The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee doesn’t come off as very…intelligent. Or at least informed.

I’ve been fearful, ever since September 11, that our government, as currently constituted, is not up to the task of fighting this war. Things like this do nothing to assuage that fear.

But then, I guess it could be worse. Senator Patty Murray thinks that Al Qaeda is a day-care provider.

You know, when the Washington Post tells the Baker Commission they’re out to lunch on their policy recommendations, you know they have to be out there:

…to embrace the group’s proposed “New Diplomatic Offensive” would be to suppose a Middle East very different from what’s on the ground.

Start with the supposition that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is somehow central to ending the chaos in Iraq. In fact, even if the two-state solution sought by the Bush administration were achieved, it’s difficult to imagine how or why that would cause Sunnis and Shiites to cease their sectarian war in Baghdad or the Baathist-al Qaeda insurgency to stand down. It’s no doubt true, as study group chairmen James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton have said, that every Arab leader they met told them that an Israeli-Arab settlement must be the first priority. But the princes and dictators of Riyadh, Cairo and Amman have been delivering that tired line to American envoys for decades: It is their favorite excuse for failing to support U.S. initiatives and for refusing to reform their own moribund autocracies.

Baker is living in the past, and in an alternate reality.

Mark Steyn, on the “Illustrious Seniors Group“:

Oh, but lest you think there are no minimum admission criteria to James Baker’s “Support Group,” relax, it’s a very restricted membership: Arabs, Persians, Chinese commies, French obstructionists, Russian assassination squads. But no Jews. Even though Israel is the only country to be required to make specific concessions — return the Golan Heights, etc. Indeed, insofar as this document has any novelty value, it’s in the Frankenstein-meets-the-Wolfman sense of a boffo convergence of hit franchises: a Vietnam bug-out, but with the Jews as the designated fall guys. Wow. That’s what Hollywood would call “high concept.”

Why would anyone — even a short-sighted incompetent political fixer whose brilliant advice includes telling the first Bush that no one would care if he abandoned the “Read my lips” pledge — why would even he think it a smart move to mortgage Iraq’s future to anything as intractable as the Palestinian “right of return”? And, incidentally, how did that phrase — “the right of return” — get so carelessly inserted into a document signed by two former secretaries of state, two former senators, a former attorney general, Supreme Court judge, defense secretary, congressman, etc. These are by far the most prominent Americans ever to legitimize a concept whose very purpose is to render any Zionist entity impossible. I’m not one of those who assumes that just because much of James Baker’s post-government career has been so lavishly endowed by the Saudis that he must necessarily be a wholly owned subsidiary of King Abdullah, but it’s striking how this document frames all the issues within the pathologies of the enemy.

I’ve never been a big fan of most of the people on the ISG (though Alan Simpson had his moments), but my esteem for Baker and Lee Hamilton has hit a new low.

I’m not very happy with Bush (and I never actually have been) but I’m glad that, in contrast to the wishes of the Democrats and the “bipartisan” ISG of Jim Baker et al, he refuses to surrender to the enemy.