From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On the speech excerpts released ahead of President Obama’s appearance at West Point last night:

Well, it does have the sound and the structure of the surge in Iraq in 2007. It is a surge. Our commanders have a reasonable confidence in its success. They’re not 100 percent confident, but then again in Iraq, it was also a chancy deal.
The real difference here — and I think the troubling element here and probably the most important element — is how much the commander-in-chief is committed to success in this war.
With Bush, there was no question. I went back. I had a look at the speech he gave in announcing the surge [in Iraq]. There were no timelines, no essential conditions other than the Iraqis supporting us in the surge and not restricting our movement. No talk of withdrawal or timetables.
With Obama, what you are getting is a call to war with an uncertain trumpet. When you announce that in 18 months we are beginning our withdrawal, what are you signaling to our allies in Afghanistan, our allies in NATO, and those on the ground, in the field, who are wavering? That in 18 months, the Americans are going to start to leave, and you will be left naked against the Taliban who will be angry if you helped the Americans during the 18 months.
I think 2011 is a signal to his left. It’s a way to placate his left and a way to say, “Hold on. Give me a year-and-a-half, and I will get us out of here.” The problem is this [that] if he cannot give a speech without placating his left early on — before the spike in casualties, which we know is going to happen, and before the going gets really rough — if he is already conceding and sending a signal of weakness in order to hold his own left, what is he going to do in six months or a year when the going (as in Baghdad, that surge) got very tough?

On the deficit neutrality of the Senate health-care bill:

It is done with trickery. It [total cost] is under $900 billion if the benefits are only going to be offered for about half of the decade.
But over a normal decade, if you start in 2014, the cost of the Senate proposal will be between $1.8 trillion and $2.5 trillion, depending on how you count it, which is just monstrous at a time when we are doubling our deficit outside of health care in the next five years and tripling in over the next ten.
I think that is the real reason why there is this public concern. It is not only [about] how it will affect the individual. It is also a sense that this is a huge entitlement. We knew the history of health-care entitlements. They always outrun projections by a factor of 10 or 20 or 30.