Barack Attack.

WASHINGTON (Aug. 1) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists even without local permission if warranted - an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

In the first place, Obama is absolutely right. If Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda have found a haven in Pakistan, we MUST go get them, and if our supposed "ally" refuses to help, he obviously isn't our ally.

And Musharraf is in his sixties and holding on to power rather tenuously. What happens when he dies or is deposed? You don't think Al Qaeda will actually make a play to get some REAL power? That's a nuclear country Al Qaeda has a foothold in. They actually HAVE WMDs.

BUT - I also want to draw attention to something that the press does constantly:

"Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists even without local permission if warranted - an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive."

The writer of the article can't possibly know that.

They make their guesses about candidates' motives part of the actual story, and repeat those guesses as fact - as though it isn't POSSIBLE that any candidate ever says something simply because he believes it. EVERYTHING must be viewed purely through the prism of political calculation.

The REPORTERS are that cynical and without principle, so their reporting includes the presumption that everybody else is, too.