From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On the Fox News report that the White House is planning, against the wishes of commanders, to pull out all but about 3,000 troops from Iraq at the end of the year:

There is a great irony here because it was the Democrats who for years assailed the Bush administration for not supplying sufficient troops in Iraq and that, as a result, it was difficult to protect our troops and to achieve the mission. And they were in large part correct.
But now we’ve had eight years of experience with that and in Afghanistan. We know that it’s dangerous to do a mission without the proper number of troops. As we heard, the generals recommended between 20,000 to 25,000. They may have settled for 10 or 15 [thousand]. Three [thousand] is an extremely small number.
Here is the problem. Once you have a number that small, almost anything they do will be protecting themselves – which is militarily illogical. If you are going to do a lot of work to protect a small number of troops in a hostile zone — protect them at home. That lesson was learned by the Reagan administration in Lebanon where we had a very small number of troops. We stuck them in the airport as a “presence.” It was not large enough to actually effect anything on the ground but it was enough to attract Hezbollah. And we know what tragedy actually ensued.
I am afraid that would be the outcome with a small contingent [in Iraq] that wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything on the ground within Iraq.
I think it’s either what the generals are recommending — or zero.

On Teamsters President James Hoffa’s profane remarks on the Tea Party at the Labor Day rally in Detroit that President Obama later spoke at:

I think the only story here, the real story, is the cosmic hypocrisy of the Democrats. …
When we had the shootings in Tucson … which were obviously the act of a psychotic mad man — I remember saying that at the very early hours of the drama. It was obviously so. And in fact a court has found that the shooter is a paranoid psychotic. It was obvious at the beginning.
And yet for four days there was unrelenting vitriol from the left — some [from] elected representatives, some commentators, [some] columnists — how this was caused by the — somehow the climate. In fact, a front page story in the New York Times … not an editorial, a reporting story –spoke about the “climate” [of violence] which had been created.
It was nonsense from the beginning. I’ll remind you that the president, even though he spoke about civil discourse at the ceremony a week later, allowed these attacks on the right to go on for four days without saying a word. And it’s the president who … [then] all of a sudden became a champion of civil discourse.
Here’s the head of a union, an ally of his, speaking in these terms: taking out the opposition. And remember, this is the head of a union with its own history, a man called Hoffa with his own family history. The president, as [Jay] Carney indicated, spoke 20 minutes after [Hoffa] on the same stage — and said nothing.
I think the real story is double standards. Civil discourse is a one-way street if you’re a Democrat.