I am looking at stories one, two and three at the Daily Beast. Senate Ratifies START treaty. Obama Signs DADT. Senate Passes 9/11 Health Bill. And that does not include the surprisingly well-received tax bill he got passed.
Is this not like the champion coming off the ropes near the end of his stamina (it seems)--then flying forth with a left right left that lands hard upon the Obamahaters' collective chins?
Does this not show a man resilient enough to come off the ropes with plans intact and executable? Almost by slipping through a closing portal, he emerged with these votes in his favor, first the tax bill, then three fairly major pieces of legislation the success of any of which no one was even talking about a month and a half ago.
This is akin, for what it is worth, to a third baseman down on his luck in the playoffs suddenly going 3 for 4 with several ribbies in a deciding contest. Kind of stuff stars are made of.
Anyone who forgot Obama is a Brainiac had better remember now. Whether you like him or not, he's got the bully pulpit and he's got more grey matter and fortitude than a dozen others like him. And this one-two-three salvo is the opening of Obama 2012.
We've always suspected Obama simply has to "not be lame" to be re-elected, given the Republicans' distinct lack of big-tentedness (Sarah: 30% and holding; Barbour: Confederate confederacy; Romney: Mormon with dog on car roof; Pawlenty: oh, that was last time, sorry; Huckabee: Christer homilies'll get you to the Arkansas statehouse but not the White House; Jindal: okay, as long as this is for extra credit; Rand Paul: too smart for you guys); but there have been times when, having lost his footing some, Obama may have appeared vulnerable to a creditable primary challenge. I believe now when people look back on years one and two,they will have to admit: Saved Economy From Depression On First Day in Office; Created Platform for a National Health; Appointed Two Super-smart New York Women to the High Bench; Kept Sharron Angle out of the Senate; Extended Middle-Class Tax Cuts; Ratified START; Ended DADT; Passed 9/11 Health Bill. 'Nuf?
Anyone who cares, and understands what it would be like with the Insane Clown Posse in charge, knows that, whether or not you feel he gets a big smiley face on his half-term paper, you will be swinging the lever for the big O come 2012.
Showing posts with label obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obama. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Avatar in Massachusettes
Yes, the name of the state is misspelled.
And here is a quote from science fiction editor Annalee Newitz (io9dotcom) via an article in the NYT:
"In movies like “Avatar,” Ms. Newitz wrote, “humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress,” until a white man “switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior.”
Whatever else viewers might say about Avatar--that it is anti-imperialist, pro-animist, anti-monotheism and all the rest--the fact is as Newitz implies: it's a white-guilt/redemption classic. Personally I found this theme rather obvious and that the obviousness of it detracted from the overall awe one could not help feeling for its complex visual beauty.
And now a perhaps tenuous but not, I think, altogether inappropriate segue to the Great Democractic Debacle in the Bay State where the now-forever-ignominious Ms. Coakley could not withstand the former nude male model's White Manly Pickup Truck onslaught in an election that could spindle National Health by allowing a Teabagger to take the place of the Great Healthcare Lion who recently and most ironically passed on just before he might vote on the Great Cause of his long tenure in that August Body.
In short, is it really possible that there is now a Palinesque male Junior Senator in the senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy? Wake up, ye thoughtful losers, for it has come to this. And many now say major health care reform, long and idiotically allowed to be held hostage by the GOP while an ineffectual near-supermajority of Democrats could not seem to do what any Republican Majority would have done (smash through whatever they wanted with 51 senate votes), may be in serious peril. Speaker Pelosi, facing us with an ever-less-believable rictus, says not to worry. However, if I am a fan of major health care reform, I am worried. And of course worried about the newly minted good fortune of the Grand Old Teabaggers--in "Massachusettes", where once a band of outraged taxpayers threw tea in the water dressed as "Indians" to protest levies of the Crown.
Let us now examine the manner in which the magnificently inept Coakley campaign misspelled the name of its own state in an ad during the campaign. And then let us think about the white-male-savior fantasy at the heart of What's-His-Name's unexpected victory.
The Hellenistic world, and especially the U.S.A. which is populated by all the peoples of the planet but governed by laws descendant from the Greek, has often been a theater of battle between pantheism and monotheism (to wit: Salem; slaughter of animist Native Americans; forced-Christianization of chained and shackled Africans). Monotheism has in this country been not only ascendant but unforgiving until quite recently (the 1960s), when all manner of thought not including a White Male Leader fairly exploded upon the general consciousness and wrecked the cut-grass and steak-for-dinner oppressiveness of the White Male Power Paradise.
