In an event at the American Enterprise Institute today, Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon — sitting next to hawks Fred Kagan and Ken Pollack — praised the Iraq surge, saying the surge architects would make former Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi “proud”:

I want to call them the Lombardis of this war. … And in addition to Fred and Ken who have been two of the most important people. Andy Krepinevich is another important think tanker. Retired Gen. Jack Keane from the outside. A small group of people inside the administration, smaller than it should have been, but people like Meghan O’Sullivan. [...]

These people did two things that I think would have made Vince Lombardi proud. One, they stuck with it, and they persevered through difficult times. And two, they stayed focused on fundamentals.

Watch it:

In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Justice Department official John Yoo blasts the Democratic party for its “undemocratic” system of superdelegates:

This delegate dissonance wasn’t anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature. They had the record of revolutionary America to go on. All but one of America’s first state constitutions gave state assemblies the power to choose the governor. James Madison commented that this structure allowed legislatures to turn governors into “little more than ciphers.”

Since when did Yoo become so concerned with the Constitution? During his time in the administration, he aggressively urged the administration to push moral, ethical, and legal boundaries:

– Yoo was the author of the administration’s infamous torture memo, which argued that interrogation techniques only constituted torture if they are “equivalent in intensity to…organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” [Link, Link]

–Thanks to Yoo’s legal work, the Bush administration justified the creation of a new category of detainees: “illegal enemy combatants.” He advised that President Bush did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling detainees in the war on terror. [Link]

– Yoo argued that President Bush “didn’t need to ask Congress for permission to invade Iraq.” The 1973 War Powers Resolution, according to Yoo, is “irrelevant.” [Link]

– Yoo helped craft the legal justification allowing the Bush administration to secretly eavesdrop on Americans without court-approved warrants. In 2001, Yoo brushed aside constitutional concerns, stating that after 9/11, “the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties.”[Link]

Additionally, despite what Yoo claims, the Founders never envisioned “direct election by the people.” In fact, during the Constitutional Convention, “a plan to have the president elected directly by the people was defeated twice.”

(HT: Andrew Sullivan)

With the deaths of four more soldiers last night, the U.S. military reached the grim marker of 4,000 soldier fatalities in Iraq. Both Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) released statements recognizing the soldiers for their sacrifice and mourning their families’ loss. One campaign, however, has been silent:

One note — John McCain’s office has issued a statement today about elections in Taiwan but nothing about the 4,000.

On his campaign website, McCain calls for “a greater military commitment” and says “more troops are necessary.”

I’ve been remiss in not linking to this thrilling article in which Evan “he’s the future of the Democratic Party and he always will be” Bayh explains that superdelegates should consider ignoring Barack Obama’s lead in elected delegates and the popular vote, and instead focus on the fact that Hillary Clinton would we winning if primaries were governed by the electoral college.

I believe that by the Duhem-Quine thesis there are actually an infinite number of arbitrary criteria we could devise to prove that our preferred candidate is “really” winning. For example, Obama’s leads in delegates and votes are relatively narrow, but I bet that if we counted by mass his disproportionately male base of support would have a much larger edge.