Anyone who thinks the Iraq war was fought for cheap gas clearly hasn’t been seen the price at the pump — $4 a gallon and climbing.  If this war was about oil, it certainly has been the worst war for oil ever.  Particularly considering that oil was $25 a barrel when the war started five years ago.
But the charge has been a great source of comedy — quite a long-running joke; as long, in fact, as the war itself.

The site Politicalhumor,about.com has a wonderful round-up of jokes based on the blood-for-oil premise.

This one in particular shows how laughable the concept has been — from the beginning:

“On the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq gas prices in L.A. reached three dollars a gallon in some places. Didn’t we win that war? I mean, I know there were no weapons of mass destruction but apparently there’s no gas there either.” –Jay Leno

What’s a tangible improvement for Iraq that John McCain might want to trumpet during the campaign?  It’s got nothing to do with troop levels or timetables — but everything to do with Iraq’s economy.  McCain should work on ways to improve Iraq’s stock market.

I was struck by how clunky and backward Iraq’s stock exchange is after this item in the February issue of Money:

Question: A friend told me the Iraq Stock Exchange is open for business. How do I buy shares that trade there? Also, how safe and secure is it? - Bryce Frederickson, Lawton, Okla.

Answer: Investing in Iraq takes some effort. Given the risks and costs, though, maybe that’s just as well. The ISX didn’t respond to e-mails, so Answer Guy consulted with Björn Englund, manager of the British Virgin Islands-based Babylon Fund - not open to individuals in the U.S. - which invests in Iraqi securities.

You’ll have to open an account with an Iraqi brokerage (Englund uses Commercial Bank of Iraq). And to do that, you’ll first need to get a copy of your passport notarized, then certified by Iraq’s U.S. embassy. (For more information go to isx-iq.net, where you can try to decipher the exchange’s baffling instructions.)

Once you’ve got an account, well, you’re not in Oklahoma anymore - and not just because you’re investing in a war zone. Only a minority of the 90-odd listed stocks trade even once a week. Commissions and spreads between bid and ask prices are large; company news, says Englund, “is late or absent.”

The fund manager figures the ISX should get a boost once telecom and oil service companies start trading. Still, he warns, you should invest money in Iraq only if you won’t mind losing it.

Helping Iraq improve its stock market — now there’s a way for John McCain to combine strong Iraq and growth-oriented economic policies.

Republican pandering in Florida just ain’t what to used to be.

Take Fidel Castro.  Used to be we could end that by saying ‘please.’  We can’t even do that anymore.

Castro merited but one mention in last night’s Republican debate.

Rudy Giuliani:

“The longest dictatorship, I believe, in the modern world, is the one of Fidel Castro. The presumption is that if you’re fleeing Fidel Castro, given decades and decades of murder, oppression — including, most recently, the way he cracked down on the Cambio Group, Brothers to the Rescue, all of these things — there’s a presumption in the immigration law that if you’re fleeing Fidel Castro, you’re fleeing political persecution.”

In the good old days, an opponent surely would have tried to trump Giuliani by saying, “Fidel, you ignorant slut.”  Alas, last night nothing of the sort.

Israel, too, came in for short rhetorical shrift.

John McCain was the lone voice in asserting this:

“There’s many people who are concerned and have a priority of the — the independence of the state of Israel. They know that I know how to keep Israel independent as well.”

Fine, but where was the thunderous acknowledgment that a strong Israel is in the best interest of a strong America?  And even McCain’s statement was a wee bit confusing — is Israel’s independence at stake?  Security, yes — always.  But independence?  From whom?  Perhaps McCain was confusing independent voters with Likud and Labor voters.

The only real pandering we could spot was courtesy Ron Paul.  Social Security got only tepid discussion from Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.  Ron Paul, however, said he’s still in favor of abolishing Social Security …. but ….”not overnight. As a matter of fact, my — my program’s the only one that is going to be able to take care of the elderly.”

Thank goodness.  A glimpse of Florida reality.  John McCain’s 95-year-old mother should feel socially secure if Ron Paul wins.

Wall Street woes giving you the blues?

Why not put your money elsewhere — like, the Iraq stock exchange?

Here’s Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox last week:

… the nations of the world have increasingly embraced capitalism over the past decade and a half. Securities exchanges, which used to be restricted to countries with golf courses, have proliferated around the world so that today more than 112 nations have active securities markets.

Even in Baghdad, the Iraq Stock Exchange now operates under the oversight of the Iraq Securities Commission, an independent agency modeled after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. And the Iraq exchange was just recently opened to foreign investors this past summer. So today, you can diversify your portfolio to include issues such as the Bank of Baghdad, or the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company, or the Iraqi Tufted Carpets Company.