It has gone poorly for the Traditional White Male ever since. Gone missing is his assumed throne at the pinnacle of creation as the landscape is re-shaped by powerful women, gay men and educated, powerful men of color . And now with an Articulate (please make careful note of the quote marks) "Negro" in the White House, the fortunes of the White Male may have come to seem almost permanently eclipsed.
But this White Male Monotheist is a fighting man if nothing else. His Templars took Jerusalem from the Saracens once, and today in America his Teabaggers are determined to take Washington from the Freaks and Geeks if it means the very destruction of the nation itself.
And here, in the cross-hairs, is poor Martha Coakley, unassuming Generic Female Candidate in what Democrats foolishly thought was a race they owned. This was the bluest of blue states after all--and this election was for the rightful Kennedy Seat! The trusty blue Commonwealth, it seemed to Dems, would elect a ham sandwich to that seat if the Dems told them to, would they not?
Not.
What has happened was this:
Martha early established her credentials as a nitwit and worse (by Teabagger lights), a female nitwit, by incorrectly feminizing the name of the state: Massachusettes (with that effete little extra "e" as if spelling "crepe suzettes"). Then she proceeded to assume, oddly like Hillary did not long ago, that the race was hers, and that there was no real need to compete.
Now here came the White Male Savior. And the guilt-ridden voters of Massachusetts, having allowed their state to help stain the purity of White Male Domination by helping elect a "different type" of man to the Presidency, saw their chance to "switch sides" and "save" themselves from a fate unendurable--that being a world ruled by laws signed by that fateful "Other": that guy with the near-unendurable name, Barack Hussein Obama.
And in his pickup truck he rode, Mr. Male Nude Model, and he was their Avatar, and they lived through him as he crunched and punched his way through the cobwebs of misspelling and ineptitude characterized by the inept and vague and miserable Coakley, and he won a Great Victory for the White Male and probably Monotheism by somehow convincing the N'avi of Massachusetts that he was one of them.
And that is how the Avatar came to Massachusettes.
And here is a quote from science fiction editor Annalee Newitz (io9dotcom) via an article in the NYT:
"In movies like “Avatar,” Ms. Newitz wrote, “humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress,” until a white man “switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior.”
Whatever else viewers might say about Avatar--that it is anti-imperialist, pro-animist, anti-monotheism and all the rest--the fact is as Newitz implies: it's a white-guilt/redemption classic. Personally I found this theme rather obvious and that the obviousness of it detracted from the overall awe one could not help feeling for its complex visual beauty.
And now a perhaps tenuous but not, I think, altogether inappropriate segue to the Great Democractic Debacle in the Bay State where the now-forever-ignominious Ms. Coakley could not withstand the former nude male model's White Manly Pickup Truck onslaught in an election that could spindle National Health by allowing a Teabagger to take the place of the Great Healthcare Lion who recently and most ironically passed on just before he might vote on the Great Cause of his long tenure in that August Body.
In short, is it really possible that there is now a Palinesque male Junior Senator in the senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy? Wake up, ye thoughtful losers, for it has come to this. And many now say major health care reform, long and idiotically allowed to be held hostage by the GOP while an ineffectual near-supermajority of Democrats could not seem to do what any Republican Majority would have done (smash through whatever they wanted with 51 senate votes), may be in serious peril. Speaker Pelosi, facing us with an ever-less-believable rictus, says not to worry. However, if I am a fan of major health care reform, I am worried. And of course worried about the newly minted good fortune of the Grand Old Teabaggers--in "Massachusettes", where once a band of outraged taxpayers threw tea in the water dressed as "Indians" to protest levies of the Crown.
Let us now examine the manner in which the magnificently inept Coakley campaign misspelled the name of its own state in an ad during the campaign. And then let us think about the white-male-savior fantasy at the heart of What's-His-Name's unexpected victory.
The Hellenistic world, and especially the U.S.A. which is populated by all the peoples of the planet but governed by laws descendant from the Greek, has often been a theater of battle between pantheism and monotheism (to wit: Salem; slaughter of animist Native Americans; forced-Christianization of chained and shackled Africans). Monotheism has in this country been not only ascendant but unforgiving until quite recently (the 1960s), when all manner of thought not including a White Male Leader fairly exploded upon the general consciousness and wrecked the cut-grass and steak-for-dinner oppressiveness of the White Male Power Paradise.
