Two Good ones for tonight….:

This presidency is not yet in trouble. But it is sure headed that way.

Finally, there is the freedom factor. Your health is obviously very personal. You want to have as much control as possible when you get sick. In Canada, where the government runs the health care industry, there are waiting lists for treatment in some places, a shortage of doctors in others. Americans fear that if medical choices are dictated by the feds, that kind of chaos will happen here.

Also, federal health care means all your medical records are in the hands of the government. Do you want that?

So, don’t be surprised if the federal health care plan goes down in flames and President Obama is dealt his first major setback. This whole thing is poorly thought out, rushed, and full of peril.

It’s almost enough to make you sick.

So every morning I would wake up at 5:30am, ride the Metro to Union Station, and walk to the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, where Laura’s studio is located. Her show went live at 9am and interns were expected to arrive around 7. Laura was never there. She would arrive around 8 and head to the gym in the basement of Heritage. In the meantime, interns would be reading every major newspaper in the country in search of news that she could talk about. All the content was developed by the producers and transcribed by the interns for her: a funny anecdote from Wichita; some out of context quote from a war opponent; any piece of audio from Capitol Hill or from broadcast news.

Right around 8:58 Laura would come storming in, still wet from her after gym shower. The producers would quickly brief her on what she was going to say and by 9:05 she would be talking about what she “read in the Post this morning.”

I don’t write this in order to trash the show. I could excuse her berating an intern for getting her latte wrong or attacking another intern on the air for misspelling a word if she had genuine talent. The producers there are smart and funny and genuinely kind to all of the interns and guests. But even they made it very clear to the interns that anyone could do what Laura does. “Our job,” one producer once said to us, “is to make what she does look difficult. It’s not.” If she was just an entertainer then all of this would be superfluous, but she is a best-selling author and what passes today as a public intellectual. Yet she doesn’t even read the paper herself.

It shows. Rush shows up to his studio hours before his show begins and does most of his own research. He is prepared when his show goes live and as a result he is an engaging host and an informed commentator, despite his poor understanding of many issues. Laura, other than being a woman, offers little that is different than the drivel heard from the typical talk-radio personality.

One day, Obama is going to have to decide whether he wishes to be the darling of the international left or the unapologetic leader of the nation that is most resented and reviled by the international left.

The ability of Iraqi and U.S. commanders to subvert the SOFA and extend the stay of U.S. troops in Iraqi cities past the June 30 deadline does not bode well for the other withdrawal deadlines laid out in the agreement. Moreover, the vague language of the agreement lends itself to the possibility that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq past the December 31, 2011 deadline.

This all may be for naught, however, as a referendum on the SOFA is scheduled for July 30 in Iraq. Despite attempts by the Iraqi cabinet to postpone the vote, lawmakers think a delay is unlikely. The measure is likely to lose if it goes to popular vote given the widespread opposition to the SOFA in Iraq, which is seen as legitimizing the U.S. occupation until 2011. According to the latest polls, published in the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, 73% of Iraqis oppose the presence of coalition forces. If the SOFA is struck down by the vote, U.S. forces could be forced out of Iraq immediately as the forces would not be legally protected.

The referendum could create big problems for the Obama administration, which has quietly discouraged the Iraqi government from holding it. The pressure from the administration is inconsistent with their goals of promoting democracy in Iraq. The people, who have been forced to live under occupation for the past six years, deserve a chance to have their voices heard.

Obama campaigned on a promise to leave Iraq. Yet the response to the June 30th deadline, the lack of support for the referendum, and the passage of another $70 billion for the war are stark indicators of what the real Iraq policy may be.

This whole disappearing to Argentina affair (pun intended), reinforces that impression. What could he possibly have been thinking? Did he really think he could get away with just leaving the country and no one would know he was gone and no one would ask pesky questions? This strikes me as a guy who was just “chucking it all” so to speak in desperation. Maybe he didn’t want to break it off with the lady from a distance, but he could have flown her up here or something. It seems to me either a desperation move consequences be damned or slightly out of touch with reality.

What then, in the words of Lenin, is to be done? Why should anything be done at all? Paleocons of all stripes need to realize that there is much to be learned from one another—something all the more important in that we are run today by a set of people who have their own utopian agenda, quite as irrelevant to the needs and wishes of most of the country as anything anyone could dream up. Both generations must understand that each has a reason for being as they are. Young paleos ought to see that men like Pat look back to a past that was not merely, in many ways, better than the present; it was also tangible, real, as opposed to theoretical. Old paleos must understand that—as the new Chief of State proves—we are not going back. What are needed are thinkers and men of action who will use the best of the past and the present to play an effective role in the fight for the shape of the future.