Here’s Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) explaining why folks like Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) who are trying to help Iraqi refugees are wrong:

They’re wonderful people who’d like to live here, especially the ones who have helped us, but the last thing we want to do is to have people who are friendly to democracy . . . moving here in large numbers at a time when they’re needed to build a new, thriving Iraq.

That comes to me via Justin Logan who remarks: “So Rep. Rohrabacher knows better than these Arabic-speaking, living-in-Iraq Iraqis what’s best for them. And, as it happens, what’s best for them is to stay in the hellish maelstrom of violence that is Iraq, despite the stated views of these folks themselves.” But of course that’s the point, right? To admit that we ought to be helping refugees would be to admit that even post-surge Iraq is pretty terrible so Iraqis who cooperated with Coalition forces will just have to suffer in order to maintain the pretense that all is hunky-dory.

When I was in the green room earlier today at NBC’s studio in DC, I was watching CNBC curious to see how the variance finance talking heads would be covering the unfolding drama. The party line was pretty uniform, and a bit bizarre — basically, the Fed was obviously right to act to prevent Bear Stearns from falling into bankruptcy because the entire global economy is teetering on the brink of collapse and utter doom would strike if they’d done otherwise. But all’s well now, thanks! No need to worry, nothing to see here, worst is behind us, etc.

I mean, I suppose that could be right, but common sense indicates that if over the weekend drastic measures were needed to stop everything from unraveling that this week we continue to be in a pretty precarious situation. At a minimum, it seems like the best hope for a turnaround in the “real” economy is for the dollar to fall even farther, providing jobs in exporting and tourism, and as far as best-case scenarios go that doesn’t seem like a particularly awesome one.

John McCain brought the straight talk on a CNN interview earlier today:

Well, all I can say is that [Hillary Clinton] obviously does not understand nor appreciate the progress that has been made on the ground. She told General Petraeus last year when he testified that she would have to suspend disbelief in order to believe that the surge is working. Well, the surge is working.

So I just think what that means is al Qaeda wins. They tell the world that. And we fight here again and around the Middle East. And their dedication is to follow us home. All I can say is that this will be a big issue in the election as we approach November because at least a growing number of Americans, though still frustrated and understandably so, believe that this strategy has succeeded.

Bracketing the entire issue of whether or not the surge is succeeding, to portray what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq as primarily a matter of fighting al-Qaeda is breathtakingly dishonest. At least I hope it’s dishonest, because if McCain is really that clueless about what’s happening, then we’re in more trouble than I thought. Meanwhile, this business about al-Qaeda following us home from Iraq is ludicrous. The American deployment in Iraq isn’t a physical barrier preventing people from coming to the United States. Obviously, preventing would-be terrorists from getting into the country is an important priority, but sending 160,000 soldiers to Iraq doesn’t accomplish that.

Meanwhile, as John Brennan told me a few weeks ago, McCain “says that al-Qaeda has said it will be a defeat if we leave, I think it is most inappropriate to concede to al-Qaeda the ability to define what constitutes success.” After all, “al-Qaeda’s strategy has been to bleed the U.S. into bankruptcy and to continue with the same approach will have severe consequences for U.S. national security.” I think that’s exactly right. To reason, as McCain does, that because al-Qaeda will boast if we leave Iraq that we therefore most make an unlimited commitment to indefinite warfare there is crazy; we’d be letting a small group of fanatics pin down a huge swathe of the American military with nothing more than the threat to release a gloating videotape.