It has gone poorly for the Traditional White Male ever since. Gone missing is his assumed throne at the pinnacle of creation as the landscape is re-shaped by powerful women, gay men and educated, powerful men of color . And now with an Articulate (please make careful note of the quote marks) "Negro" in the White House, the fortunes of the White Male may have come to seem almost permanently eclipsed.
But this White Male Monotheist is a fighting man if nothing else. His Templars took Jerusalem from the Saracens once, and today in America his Teabaggers are determined to take Washington from the Freaks and Geeks if it means the very destruction of the nation itself.
And here, in the cross-hairs, is poor Martha Coakley, unassuming Generic Female Candidate in what Democrats foolishly thought was a race they owned. This was the bluest of blue states after all--and this election was for the rightful Kennedy Seat! The trusty blue Commonwealth, it seemed to Dems, would elect a ham sandwich to that seat if the Dems told them to, would they not?
Not.
What has happened was this:
Martha early established her credentials as a nitwit and worse (by Teabagger lights), a female nitwit, by incorrectly feminizing the name of the state: Massachusettes (with that effete little extra "e" as if spelling "crepe suzettes"). Then she proceeded to assume, oddly like Hillary did not long ago, that the race was hers, and that there was no real need to compete.
Now here came the White Male Savior. And the guilt-ridden voters of Massachusetts, having allowed their state to help stain the purity of White Male Domination by helping elect a "different type" of man to the Presidency, saw their chance to "switch sides" and "save" themselves from a fate unendurable--that being a world ruled by laws signed by that fateful "Other": that guy with the near-unendurable name, Barack Hussein Obama.
And in his pickup truck he rode, Mr. Male Nude Model, and he was their Avatar, and they lived through him as he crunched and punched his way through the cobwebs of misspelling and ineptitude characterized by the inept and vague and miserable Coakley, and he won a Great Victory for the White Male and probably Monotheism by somehow convincing the N'avi of Massachusetts that he was one of them.
And that is how the Avatar came to Massachusettes.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
One Hundred Years Ago. . .
. . .your great grandparents were in their prime (do you know who their parents were? and isn't it bone-chilling to realize you may not, and that your own full, passionate life may be subject to the same oblivion but a hundred years hence?).
Please read on, fellow mortal.
Your great grandparents, probably without understanding exactly why, were standing at the portals of a momentous period we have come to call "The American Century". That century has come to an end. The 21st got started with awful news from Dade County and then worse news from the corner of Liberty and Church in Lower Manhattan, followed by even worse news a couple of blocks south at the corner of Wall and Broad just across from where a certain American General was sworn in as the nation's first Commander in Chief. Obama may be President today, but he's inherited a deflated-balloon of a nation hissing out its remaining air in a way that sounds an awful lot like the mindless drone of tea-baggers and other ill-tempered opponents to common-sense.
But hope cannot be lost if we look back on what was going on a hundred years ago, when the prospects for the nation loomed great, but when the United States, culturally at least, was unsound and notably laggard--perhaps much as it is today.
Here are a few examples of what made the papers (ref: "America's Taste 1859 -1959, NYT Books):
1908: New York Camera Club Ousts Alfred Steiglitz
They accused him of malfeasance but he said the reason was they just objected to his realism. They called him and his followers "the Mop and Pail crew", mocking their penchant for photographing the city's streets and its people. For quite some time, cubism's forward-looking works on canvas could be seen only at Steiglitz' New York Studio. Incidentally, Picasso's earth-shaking "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" with its distorted monstrous nude ladies with African masks was revealed to a generally horrified public in 1906.
1906: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is panned by the critics but becomes a best-seller anyway.
"I aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach" said Sinclair (who also authored "Oil!" upon which the Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle "There Will Be Blood" was based). For those who don't know, "The Jungle" is a novel about labor injustice and woefully poor hygiene in the meatpacking industry. Apparently the latter descriptions were so disgusting that the public grew outraged and soon insisted upon, and got, the US government to inspect food processing and keep it at least effectively clean enough not to sicken any noticeable percentage of those who partook. Sinclair had in addition hoped to spur similar outrage at the labor malfeasance thereat, but as any Mexican working in a chicken-parts factory knows, this part of the outrage never became as popular with a feasting American public.
1903: Carrie A. Nation is jailed.
