Pawlenty will be speaking at the Tea Party summit along with fellow potential presidential contenders Ron Paul and Herman Cain.

“We believe it is every citizen’s duty to defend America’s founding principles,” the summit website states. “That’s why one of the Tea Party Patriots’ goals is to gain the support of 60% of American citizens for the three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets.”

“This summit will be an important opportunity for Tea Party Patriots to come together to celebrate and recommit to the ideals and values that are responsible for the dramatic victories in the November election,” Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, said in a statement. “We’re delighted Gov. Pawlenty, Rep. Paul and Mr. Cain understand the importance of debating and discussing these fundamental issues.”

Event organizers have also included this welcome video:

Pawlenty will also be at Vanderbilt University in Nashville for the annual Impact Symposium, which begins March 22. Pawlenty will be talking about “Bridging the Gap: America’s Middle Class.”

Kristol cleans up today by putting a spin on Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) “Waterloo” remarks:

Last night’s victory was the culmination of Obama’s health care effort, which has been his version of  Napoleon’s Russia campaign. He won a short-term victory, but one that will turn out to mark an inflection point on the road to defeat, and the beginning of the end of the Democratic party’s dominance over American politics. Last night was Obama’s Borodino. Obama’s Waterloo will be November 6, 2012.

Kristol calls a “repeal” campaign a “one-item Contract With America,” which looks like hyperbole if, as polling suggests, anger at the bill has already peaked and started to simmer down.

Ben Smith has a letter signed by a coalition of Republican legal mainstays, including Rivkin and Casey, denouncing Keep America Safe’s most recent ad, terming it “a shameful series of attacks” on people who upheld the “American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients [which] is at least as old as John Adams’s representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre.” Other signatories include, of all people, Cully Stimson, the Pentagon official in charge of detainee policy who resigned for exactly the same offense that the Cheneyites committed and the letter condemns. Yes, they’ve lost that guy.

And they know it. Smith cites Bill Kristol, a board member of Keep America Safe, implausibly spinning the ad as an attempt to merely raise questions about disclosure — which itself suggests that the Justice Department lawyers did something untoward, something a Founding Father disputes — and not impugning the loyalty of the people the ad called the “al-Qaeda Seven.” That sounds like an attempt at a face-saving retreat, with Kristol’s attacks on the critics of the ads acting as little more than suppressing fire. The question now becomes whether Keep America Safe’s toxic reputation remains with it the next time it attempts to attack the patriotism of the Obama administration.

Though the Oslo speech follows others that have inspired even his critics, this was Obama’s most presidential. It marked the moment when Obama became a leader, defined as an individual who chooses the hard road because he believes it is the right one.

Bill Kristol, paying a high compliment, compares the speech to President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address — the post-9/11, post-invasion of Afghanistan apogee of his power and philosophy. Sarah Palin endorsed the speech in an amusingly self-serving way that Ben Smith noticed – amusing because a constant critique of Obama on the right is that he personalizes issues too much.

As a point of comparison, it’s not unusual for conservative radio show host Laura Ingraham to interrupt Obama clips on her radio show and sneer “me, me, me, me!”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Gen. Stanley McChrystal (WDCpix, Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

[GOP1]Over two days of hearings with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of CentCom, Republican members of Congress settled on a common line of questioning. Did the general have everything he needed to win? Did he have everything he asked for? Was President Barack Obama’s proposed July 2011 deadline for the beginning of a troop withdrawal feasible?

“I have heard that your request of the president was anywhere from 10,000 to 80,000 additional troops,”said Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), during the morning hearings on the House side. “We have not been given your request. All we’ve had to go on is what we’ve heard.”

The afternoon’s questioning in the Senate took on the same tone. “We’ve announced a date divorced from conditions on the ground when we will start to withdraw our troops,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), kicking off his party’s line of questioning. “It doesn’t matter whether we call it a cliff or a ramp or anything else. It’s still an exit sign, and it sends the wrong signal to our friends and our enemies.” Over the course of a long day, McChrystal reiterated his support for the president’s decision, but Republicans got statements on the record about the malleable nature of the proposed July 2011 and cast some doubt on whether the general was getting everything he needed. For the conservative military analysts who’d spent the year consolidating unconditional Republican support for the war, it was a mixed success.

