New Virginia Senator Jim Webb just demonstrated at length why we must not allow his party to hold power for any length of time (and why it’s all too likely that they won’t).  The economic portion of his speech was just one long laundry list of class warfare tripe.  His statistics are wrong, his populism is misplaced, and his philosophy is not shared by the vast majority of Americans.

His foreign policy section was hardly better.  Using his father — who flew planes in the Berlin Airlift — as a prop, supposedly demonstrating his patriotism and commitment and blah blah blah, he joins a long list of Democrats who drape themselves in the flag only to burn it.  Someday, even the asbestos suit of the media won’t be able to protect them from their flames.

It’s hard to know where to begin on the fallacies (read: lies) in Webb’s speech, other than the obvious: his script was not written in 2007 in Washington but rather in 1967 in Berkeley.  There wasn’t a single assertion Webb made — other than the increased unpopularity of the war — which wasn’t false; moreover he contradicted himself flat out in pretending at first not to call for a precipitous withdrawal and then demanding that very thing.  Especially egregious was his unsupported, unsourced lie that the majority of the military is now against the war:  expect this to be the oft-repeated lie of the year on the Democrat side.

And of course, his conclusory sentence was as plain as day:  George Bush can surrender now, or we’ll make him do it.

As Rudy Giuliani said moments later on Fox News, the war on terror will not end because these idiots happen to hold another Woodstock.  The war was declared and prosecuted by our enemies for a decade (by some counts two) before we even noticed on 9/11.  Leaving Iraq will just embolden them.  It will not stop them:  it will bring them here in force.

But that’s the opposing party.  Patriotic and full of desire to defend America, or deceitful hippie fifth column, selling us out to whichever enemy happens along from decade to decade?  You decide.

Shorter than many, it was a good speech, even if it was less thematic than originally billed.  The response was polite, but not especially enthusiastic.  Even so, the degree to which the Democrats were at least polite certainly beat years past.

Once again, it’s very hard to see how the Democrats can spin the health plan as a tax increase — it is anything but.  Nevertheless they will, and conservatives need to fight this.  The reforms George Bush just outlined could have a transformative effect on health care in this country, all for the staggering good. And if they fail (or rather, if we allow them to be defeated), the pressure for socialized medicine will grow much, much stronger.

Fiscal discipline and a balanced budget are right on, but economic growth must not be impeded to achieve either.  A tax hike would be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.  Democrats are salivating over the prospect of raising taxes and smearing the President with this.  We must not let them, for all our sakes.

Finally the defense and foreign policy stuff is right on.  It is good for this President to own up to the problems in Iraq:  it would be better to own up to the fact that his State Department — not his Defense Department — created most of them.  The troop surge is good, the call to first principles — of securing the blessings of liberty for our friends in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as for ourselves and our  children — is exactly right.  But time is indeed running short, not militarily abroad but politically at home (it is shameful to have to right such words).

One last point:  most of the President’s difficulties in Iraq could have been avoided had he just chosen to go to Congress in 2003 and, following the Constitution, declare war.  Many seem to this of this as archaic, and I’ll admit that I get the legal argument as to why it was not strictly necessary in this one case.  But weaseling through on a technicality was, especially in pragmatic retrospect, stupid as hell.  Had there been a declaration of war, everything would now be different:  we wouldn’t be talking about “losing” because our total, absolute, three-week victory would be enshrined now in an unconditional surrender signed in April 2003 by a senior Iraqi official.  We would now be in the formal post-surrender occupation phase, and that could not be spun as ‘losing’ the war.  And the way we end our obligation in an occupied country with which we’ve signed a peace treaty is well understood, well laid out ground.  No one could say they “don’t know why we’re there”.

This was, in retrospect, the single biggest missed opportunity in Iraq.  It’s a lesson we better learn for the future.

1. The President’s noting of our fight against AIDS in Africa is no small thing:  Bono recently said that America is spending fully half of all the money spent in the whole world on this effort.  Another thing this President has done for which he gets zero credit, and for which America gets no credit abroad.  But it’s important nonetheless.

2. It is amazing to me that Pelosi stands to applaud the line about Darfur — where we can do relatively little without launching another war — but is steadfastly against doing what is needed to keep free the 25 million liberated souls in Iraq, where we already have boots on the ground.  This is a pretty good indication of her true position:  if the President isn’t doing something big and bold, attack him for inaction; if the President IS doing something big and bold, attack him for that.  The specifics of the issue do not matter.  The only thing that matters is attacking.

3. This applies too to the degree of foreign coalition support the President just cited in our war on terror.  We are in Iraq under UN mandate, we are in Afghanistan with NATO in the lead, we are in six-party talks over nuclear disarmament in Korea, etc. etc.  Throughout the war, the left has attacked the President for “going it alone”, and yet that’s obviously not true.  And of course, in Korea, when Bush abandoned the failed Clinton approach of one-on-one talks with Kim’s regime and instead brought the other interested parties to the table, the Dems attacked him for that and demanded to “go it alone”.  The mind boggles.