Her axe-wielding quote: "You have taken me in as a lamb but I shall come out as a lion". And thus was born the movement that would eventually become an ignominious chapter in our history known as Prohibition; and concomitantly we'd see the rise of a ruling class of Gangsters in America. What Carrie couldn't understand was that you can't stop people from ingesting what they want (see above) no matter what method with which you regale them or punish them. Carrie A. Nation, an Oklahoma girl, had in her later years decided, it seems, that Demon Alcohol was the ruin of lives and families and that alcohol-bars must be cut up with axes. She may have had a point. But it is a little known fact that she was equally and as vociferously against "fraternal orders" such as the Masons, the Odd-Fellows, and probably, if they had existed, Ralph Kramden's Raccoon Club. One imagines these groups were far more influential then than now--or perhaps we just don't realize what they are up to these days (Skull and Bones anyone?). I know I haven't a clue. Having discovered this latter nugget of information, I must admit, is forcing me to give old Carrie a second look.
Finally, and this is about inflation:
1909: Holbein Portrait sells for $400,000--a scandalous sum for a painting at the time.
Now of course we would be well into the multi-millions for same. Fifty million? Maybe. But $400,000! Today you might get a weatherbeaten Manhattan co-op with a view of the air shaft for that much, provided you could convince the bank you really didn't need the money in which case they would guardedly lend it to you (still owing all that TARP money to the government).
So, while we might still be driving the bus in the ditch, we can safely consider ourselves well ahead of our great grandparents in some ways. For instance, there is no chance they carried around supercomputers in their pockets. Nor would they have been lucky enough to be able to argue about universal health care (in an age when "dropsy" was a significant ailment).
In any case, why is everyone so excited about any of these? A hundred years from now it will all seem so quaint.
Please read on, fellow mortal.
Your great grandparents, probably without understanding exactly why, were standing at the portals of a momentous period we have come to call "The American Century". That century has come to an end. The 21st got started with awful news from Dade County and then worse news from the corner of Liberty and Church in Lower Manhattan, followed by even worse news a couple of blocks south at the corner of Wall and Broad just across from where a certain American General was sworn in as the nation's first Commander in Chief. Obama may be President today, but he's inherited a deflated-balloon of a nation hissing out its remaining air in a way that sounds an awful lot like the mindless drone of tea-baggers and other ill-tempered opponents to common-sense.
But hope cannot be lost if we look back on what was going on a hundred years ago, when the prospects for the nation loomed great, but when the United States, culturally at least, was unsound and notably laggard--perhaps much as it is today.
Here are a few examples of what made the papers (ref: "America's Taste 1859 -1959, NYT Books):
1908: New York Camera Club Ousts Alfred Steiglitz
They accused him of malfeasance but he said the reason was they just objected to his realism. They called him and his followers "the Mop and Pail crew", mocking their penchant for photographing the city's streets and its people. For quite some time, cubism's forward-looking works on canvas could be seen only at Steiglitz' New York Studio. Incidentally, Picasso's earth-shaking "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" with its distorted monstrous nude ladies with African masks was revealed to a generally horrified public in 1906.
1906: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is panned by the critics but becomes a best-seller anyway.
"I aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach" said Sinclair (who also authored "Oil!" upon which the Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle "There Will Be Blood" was based). For those who don't know, "The Jungle" is a novel about labor injustice and woefully poor hygiene in the meatpacking industry. Apparently the latter descriptions were so disgusting that the public grew outraged and soon insisted upon, and got, the US government to inspect food processing and keep it at least effectively clean enough not to sicken any noticeable percentage of those who partook. Sinclair had in addition hoped to spur similar outrage at the labor malfeasance thereat, but as any Mexican working in a chicken-parts factory knows, this part of the outrage never became as popular with a feasting American public.
1903: Carrie A. Nation is jailed.
Her axe-wielding quote: "You have taken me in as a lamb but I shall come out as a lion". And thus was born the movement that would eventually become an ignominious chapter in our history known as Prohibition; and concomitantly we'd see the rise of a ruling class of Gangsters in America. What Carrie couldn't understand was that you can't stop people from ingesting what they want (see above) no matter what method with which you regale them or punish them. Carrie A. Nation, an Oklahoma girl, had in her later years decided, it seems, that Demon Alcohol was the ruin of lives and families and that alcohol-bars must be cut up with axes. She may have had a point. But it is a little known fact that she was equally and as vociferously against "fraternal orders" such as the Masons, the Odd-Fellows, and probably, if they had existed, Ralph Kramden's Raccoon Club. One imagines these groups were far more influential then than now--or perhaps we just don't realize what they are up to these days (Skull and Bones anyone?). I know I haven't a clue. Having discovered this latter nugget of information, I must admit, is forcing me to give old Carrie a second look.