Politicians and activists talk about the need for shared sacrifice.  How about the need for shared investment?  The Iraq stock market can only go up.

We’ve noticed often in the past that the Washington Post editorial page frequently out-hawks the Democrats on Iraq and terrorism.

We called it “a new brand of neoconservatism: a Post-Con.”

The editorial page serves up another juicy example today:

“AT SATURDAY’S New Hampshire debate, Democratic candidates were confronted with a question that they have been ducking for some time: Can they concede that the “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq has worked? All of them vehemently opposed the troop increase when President Bush proposed it a year ago; both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama introduced legislation to reverse it. Now it’s indisputable that the surge has drastically reduced violence. … any U.S. policy ought to be aimed at consolidating the gains of the past year and ensuring that neither al-Qaeda nor sectarian war make a comeback. So far, the Democratic candidates have refused even to consider that challenge.”

We see this on the White House website today:

Caption:

President George W. Bush makes Christmas Eve telephone calls to members of the Armed Forces at Camp David, Monday, Dec. 24, 2007.

Bush is being real thorough with those phone calls this year.  I know it first-hand because this morning I was playing with my four-year-old daughter and her bucket of toy soldiers.  And they all got calls from Bush, too.

We’ve often observed that the Washington Post likes to say that a Republican who acts like a Democrat is “maturing in office.”

The good news: that rhetorical shoe fits on the other foot as well.  The Washington Post increasingly is becoming neocon-ish-eque-like in the way it sees Iraq and terrorism.

Witness today’s editorial on the Democratic presidential candidates and the war on terrorism:

The common blind spot among the Democrats is Iraq. Eager to please a constituency that despises the war, the candidates commonly promise to “end” it, ignoring the reality that Iraq is still an active battlefield for al-Qaeda. Mr. Obama rails against the failure to destroy al-Qaeda’s camps in eastern Pakistan, where no American troops operate, yet proposes to control al-Qaeda in Iraq with a “minimal over-the-horizon military force” — a plan that would duplicate the Pakistan problem. Ms. Clinton says that “we cannot succeed” against al-Qaeda “unless we design a strategy that treats the entire region as an interconnected whole, where crises overlap with one another and the danger of a chain reaction of disasters is real.” Yet she would effectively exclude Iraq from that strategy.

Glad to see the Post exposing that blind spot.  Call it maturing in office.  Or call it a new brand of neoconservatism: a Post-Con.

Instapundit alerts us to this news in the Examiner:

Former D.C. Police Chief Charles Ramsey is shifting his position on Washington’s 31-year ban on handgun ownership as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on the issue.

Ramsey says there needs to be reasonable control over guns, but he says handgun registration can provide that control.

The former chief, who is set to take over Philadelphia’s police department in January, says the nation is not going to ban handguns and he’s taking a realistic approach to the issue.

Not surprising.  Ramsey may turn out to be D.C.’s most realistic public official since Boss Shepherd.

Over the summer, Ramsey led a delegation of law enforcement officers to Iraq to evaluate policing.

And this comment recently appeared on a Philadelphia news blog:

I can’t help commenting on my experience of being arrested during a peaceful and permitted protest against the Iraq war under Ramsey’s orders in 2002. A docile crowd was gathering in Pershing Park DC to protest the war when police encircled the park and arrested over 400 of us including protesters, joggers and local workers on their lunch breaks. We spent a couple days warehoused in a police academy gym all with our wrists zip tied to ankles, before most of us who agreed to sign guilty pleas were released. This was nothing short of a mass political roundup intended to harrass us and gather our information.

To which we say: Way cool.

Meantime, the conservative blog Red Maryland noted recently:

Chief Ramsey turned around a thoroughly corrupt, demoralized, and ineffective police force in the District.

Sure he’s not perfect.  No one from D.C. possibly can be.  But Chief Ramsey certainly deserves the royal treatment of some sort.

Rough few days for CNN, what with them putting on presidential debates and all.

But in all the gloom, is there something CNN-related to brighten our day?

Of course!  Taste this scrumptious bon-bon from TV Newser:

Campbell Brown’s first documentary for CNN, “Campaign Killers: Why Do Negative Ads Work?” premiered Wednesday night after the GOP debate, and is already drawing criticism. Media Matters picked up on Brown’s categorization of the group MoveOn.org as “American insurgents” in her description of their ad against Gen. David Petraeus.

Brown said, “General David Petraeus made his reputation taking on insurgents in Iraq. But when he came to Capitol Hill in September, he was confronted by American insurgents: a liberal anti-war group called MoveOn.org.”

Sure glad the CNN fact checkers were asleep at the wheel on that one, too.