The President:  “We entered this struggle together, and whatever you voted for, you didn’t vote for failure.”

If only the Dems could remember this!

The President just said it best:  “we did not drive the terrorists out of their safe-havens in Afghanistan just to let them take over and establish themselves in a new free Iraq.”

Exactly.

He also just got another essential point right.  The troop surge MUST be about hunting down the terrorists and killing them.  The defensive posture of so much of our force in Iraq has greatly prolonged our fight, and for no good reason I can see.  My friends in the Pentagon unanimously agree that in the sectors where our guys hunt the bad guys down proactively, we clear them out and keep them gone.  If this is what the troop surge is all about, we should support it with all our might.

If it isn’t, it will fail.  And so will America.

Oh, the Dems HATE this part!  It was just weeks ago that Pelosi was telling us there is no al Qaeda in Iraq (note that our enemy in Iraq has a name, which it gave itself: “Al Qaeda in Iraq”).  They don’t want to hear these guys want to kill us, much less kill us here (note that just last week, we were reading news reports of Iraqi al Qaeda cells’ plans for attacks in the U.S.).  They continue to pretend that what’s happening in Iraq has nothing to do with the War on Terror.

They’re wrong.  Bush is right.  Period.

But he’s not just right about the nature of the enemy.  He’s right that free people do not normally breed such social pathologies.  He’s right that for the sake of our own security, we must not only root out the terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, we must nurture the longings of the people there for freedom and security and prosperity.  He’s right to point out that this goes far beyond the military aspect:  the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the election of a parliament in Afghanistan, the not one or two but three enormously successful free elections in Iraq and the approval of the only democratic constitution in the entire Arab world.

He’s right to realize that the terrorists are focusing their efforts against the innocents in these countries because they must snuff out this march toward freedom before they themselves are snuffed out.

For the terrorists, Iraq is do-or-die.  One has to be very tuned out or very stupid not to realize this.  And we can begin to secure the whole world’s future through victory.  The issue is not price or time:  the issue is decisively defeating the enemy.  Nothing else will do; and the price for failure will be paid in blood on these shores.

Did you see?  Not one Democrat stood when the President called for swift confirmations of judges.  Why?  Because they know unconstitutional government programs and abortion on demand are on the chopping block.

Republicans should have acted more strongly when they had the Senate.  John McCain is the reason why they didn’t.  Remember that in 2008.

Exactly the right note.  The issue is not the energy itself:  we just survived $3/gallon gas without a recession, and America has vast untapped energy reserves and new technologies coming online.  The issue is that every barrel we buy of foreign oil pays for the bullets our enemies fire at our men in Iraq, the bombs they explode in our cities.  We need to be energy self-sufficient not because of economics but because we need to starve out our enemies.

But again, I’m pretty skeptical.  The President has pushed for sensible energy policy — including the alternative sources liberals claim to love — in every single State of the Union in his Presidency.  Democrats have done their best to block him every time.  They talk a good fight, but they don’t want to drill — anywhere! — they don’t want refineries built, they don’t want any of the things necessary to give Chavez, Ahmedinejad and the Saudis a black eye.

But he’s up here saying the right things, and six years show he means them.  We’ll definitely be there to support him.

This is vital.  Democrats are already spinning the President’s plan as a tax increase, which is a sick joke.  We have to fight their spin.

The tax exemption idea for health insurance is brilliant:  the only complaint we have is that it’s not as much as we’d like.  We have long called for a complete and total exemption for every American of every dollar spent or saved for health care and insurance.  But the President’s plan is an enormous step in the right direction, and something Democrats have steadfastly refused to do for decades.  Don’t let them fool you on this point.

Expanded Health Savings Accounts are a big part of this, as are Association Health Plans and medical liability reform.  But don’t expect Dems to warm to these things:  the latter hurts their ability to bring in campaign bucks from the trial lawyer lobby, the former hurt their ability to concentrate health care into more and more centralized schemes.

Bottom line:  as the President said, the aim is not just for every American to have good health care — something HSAs are already going a long way toward making possible — but for every American to have control over their own health care.  Markets and pro-consumer tax reforms can make this possible — and make it a reality.  But the Democrats are steadfastly opposed to both.

The President’s three economic priorities:

1. Balance the budget.  The President’s call for spending discipline is just right, and had it only come two years sooner, there would be no “Speaker Pelosi”.  He is just right to say no taxes are needed to do this too:  the goal to cut the deficit (a product of 9/11, the recession, and the war) in half by 2009 was reached two years early, purely through economic growth.  More growth — meaning more prosperity for more Americans — is the key, not new taxes which would punish everyone.

2. Ending earmarks.  Ditto above note about “Speaker Pelosi”.  Too late, but not too little.

3. Entitlement reform.  This is one of TheVanguard.Org’s biggies, not for fiscal discipline alone but so that everyone has a better life than our flawed semi-socialist systems provide.  It will be interesting to hear what the President has to say about this — particularly in regard to health care — in the next hour.