Finally, and this is about inflation:
1909: Holbein Portrait sells for $400,000--a scandalous sum for a painting at the time.
Now of course we would be well into the multi-millions for same. Fifty million? Maybe. But $400,000! Today you might get a weatherbeaten Manhattan co-op with a view of the air shaft for that much, provided you could convince the bank you really didn't need the money in which case they would guardedly lend it to you (still owing all that TARP money to the government).
So, while we might still be driving the bus in the ditch, we can safely consider ourselves well ahead of our great grandparents in some ways. For instance, there is no chance they carried around supercomputers in their pockets. Nor would they have been lucky enough to be able to argue about universal health care (in an age when "dropsy" was a significant ailment).
In any case, why is everyone so excited about any of these? A hundred years from now it will all seem so quaint.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
I was a Deluded Liberal
The tiny elections held last night loom large in the reconstruction of the Republican party even as the tiniest election of them all, in upstate New York, threaten to keep it confused and hobbled by divisive internal attacks from Valkyries like Sarah Palin. She and Dick Armey and the Teabagger Militia rolled in behind an ultra-conservative against a moderate Republican and thereby handed the long-red district to the blues.
But for Democrats, last night was, I believe, a watershed of a different type. For me, anyway, it proved that Obama has waited too long to put his positive stamp on the country; has deferred too much to others; has simply not been the bold leader many had hoped he'd be. And now I think he has let the GOP, which had been flat on its back in the first row of seats like a wrestler hove out of the ring, climb back between the ropes bloodied but eager (and strong enough) for a fight.
Let us review for a moment the health care issue. Perhaps it wasn't obvious until right now that the thing ought to have been wrapped up and delivered before the election. The message moderates will take from the pair of big GOP gubernatorial victories is that Obama may not be magical after all; and that they need not support him on health reform. I could be wrong, but I think Obama has let the moment pass. Thanks to his pusillanimous fellow Dems in the Senate (especially the no-account Harry Reid) and thanks even more to the ever-perfidious Lieberman (who seems perversely to enjoy ruining any laudable cause he can influence), I think health care is going to be lost like a ship foundering in heavy seas, and that reform will be found only in Davey Jones' locker.
Let us now review New Jersey if we must. What gave the Democrats the idea they could win with a guy from Goldman Sachs who talks like an undertaker and doesn't know how to tie on a seat belt at high speed? Corzine stank of all that stinks in this land--the cynical manipulation of events with mountains of ill-gotten cash--and the voters went for the Other Guy, who happens to be a member of the Party of Limbaugh. Nice going, Dems.
Finally let us review Afghanistan. The right thing is to get us the hell out of that historical destroyer of empires. How many times does a person have to see "The Man Who Would Be King" before he realizes Afghanistan is a lose-lose proposition? And yet we waste blood and treasure there as if bin Laden were somehow just down the next street awaiting capture. I know Obama never said he wanted out of Central Asia. But so what? Afghanistan only adds to the sense that the extremely historic election in 2008 has resulted in nothing of great note on the ground. And lets just not talk about Iraq for now.
Sure, the stimulus has worked somewhat. Sure, there's lip service and some progress on some fronts (gay rights, energy independence); but any garden variety Democrat could have done as much.
Maybe Obama needed a wake up call. It's just that I'm not sure I know who he is right now, and what he'll do once he wakes up.
But for Democrats, last night was, I believe, a watershed of a different type. For me, anyway, it proved that Obama has waited too long to put his positive stamp on the country; has deferred too much to others; has simply not been the bold leader many had hoped he'd be. And now I think he has let the GOP, which had been flat on its back in the first row of seats like a wrestler hove out of the ring, climb back between the ropes bloodied but eager (and strong enough) for a fight.
Let us review for a moment the health care issue. Perhaps it wasn't obvious until right now that the thing ought to have been wrapped up and delivered before the election. The message moderates will take from the pair of big GOP gubernatorial victories is that Obama may not be magical after all; and that they need not support him on health reform. I could be wrong, but I think Obama has let the moment pass. Thanks to his pusillanimous fellow Dems in the Senate (especially the no-account Harry Reid) and thanks even more to the ever-perfidious Lieberman (who seems perversely to enjoy ruining any laudable cause he can influence), I think health care is going to be lost like a ship foundering in heavy seas, and that reform will be found only in Davey Jones' locker.
