Barack Obama, while still in the Illinois legislature, said, "I'm not opposed to all war. I'm opposed to stupid wars."
Well, now we know how wrong he was---about himself. It turns out President Obama is in favor of stupid wars.
Within a year many more American troops will be in Afghanistan and many more Americans will die for stupid reasons. Just as importantly, many, many Afghani citizens,will die, innocent of everything except being in the way of the American war machine. We even have a term for them: collateral damage. And we will seldom hear about them except for the work of brave researchers who show us the costs of our inhumanity.
The picture of the President hailing a sea of West Point cadets and smiling from ear to ear nauseates me. Some in that sea will die for no reason because of this decision made in stupidity.
What a picture for the 2010 elections
By almost unanimous consensus among real experts there are somewhere between 100 to 300 Al Qaeda terrorists, most of them in Pakistan. And for this dire threat we deploy 30,000 more troops to a huge and indifferent nation about which we know almost nothing, just as the British and the Russians did. And because of our stupidity the numbers of Al Qaeda will increase and instability in Pakistan will increase.
The president is a smart man but not a brave man. He is driven by poll numbers and the logic of the sectionalism which Rahm Emmanuel sold to the Democratic Party over the past 10 years. Rahm Emmanuel recruited many of the so-called Blue Dog Democrats in Southern and border states so that we could control the House and the Senate and the White House.
Today, because of their power to make or deny a majority, we are now doing pretty much the same thing that George Bush did: using war to win elections, kowtowing to generals, retreating into state secrecy, and giving inordinate attention to the handful of Blue Dogs in the Senate who do not let a day go by without biting the hand that courts them.
Now that we will have 100,000 troops within the next year in Afghanistan, just in time for the 2010 elections, does anyone really believe that we will then start drawing down the troops?
I have lived through Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), and each time we were told that more troops is the solution, and each time this turned into a horrible mistake.
There was another way, a more honorable way. Once elected Obama could have fought harder and smarter for the things we really should believe in and not just universal health care. We could have fought for real reforms on Wall Street but then, where would all the money for Democratic candidates come from.
We could have fought for a tragically overdue overhaul of the nation's infrastructure but the Blue Dogs and the Republicans are determined to allow America's future to be buried under the legacy of endless war, endless tax cuts, endless stalemates over abortion, all because of 40 seats or so in the House and 7 or 8 in the Senate. We could have fought for bringing the troops home and getting the hell out of the Middle East.
The right wing that exists in both parties has forced the Democrats to cave, time and time again.
My wife Carole took her Obama sticker off her car yesterday. I took mine off some time ago.
I can 't wait until the next robo-call I get from the DNCC. The Democrats will not get one dime from us until this stops.
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