Lynch Report

The Election and September 11
From the Wall Street Journal.....

On this, the seventh time the United States has observed the events of September 11, 2001, one may say with confidence: Forget national unity.

AP

That John McCain and Barack Obama had to set aside their differences over the war on terror to stand together this morning at the grim hole that was the Twin Towers testifies to the political divide that emerged after September 11.

While the government has broken up several terrorist plots in Buffalo, Los Angeles, New Jersey and Miami, these real-world events have been overwhelmed by the political battles over the Bush antiterror policies -- the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretaps, military commissions, CIA interrogations of terror suspects.

Lest we forget, as someone said, let's revisit the bare details of that day. This presumably is the reason for anyone's post-9/11 antiterror policies.....MORE....

Bush Said to Give Orders Allowing Raids in Pakistan

The order allowing Special Operations forces to act without the prior approval of the Pakistani government underscores U.S. concerns over Pakistan’s ability and will to combat militants.

Pakistan’s Military Chief Criticizes U.S. Over a Raid

an unusually strong statement criticizing the United States for sending commandos into Pakistan to fight theTaliban and Al Qaeda, the chief of the Pakistani Army said Wednesday that his forces would not tolerate such incursions and would defend the country’s sovereignty “at all costs.”  MORE....

Obama's Lost Years

Barack Obama makes his first campaign visit today to his alma mater, Columbia University. Just don't ask the prolific self-diarist to talk about his undergraduate days in Morningside Heights.The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of them. Why not release his Columbia transcript? Why has his senior essay gone missing?......

What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him. He had transferred from Occidental College in California after his sophomore year because, he told the Boston Globe in 1990, "I was concerned with urban issues and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities." He got a degree in political science without honors. "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot," he told his biographer David Mendell.

Put that way, his time at Columbia sounds unremarkable. Maybe that's what most pains a young memoirist and an ambitious politician who strains to make his life anything but unremarkable.  MORE....