Let us now review New Jersey if we must. What gave the Democrats the idea they could win with a guy from Goldman Sachs who talks like an undertaker and doesn't know how to tie on a seat belt at high speed? Corzine stank of all that stinks in this land--the cynical manipulation of events with mountains of ill-gotten cash--and the voters went for the Other Guy, who happens to be a member of the Party of Limbaugh. Nice going, Dems.
Finally let us review Afghanistan. The right thing is to get us the hell out of that historical destroyer of empires. How many times does a person have to see "The Man Who Would Be King" before he realizes Afghanistan is a lose-lose proposition? And yet we waste blood and treasure there as if bin Laden were somehow just down the next street awaiting capture. I know Obama never said he wanted out of Central Asia. But so what? Afghanistan only adds to the sense that the extremely historic election in 2008 has resulted in nothing of great note on the ground. And lets just not talk about Iraq for now.
Sure, the stimulus has worked somewhat. Sure, there's lip service and some progress on some fronts (gay rights, energy independence); but any garden variety Democrat could have done as much.
Maybe Obama needed a wake up call. It's just that I'm not sure I know who he is right now, and what he'll do once he wakes up.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
One More Invader Repulsed
Afghanistan--can you believe we fell for it?
I think it was Kipling who said something like "Woe betide the man who tries to hustle the East". And apologies to General Westmoreland if it wasn't him who indicated we might have to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it.
We should have left Afghanistan after it was clear Osama had left.
We should have devoted all of our military might (and, while it may have been oxymoronic, intelligence) to finding his cave in Waziristan or Pakistan or his warren of rooms in Peshawar, and then penetrating the complex with bunker-busting ordinance. We still should.
But it doesn't take 40,000 troops to do this--it might take a couple of thousand and just like any manhunt, it would eventually come to an end with the culprit Dillingered and lying dead with a somewhat surprised look on his face.
Having chased the cruel Taliban out but not having won the hearts and minds of the Afghans (who knew?), we have now joined the long list of invaders who have been repulsed or who are about to be repulsed, or at least to go home in a military form of tatterdemallion, without having achieved any objective.
To be fair to the President, he never said he was hoping to pull out of Afghanistan. But that was then. There's no good reason to stay there. And you knew he couldn't have said he wanted to pull out of there anyway during the campaign because then McCain would have clenched his teeth even tighter and maybe even would have convinced someone that Obama would make a poor Commander in Chief.
I don't want to make this a referendum on Obama--but it's time to quit fooling with Afghanistan. To heck with what General McChrystal says. Nobody elected him. He's a fighting man and he's telling the boss what it would take to win.
But we don't need to win there, and should get out before they kill more American soldiers for no good reason. We should just focus on Bin Laden--that's all.
Support the Troops in Afghanistan. Time to come home.
--Renaissance
I think it was Kipling who said something like "Woe betide the man who tries to hustle the East". And apologies to General Westmoreland if it wasn't him who indicated we might have to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it.
We should have left Afghanistan after it was clear Osama had left.
We should have devoted all of our military might (and, while it may have been oxymoronic, intelligence) to finding his cave in Waziristan or Pakistan or his warren of rooms in Peshawar, and then penetrating the complex with bunker-busting ordinance. We still should.
But it doesn't take 40,000 troops to do this--it might take a couple of thousand and just like any manhunt, it would eventually come to an end with the culprit Dillingered and lying dead with a somewhat surprised look on his face.
Having chased the cruel Taliban out but not having won the hearts and minds of the Afghans (who knew?), we have now joined the long list of invaders who have been repulsed or who are about to be repulsed, or at least to go home in a military form of tatterdemallion, without having achieved any objective.
To be fair to the President, he never said he was hoping to pull out of Afghanistan. But that was then. There's no good reason to stay there. And you knew he couldn't have said he wanted to pull out of there anyway during the campaign because then McCain would have clenched his teeth even tighter and maybe even would have convinced someone that Obama would make a poor Commander in Chief.
I don't want to make this a referendum on Obama--but it's time to quit fooling with Afghanistan. To heck with what General McChrystal says. Nobody elected him. He's a fighting man and he's telling the boss what it would take to win.
But we don't need to win there, and should get out before they kill more American soldiers for no good reason. We should just focus on Bin Laden--that's all.
Support the Troops in Afghanistan. Time to come home.
--Renaissance
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