From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:
—On the McCain Speech—
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It was extremely strong, it was crafted, and it made a case in favor of the war that even the president hasn’t with that kind of strength and elegance. . . . But he also did something else. He made a very strong political attack on the Democrats. . . . The Democratic effort is to take possession of Iraq as an issue in ‘08 and not possession of the war. That’s what McCain attacked and I think it’s the first time it’s been done well and he’s right in doing it.
FRED BARNES: [H]e’s been for the victory in Iraq the whole time and the press now has been incredibly unfair to him. They attack him, they say well he’s just backing Bush now. . . . [But] Bush has adopted the McCain strategy . . . And I think the two best speeches that I have heard over the last, what four or five year about Iraq, explaining why we’re there and why we have to stay there and why we have to win were both actually given by McCain. The first one was at that Monday night at the Republican convention in New York in 2004 and then this one today. . . .
Will it get him the nomination or not? I don’t know, you know, he has this saying: I’d rather lose a campaign then lose the war. It reminds you a little of Henry Clay’s famous statement, you know, I’d rather be right then president. Well, Clay was right, but he was never president.
—On the Duke Lacrosse Case—
BARNES: [I]t was a rush to judgment by the press, by all of all these faculty members at Duke. And I saw this mealy-mouthed statement from the Duke president, Richard Brodhead, in which he said he’d always been careful to note that these guys were innocent and so on. Well, what did he do? One, he threw two of them out of school. He told the Duke lacrosse coach: You get out of town, off this campus, today, and don’t come back. . . . [The media] wrote all those stories based the assumption that this was privileged white guys who had preyed on poor black women, reminded them of the slave days and so on.
And then there was all that stuff with the Duke faculty members, you know, one of them said: Players who were are in these helmet sports, they’re prone to take violence against women. And one of them likened the Duke case . . . to the Emit Till lynching in Mississippi in 1955. Amazing stuff, they need to apologize.
HUME: Now, tell what can we now expect from the faculty and from the administration of Duke University?
KRAUTHAMMER: Nothing. They showed themselves early on as cowards and they remain a cowards.