Feingold wants more troops?

Strike that, he wants troops in more places.

Senator Russ Feingold seems to think he's the only one talking about global terrorism.

On Tuesday, Feingold cited the botched Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound plane — allegedly by a Nigerian man with suspected ties to al-Qaida in Yemen — as evidence of the threat he's warned of for nearly a decade.

"It's very sad that it takes an incident like this for people to pay adequate attention to places like Yemen," Feingold said in an interview. "Time and again, I've been trying to get people to think about the war against al-Qaida as a global war rather than fighting it country by country."

We know there are other nations involved. Terrorists are certainly harbored in more than Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. But you cannot send troops to 100 different nations and think the force will be strong enough to dispel terrorists world-wide.

James Phillips, a senior research fellow on Middle East affairs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said while more attention should be given to Yemen, it shouldn't detract from the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Yemen definitely requires a greater effort," Phillips said, "but not at the cost of reducing resources in Afghanistan and Iraq. We should not make the mistake of using the recent problems in Yemen as an excuse to retreat from Afghanistan."

Where they are strongest, we must be. A lone Nigerian bomber from Yemen with explosives in his crotch isn't exactly the mastermind of Osama.

This IS a global fight. The Christmas bomber showed terrorists can come from anywhere and take their fight anywhere, not just from the caves of Afghanistan to the shores of America.

So I ask you, Mr. Feingold, where is everyone else?

Obama slaps former presidents

Gotta love a little Rove fighting back.

Consider Mr. Obama's comment in his interview this past Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" that the Bush administration made a mistake in speaking in "a triumphant sense about war."

This was a slap at every president who rallied the nation in dark moments, including Franklin D. Roosevelt ("With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph"); Woodrow Wilson ("Right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts"); and John F. Kennedy ("Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed . . . will be met by whatever action is needed").

This kind of attack gives Mr. Obama's words a slippery quality. For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it "flawed" and blamed "the last administration" for launching it "hastily."

Really? Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner designed it. If it was "flawed," why did Mr. Obama later nominate Mr. Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman and make Mr. Geithner his Treasury secretary?

Touche.

But it's not just slippery. It's downright soaking wet- watered down. He's a wet rat, drowning in rhetoric that's insulting more than inspiring. This kind of response and failure to use the language representative of VICTORY over terror and WINNING the war makes me lose faith that our President will rise to the occasion should he need to truly defend our people -and our honor- as a nation.

B+, my rear.