Thursday's links and comments

A sign that President Bush's improving poll numbers are real is New York Republican senate candidate John Spencer is saying he'd welcome the president joining him on the campaign trail. Just a couple months ago we were reading stories about Republican candidates avoiding the president like the plague. However, lets not get carried away. It is still New York so the campaign for Spencer's opponent, Sen. Clinton, has offered to pay for the president to visit and campaign on Spencer's behalf. I don't run the Republican party, but if I did I wouldn't waste any money on that race.

Ann Coulter discusses the idea of coddling terrorists in a column titled "Are Videotaped Beheadings Covered by Geneva?"

Robert Novak has a column discussing why John Bolton's nomination is still in doubt. Last year, Sen. Christopher Dodd worked to scuttle the nomination because Bolton isn't friendly enough to communist Cuba. Now, Sen. Lincoln Chafee is holding up the nomination because he heard the current administration supports Israel taking action after being attacked. Can anyone tell me why the RSCC wasted time and money on Chafee's reelection?

Michael Graham sums up the problem in dealing with the radical (ie: mainstream) Islamic countries in a column titled Tolerating intolerance."

As always, Victor Davis Hanson speaks with clarity about the threat facing civilization. Read it all, but here is a snippet:

It has been a parlor game of sorts to guess when—but even more so if—the Europeans (Britain included) will sigh, “Enough is enough,” and so get tough with both their own unassimilated angry Muslim minorities and the radical Islamic world at large. There will never be liberal values in the Middle East, no change, no future—as there would not have been in Hitler’s Germany, as there is not today in Cuba or North Korea—without the defeat of Islamic fascism, in its latest Islamic incarnation, as an ideological force.

Apparently they are calling for a heavy snow storm in hell. Charlie Rangel just chastized fellow leftist Hugo Chavez for attacking our president. You've really gone too far if even Rangel recognizes it. On that issue, FOX news has mentioned about a dozen times today that CITGO gas is state owned by Venezuela. I wonder if this will affect sales at their stations? Probably not.