From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On Iraq—

MORT KONDRACKE: There is no patience in Washington. I mean, the more you hear from members of Congress, including Republicans, September is the line, there’s going to be a reassessment in September. If it’s not going well even Republicans are talking about, you know, forcing a pullout. So, the one thing that Cheney accomplished was that they’re not going to take a vacation, the parliament; they were going to take two months off for the summer. Now they will take, I guess, a week off. And they’ve got a lot to do. They’ve been promising that they would get an oil agreement . . . that they would start moving on constitution reform, they would start moving toward regional elections and stuff like that. And everything is sort of moving but it’s all glacial and it’s got to start moving fast and show results. . . .
Unfortunately, what counts in Washington is benchmarks, achieving benchmarks and the benchmarks are partly political. And even the administration says that the — that they’ve got to reach these benchmarks and you know the operation over there, the surge, the whole surge operation is being judged not just on the basis of casualties, our casualties and their casualties and success against al Qaeda and stuff like that, but it’s these political moves the Iraqis themselves promised that they would achieve.

—On the Kansas Tornado—

KONDRACKE: Well, Katrina it ain’t. And, you know, there was the build-up and you started seeing the newspaper stories, “is Kansas another Katrina,” especially because Governor Sebelius was criticizing the National Guard response and her lack — alleged lack of supplies. However, she had an interview and now says we’re OK, you know, it’s just if we have another catastrophe in the state we might not have enough, but for now we’ve enough and further more that the FEMA response was quite swift — so, Katrina it’s not.
FRED BARNES: Well, she said those magic three words: war in Iraq. And so, you know, immediately Harry Reid started to salivate and other Democrats around the country and in Washington saying it’s all Bush’s fault because of the war in Iraq and it doesn’t appear to be the case. She seems to have changed her story. FEMA worked OK here, I mean, this is small . . . she was saying that because National Guard equipment was in Iraq, that the — that some members of the Kansas National Guard, there wasn’t enough equipment. Well, it appears, you know, they had 350 Humvees and it seemed like they had plenty of equipment. Now look, if this had been Wichita that had been wiped off the face of the earth, they probably wouldn’t have had enough equipment, but it was a small town. And it looks like they did fine.