enacted will of the people.

In Kennedy, the court reversed the decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court to uphold the capital punishment of a convicted child rapist, holding that the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause prohibits executing such offenders "where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim's death."

A United States Supreme Court with a majority of Constitution-respecting justices would have evaluated the Louisiana statute in light of the originally understood meaning of the cruel and unusual punishment clause.

Instead, today's sometimes Obama-inclined liberal activist majority subordinated to the lowest rung the clause's original meaning in favor of "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."

And how does the majority identify that new, enlightened standard applicable to child rape cases not resulting or intended to result in death?

Liberals dismiss studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer, claiming they are biased because the people promoting the studies are "anti-choice."

For the same reason, no one should believe the Democrats' "energy" policies.

Democrats couldn't care less about high gas prices. The consistent policy of the Democratic Party, going back at least to Jimmy Carter, has been to jack up gas prices so we can all start pedaling around on tricycles.

Environmentalists are constantly clamoring for higher gas taxes as the cure-all to their insane global warming theory. Clinton proposed a 26-cent tax on gas. John Kerry said it should be 50 cents. Gore endorsed the Malthusian proposal of Paul and Anne Ehrlich in "The Population Explosion" that gas taxes be raised gradually to match prices in Europe and Japan.

The result is consumers now pay about 46 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes. That's not including taxes paid directly to the government by the oil companies and passed onto consumers. As the inestimable economist John Lott has pointed out, in the past 25 years oil companies have paid more than three times in taxes what they have made in profits.

B. Hussein Obama's response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies. "Corporate taxes" sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government.

Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess liberals can declare: Mission accomplished!