Security

The General Services Administration (GSA) is still counting what the agency spent to take 300 guvvies to Las Vegas for an “executive workshop,” learning how better to serve the nation (but mostly how to serve themselves). The tab so far is $823,000, but tips might be extra, and that doesn’t count what a “regional commissioner” spent on scouting trips through the Pacific and Asia. There’s no word yet on whether and if so how much the GSA spent on fancy women.

Heterosexuality in high places is clearly running amok. And it’s not just the guvvies, either, and not just in steamy foreign places where furriners lie in wait to lure good Americans into misadventure. Bobby Petrino, who had taken big steps in building a football legend at the University of Arkansas to rival that of the Bear at Alabama, went for a motorcycle ride through the Ozarks with his sweetie and when his big Harley crashed into a thicket of briars and saplings he was fired for lying about the error of erotic ways. He blew an $18 million-dollar buyout when he was fired “for cause.” Love can be a many-splendored thing, but splendor usually costs extra.

Voters make occasional exceptions. George McGovern, who promised to “crawl on my knees” to Hanoi to end the Vietnam war, and Jimmy Carter, who bungled an attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran and left eight American soldiers dead in the desert, paid for their reckless goofiness as soon as the voters got a chance to bury them under landslides.

Barack Obama may soon join them in that pantheon to the gods of presidential screw-ups. He sent a message to Vladimir Putin begging for “space” with an implied promise to trash American missile defense later, after he achieves “flexibility” with the November election. That sounds like a promise to crawl on his knees to Moscow. Mr. Obama knows how to crawl. He earlier crawled to Cairo to deliver an apology for America being America, and offering something that sounded like a promise to make the Middle East safe for radical Islam.

Nothing but a direct order from the White House could have persuaded Maj. Gen. Mark Gurganus, the senior Marine in Afghanistan, to disarm his men on the battlefield, even for an audience with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

The general tried to make the best of his sticky wicket, as our British cousins (some of whom were in the audience, disarmed as well) might say. “You’ve got one of the most important people in the world in the room,” the general said of the visiting defense chief. He said he wanted the Marines to look just like their Afghan partners. “This is not a big deal.”

Barack Obama is obsessed with words, and he never learned to make a short speech, and he's certainly no Stonewall Jackson. The Israelis understand that, however well-meaning he may be. The president may even believe most of the stuff he hears himself say.

Mr. Obama made another pretty speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, on Sunday that was thrilling only to those who gorge on the romance of rhetoric. Mr. Obama and his teleprompter put on a show of bluffery that was surely the envy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Iran's leaders should know," the president said, "that I do not have a policy of containment. I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I've made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests."

The dreams of most little boys are made of throwing a no-hitter, of scoring the winning touchdown or stuffing a basketball down a hole with no time on the clock. Not little Barack. He dreamed of cocking his ear for the inevitable wave of applause after a nifty little speech.

The president clearly doesn't understand why his countrymen are outraged when he goes off on one of his frequent apology riffs when no apology is needed or deserved. He never learned that Americans bow to no one. He absorbed as a child the notion that America is a rotten society with a debt to the tribes of the Third World that it can never repay.

The White House is trying desperately to rewrite Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s interview with David Ignatius of The Washington Post, where Panetta was said to believe that Israel is likely to bomb the Iranian nuclear-weapon works “in April, May or June before Israel enters a ’zone of immunity.’” This is girlie-man language for “before it’s too late.”

“Very soon,” the columnist wrote from his notes of the interview, “the Israelis fear the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon – and [then] only the United States could stop them militarily.”

This is the question Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, ought to concern himself with, instead of trying to top Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, with over-the-top "outrage" over a Marine patrol taking a leak on the bodies of several freshly killed terrorists in Afghanistan.

If Mr. Panetta had been doing his job, he might have found enough Porta-Potties to spell battlefield relief for the Marines. This should teach him a needed lesson. Battlefield rest rooms are important, and will become even more important when women are dispatched to the battlefield. Lady grunts will expect something more than toilet-seat etiquette or an inconvenient bush or tree stump to protect their modesty.

No one has accused Ron Paul of being a crawler, but he sometimes channels Mr. McGoo with his angry rhetoric against the wars in the Middle East. If he were president, he said last summer, he would bring home the new generation of grunts from Afghanistan "as quickly as the ships could get there." Ships would find it hard going in land-locked Afghanistan, but we take his point.

But Mr. Paul has been nothing if not consistent, and he has consistently pushed himself to the margins of the national debate with his prescription for retreat into the Twilight Zone, where the world's bad guys would roam unmolested by American arms. You might reasonably think this would make him a pariah among the young professionals who bear those arms in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The latest purveyor of big malarkey is the chief of the Iranian navy, who would execute the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz in answer to the Western sanctions against Iran for its work on a nuclear weapon.

"Closing the Strait of Hormuz for Iran's armed forces is really easy," he says, "or as Iranians say, it will be easier than drinking a glass of water." (Those witty Persians.) Then, in deference to the real world, he added a caveat: "But right now, we don't need to shut it."

Kim Jong-il, the pudgy maximum leader of the Hermit Kingdom, will now share a grave in a gaudy memorial in downtown Pyongyang with evil aplenty, and the ghosts of many thousands of his countrymen whom he starved and otherwise brutalized into early death. Kim, a Michelin Man in a badly tailored leisure suit on elevator shoes with big hair that looked as if he trimmed it with a chain saw, never missed a session at the dinner table while his subjects were left to survive on thin soup of bark stripped from scrawny trees. Kim, who was 69 at his death, looked more like an unemployed circus clown than the aging supremo of an emerging nuclear state.

Thousands of miles away, Vaclav Havel, the man regarded as "the dissident soul of the Czechs" died at 75 at his country home in northern Bohemia, mourned as the principled man who eloquently articulated the moral power of the poor and powerless. Shy and sometimes polite to a fault, the acclaimed author of plays was a man who walked the walk, spending five years in Communist prisons and emerging to inspire a counterrevolution that toppled an evil empire.