From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On Afghanistan:

Clearly we have a split in this administration between the presidential advisors to the White House and the military. That’s obvious.
A lot of leaks from the White House dissing the commanders. You had a public reprimand from the secretary of defense to McChrystal, our commander in Afghanistan, in which he [Gates] said publicly that advice ought to be given privately — interesting juxtaposition…
McChrystal and Petraeus, who is the area commander, have recommended all in, meaning you have to do this the way Iraq was done. You have got to have a surge of troops. You have to occupy the territory, and you have to protect the population, or else we lose the war.
And the reason it’s important is McChrystal is the expert, the world’s expert on the opposite kind of strategy. He did Iraq the special ops stuff, the remote-control under-the-radar operations. Four years. He killed a lot of the bad guys. He is the world’s expert on it. He knows its potential and its liabilities.
If he tells you that his expertise in that area is useless and what you have to do is go to the other strategy, it’s persuasive. The administration is refusing that advice, at least up until now, because it means a costly year, year and a half, two years — as we had in Iraq with the surge — that it thinks that politically it cannot afford.

On the CBO scoring of the Baucus health-care bill:

Look, the CBO scoring, the numbers that came in, the blessing it gave — is because of smoke and mirrors in the bill. For the people of Wichita, somebody has to wade into the weeds. I did it at great health risk.
Two items here. One of them is the $120 billion assumed of income from what are called “fees” of the big players in health care — the health insurers, the drug companies, the guys who do diagnostics and who produce the medical equipment.
The fee is a tax, and the tax, $120 billion, is going to end up out of your pocket and mine, because every penny of it will be in higher insurance, higher costs for drugs, for stents — any kind of medical devices — and for diagnostics. Everybody will pay.
But it’s hidden. It is a cowardly way to do a tax. You do it on the industry and it is passed on.
Secondly, there are individual mandates. People are going to be shelling out a huge amount every year on insurance, and those who don’t are going to have to pay a fine, also a tax, but under another name.
There are huge costs in here, which are all hidden, and that’s why it looks OK.
And secondly, there is a $400 billion assumption of cuts in Medicare. That is not going to happen. It is an illusion. It is a fantasy. And that’s why the numbers end up OK.
So if you really look behind all of these numbers, [the Baucus bill ] is a disaster.