DOES GEN. POWELL REGRET? - AT 6:03 P.M. ET:  I've always been baffled by Colin Powell.  By the usual accounts, he was a fine military officer...until he started mixing military with political decisions, and became the consummate bureaucrat.  Last year Powell burned up his prestige by entering national politics and endorsing Barack Obama.  Now he seems to be having some second thoughts, or some thoughts, as Cheri Jacobus, writing in The Hill, notes:

“We can’t pay for it all!”

Colin Powell, a powerful ally of President Obama, rather astonishingly uttered this truth last weekend about Obama’s job performance.

The piece asks this question:

Just what part of candidate Obama’s agenda of big government, big taxes and redistribution of wealth did Powell not understand? Or, as many suspect, was he so blinded by the celebrity of Obama that he threw common sense out the window and joined in the mindless, meaningless chant of “Yes we can!”?

And...

Colin Powell now claims that he “never would have believed that we would have budgets that are running into the multitrillions of dollars, and we are amassing a huge, huge national debt that, if we don’t pay for it in our lifetime, our kids and grandkids and great-grandchildren will have to pay for it.”

Really??? He never would have believed the most liberal senator in Washington would spend, spend, spend?

COMMENT:  Powell's credibility on non-defense issues is, to put it mildly, marginal.  He still wears Teflon armor on defense and foreign policy, for some ridiculous reason.  He escaped all blame for mistakes in Iraq, and his chief deputy, Richard Armitage, was ultimately revealed as the man who blew Valerie Plame's cover.  There's a time to go into private life.  Maybe that time, for the always dignified Gen. Powell, is now.

July 10, 2009