As the Obama administration closes its first year, Republicans have staked out a combative position on the issue that gives the president the most trouble with his restive liberal base. Beginning in March, Republicans and foreign policy hawks whose influence had waned at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency began to argue that the opposition party’s role in Afghanistan policy would be to argue for a sustained commitment. In the summer and fall, as Republicans saw more political openings against the president, they balanced criticism of his approach with avowed support for a troop increase. As Gen. McChrystal departs Washington, Republicans and conservative military analysts are confident that they’ve played a role in the president’s decision and set themselves up for the debate to come.

“Things are going pretty well right now because the Obama administration realized that the American people want McCrystal to make these decisions,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) told TWI. Referring to the role Republicans have played in challenging the Obama administration not to back down from a troop surge, Inhofe added that “a lot of that’s our doing.”

Quietly, other Republicans share Inhofe’s opinion. “I think the criticism had the effect of keeping pressure on, and keeping people focused on Afghanistan,” said one GOP aide in the Senate. “Now we’re focused on the success of the strategy. Politically, as far as we’re concerned, the past is the past.”

According to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday, Republican voters are, as they have been, the strongest supporters of the war in Afghanistan. Seventy-one percent of them say that fighting the war is the “right thing.” However, only 36 percent say they support President Obama’s handling of the war. That’s more support than the president gets from Republicans on other issues–only 21 percent support his foreign policy in general.

The Republican approach to Afghanistan was telegraphed at the start of the year, most publicly with the launch of the Foreign Policy Initiative–a PR-savvy think tank led by Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol, scholar and surge architect Frederick Kagan, and former Defense Department spokesman Dan Senor. The March 30 launch of the new think tank was a festival of praise for President Obama–he made, according to Kagan, a “gutsy and correct” decision in sending 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan in February. The think tank’s goal, said Kagan, was the formation of “a consensus to commit to Afghanistan.”

According to Jamie Fly, the executive director of FPI, the consensus held then and is holding now, especially among Republicans. “On the Hill, a lot of what we do, laying out what the case should be on foreign policy–a lot of our messaging is followed quite avidly,” said Fly. “The hope is that people there will be less likely to be critical of the policy if we’re not critical of the policy.”

Between March and this week, however, the Republican approach to Afghanistan was limned with criticism of President Obama. At McChrystal’s confirmation hearing in June, Republicans voiced support for his strategy in Afghanistan and then moved onto other issues, such as U.S. relations with Colombia and the securing of loose nuclear weapons. Weeks later, on Meet the Press, McCain framed the strategy in Afghanistan as McChrystal’s to run as Congress and the White House gave him what he needed.

“General McChrystal may say we need more troops,” said McCain. “Let’s tell the American people how tough it is. Let’s tell them what’s at stake. And I want to work with the president and make sure we win this thing.”

In September, after the news that McChrystal had submitted a report on Afghanistan that asked for more troops, the Republican argument took on a harder edge. The president’s deliberation over an Afghanistan strategy, said former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, was a “slow-motion trainwreck.” In the most widely-circulated criticism, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused the White House of “dithering” over whether or not to send more troops, a charge that reporters latched onto in the month between that comment and the president’s announcement.

The most quietly influential criticism of the White House, however, may have been FPI’s September 7 letter, signed by Sarah Palin and other Republican influentials, urging the president–with some sarcastic language that recalled the 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group–to “fully resource this effort” and “do everything possible to minimize the risk of failure.” This, according to strategists, helped inform months of Republican criticism that was critical of the policy without becoming overly partisan. Cheney’s “dithering” attack, said Fly, was a rare (if influential) “wavering” of rock-solid conservative support for the president on Afghanistan.

Since the president’s announcement of the 30,000 troop surge, Republicans have refined their criticism to the areas that came up in this week’s hearings while pledging support for the policy overall. The only visible break from the GOP’s Afghanistan stance came when Rep. Josh Chaffetz (R-Utah), a freshman from Utah, proposed bringing the troops home at a high-profile speech in his home state. Chaffetz’s argument, however, was perfectly in line with Republican criticism of Obama’s decision-making process and of the over-arching argument that the president wasn’t listening to generals. “We can win any war but only with the president’s full commitment to the mission,” Chaffetz wrote in a December 8 op-ed explaining his stance. “Absent such a commitment, our presence in Afghanistan does nothing more than endanger our troops, compromise our readiness, and waste our money.”

