From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On President Obama’s speaking before Navy personnel in Jacksonville explaining his strategic review of Afghanistan:

I think he’s a little bit defensive because it has been a drawn-out process. Drawn-out decision making is OK, but not in public.
But I think it is reaching an end. I think it’s correct that they are postponing the decision until after the elections in Afghanistan, but perhaps it is only a coincidence, but that’s also the elections in the United States.
This is going to be unpopular either way, and I think they would rather have a decision after the November odd-year election.
BRET BAIER: But are you saying this is a political calculation domestically for liberals in New Jersey or Virginia if the decision is let’s go with the full troop contingent?
KRAUTHAMMER: I’m suggesting that cynicism is possible in this administration. That is as far as I will go.
But on the substance of this, what we heard from Senator Kerry — and he’s coming out now rather strongly against sort of the maximum McChrystal plan — is interesting.
He is a serious guy. He has spoken a lot with Karzai. He points out that we have a problem in governance in Afghanistan. He’s absolutely right.
But McChrystal is arguing that unless you reverse the spiral of what is happening militarily on the ground now, governance isn’t going to matter because you aren’t going to have anybody to govern.
And that’s the urgency of the request for the real increase or the surge, the same way that in Iraq you had to reverse the downward spiral of the Al Qaeda insurgency, especially in Anbar, in order to allow the emergence of a local strong government. It has got to be done now in Afghanistan, and that’s what McChrystal has been arguing.

On Senator Reid’s proposal for states to opt out of the public option in health care:

Well, it’s getting weirder and weirder. We already will have a 1,500-page bill of some sort eventually, which is a mishmash, a crazy quilt of regulations and new programs and mandates all mixed up, adding hopeless inefficiencies on to an already hopelessly inefficient system.
And now we’re going to have an opt-in and opt-out public option, which is going to make the quilt even crazier.
Look, the argument is it will increase competition if you have a public option. The way to increase competition, to lower the price of health insurance, is simple. It’s not adding inefficiencies and regulations and government involvement and subsidies. It is abolishing the ban on the purchase of health insurance across state lines.
You buy auto insurance in a national market. You buy life insurance [in a national market]. It’s the reason that prices in America are low. If you weren’t allowed to buy oranges across the state, it would be expensive in Wisconsin, especially in the winter.
But the problem is that Democrats…want is a public option under one guise or another which will increase government control. That’s what it is about. It is not about competition by any means.
…And in principle, how can the CBO make an estimate of the cost of a program in which some states presumably will opt in and opt out, but you have no idea which states, how large, how expensive, and how subsidized?