The rest of the GOP, with no time for a “bring the troops home” message, have found their footing in critical questions about the policy. On Tuesday, Inhofe prodded McChrystal to agree that the July 2011 timeline is tied to “the conditions on the ground” and “not a calendar decision.” James Cay Carafano, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told TWI that Republicans needed to do more to “get it on the record that this is a risky strategy,” to find out whether the White House passed on a recommendation for more troops, and to undermine the idea that America could leave Iraq before the job is done.

“If things go well, no one’s going to care about the deadline,” said Carafano. “A couple people from Code Pink will run around and nobody else will give a damn.”

Republican messaging on the decision is still in the early stages. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a conservative House Republican from Colorado, answered Obama with a statement praising the decision but hitting the president on two issues — floating a possible start to withdrawal in 2011 and having the audacity to talk about how the war must be honestly funded. “This President has shown no fiscal restraint whatsoever for the past year and now he is pushing for an unaffordable healthcare scheme,” said Lamborn. “His concern for the costs of this war seems insincere at best.”

But the Republicans, I think, will be a loyal opposition. They will support the president. The president simply needs to be patient, give the — General Petraeus and General McChrystal know what they’re doing.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), The Wall Street Journal, today:

Mr. Obama may need Republicans to back his latest troop increase to make up for Democratic antiwar defections. The GOP, however, will question any decision that falls short of Gen. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops, said Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.). In a phone interview from Afghanistan, where he and other lawmakers were visiting, Mr. Price was skeptical of what he feared would be half measures to try to please both parties. “If what you’re trying to do is to please all people, than that might not make any sense,” he said.

Obama’s troop increase — his second this year — is probably going to total around 30,000 combat troops. Then the administration is going to the NATO ministerial to seek another 10,000. Someone get that congressman a calculator, because I’d like to see how that adds up to a half-measure. But if this is going to be the Hill the Republican quasi-opposition/quasi-support for the Afghanistan war wants to die on, far be it for me to stand in its way.

Way back in mid-2002, when the debate over invading Iraq was reaching its height, the media was full of stories about skepticism from the uniformed military about the wisdom of invading Iraq. There was a line of argument, mostly pushed by retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, that diminished the credentials of invasion advocates for their lack of service. And so the Weekly Standard put on its cover a review of a (rather good) book by Eliot Cohen, ‘Supreme Command‘, that argued, in the words of the Standard’s headline, ‘War Is Too Important to Be Left to the Generals.’ (President George W. Bush professed, after some prompting, to have read and absorbed it.) The piece, like the book, argued for increased civilian involvement in military affairs. And it was unafraid to place the book’s argument in the context of the looming Iraq war:

But they will have to get there someday if [Bush] is to keep his promise of regime change in Iraq. “Time is not on our side,” he said in his State of the Union speech on January 29. And does anyone take seriously the proposal, advanced by opponents of action against Iraq, that things will be just fine if we can get some general to overthrow Saddam in a coup?

To find a workable plan for action against Iraq, Bush is going to have to act more like Cohen’s supreme commanders than he has so far, and he is going to have to give full backing to Rumsfeld’s efforts as well. War is too important to be left entirely to the generals. It is time for the supreme commander to command.

So remember that the next time Kristol and his friends tell you that they always opposed Donald Rumsfeld and his “just enough troops to fail” approach to Iraq. But more substantively, remember it the next week, as the GOP attempts to drive a wedge between Obama and his generals. After all, even those generals say that a purely military approach to Afghanistan is doomed to failure.

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know – no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice – in this world, and the next.

Although this paragraph will get the conservatives howling about political correctness:

This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in a time of certain danger. They are part of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.  They have served tour after tour of duty in distant, different and difficult places. They have stood watch in blinding deserts and on snowy mountains. They have extended the opportunity of self-government to peoples that have suffered tyranny and war. They are man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and stations – all Americans, serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.

What it also sounds like is … Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Dana Priest reports:

The Army psychiatrist believed to have killed 13 people at Fort Hood warned a roomful of senior Army physicians a year and a half ago that to avoid “adverse events,” the military should allow Muslim soldiers to be released as conscientious objectors instead of fighting in wars against other Muslims.

At least we know now that extremists of all stripes agree that U.S. Muslims shouldn’t serve in the U.S. military, an institution through which so many Muslim-Americans have heroically given their lives for their country. The more polite version of this rancid argument is provided by none other than Bill Kristol.