The Vig

You, gentle reader, know I’ve supported Obama from the moment he announced for the presidency back in 2007.  And as big of an Obama fanboy as I am, even I think this Nobel thing is a little much.  At least it’s pre-mature.  He’s the third sitting US President to win the award.  At least the other two (Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919) had something concrete to show for their efforts.  Obama, to this point, has bupkis.  That’s not to say he won’t have anything in five or six years.  But seriously, the guy hasn’t been in office for a year yet.  Heck the election was less than a year ago.  This is just dumb.

I think what the Nobel people are saying is for the first time in a long time we have a sitting United States President who makes the world want to be a better place.  One who inspires every corner of the world.  We haven’t had one, arguably, since Kennedy.  It’s a rare thing and the world certainly recognizes it.  Unfortunately the Nobel Peace Prize has never been awarded on potential.  It’s been awarded on results.  Obama, to this point, has none.

Sidebar: The Right in this country is going to have an absolute tizzy over this today, citing the fact Arafat won the prize in 1994.  They’ll howl their demand that Obama renounce the prize and renounce Arafat.  What they won’t mention is that he shared the prize with two lions of Israeli politics, neither of whom have been asked to renounce their own prizes.  If they’re going to start pounding Obama over the head today, they should pound Perez too.

I’m proud of my president.  I’m hopeful he can fulfill this extraordinary potential.  There’s plenty of time in the future for rewarding and recognizing accomplishment.  I just don’t think that time is now.

One of the joys of Facebook for me has been connecting with other Snethens.  These are people with whom the only thing I share is a last name.  We frequent each other’s pages almost daily, sharing links and debating the issues of the day.  It’s been challenging for all of us, but what I really enjoy is we get to have a robust debate without yelling.  We’ll blast one another one moment and begin planning a trip together the next.  It’s seriously really cool.

The topic of the moment for us is the Afghan war and what’s taking Obama so damned long to make up his mind on McChrystal’s surge request.  As Carl Levin pointed out on NPR tonight, we gave the last president three months to figure out his new course in Iraq.  Why are we calling this president indecisive after just a few weeks?  Obama’s decision will have implications that will last decades (if you don’t believe me, watch the last fifteen minutes of Charlie Wilson’s War).  I would rather he takes his time before deciding how to proceed.

Anyway, tonight’s discussion got me thinking.  Actually, it crystallized what I’ve been thinking about this.  I wanted to share it.  It begins with an admonition that I was going to get long-winded.  I frequently get heckled for the length of my responses.  The quote is from another Snethen who was, I believe, quoting a soldier he’d found on-line.  The rest is me.

Here we go…

Be prepared…I’m gonna get a little wordy again.

“…he told us even in his campaign that this was the war that America should be in and he would do everything in his power to win it, using the advice of his commanders on the ground.”

What we’re watching, potentially, is a president who’s smart and confident enough in himself to, when presented with a fresh set of facts, change his mind. The last one clearly could not until he was presented with no other alternative in November 2006. And even then he took three months to re-evaluate. Now we want this president to turn on a dime based on what his commanders on the ground tell him. Again, it’s laughable to hear these demands of the new commander-in-chief, when those making them called similar demands treasonous just three years ago. This president is going to take his time and, I hope, make the correct decision.

The commanders on the ground should absolutely be listened to and their every request granted (again…three years ago). What McChrystal, I believe, is telling the president is “if this is the mission and policy you wish, then this is what I require to complete it”. It’s significantly more than the president expected. Perhaps staggeringly so. So now the president has a decision. Do we commit to the impossible at enormous cost to both life and treasure, or do we change the mission and see what the military says then? This, I believe, is what the president is trying to decide.

In my humble opinion, we cannot continue to fund and fight the present conflict in Afghanistan. Nor can we continue the fight in Iraq. Alone, either fight will surely bankrupt us. Both? It’s inconceivable. Period. It’s time to leave and focus on a new strategy. I’ve no idea what it looks like, but the present one is not sustainable.

Should the president choose this course, the other side will pounce. Simultaneously they will call him weak on defense while claiming his agenda is bankrupting us. As I’ve said before, you cannot both complain about the $1 trillion deficit while wishing to continue these wars. They’re joined at the hip. I don’t believe the Tea Partiers understand this. Or if they do, they don’t care. Instead they’re focused on 36 “czars” who are making in excess of $100k/year, as though that will put a dent in $1 trillion.

I hope the president can make this case by himself, because he’s not going to get any backing from his party in Congress. They’re completely useless. Both parties are, for that matter. But the Democrats, in particular, are devoid of spine. For me, the president is it.

Yes, to be honest, Obama has been a disappointment to me. But he’s a damn sight better than McCain would have been. At least Obama hasn’t shown a need to be the biggest swinging dick in town. And he’s still better than any Republican currently on the scene. Given the choice Obama has before him, I don’t think there’s a single Republican out there (besides Paul) who wouldn’t choose an Afghan surge despite its fiscal and mortal pitfalls.

This isn’t a military decision that Obama faces. It’s one of policy. The military is but one component. If he decides McChrystal’s plan is not worth the cost and chooses withdrawal instead, I hope his critics will support him. Afterall, one of the pro-troop choices I’m reading here is withdrawal. “Give ‘em what they need to do the mission, or get out.” That’s what you said, right? Given that choice, I say get out.

One of the great things about the iPhone has been the ability to read some of the country’s great newspapers right on my handset.  Among the apps available is one for the Wall Street Journal.  I check in every now and then just to see what the whack jobs on the editorial page have to say.  This morning they really outdid themselves.

At the end of an editorial whacking the Democratic Senate for their failure to cut off financial support for the John Murtha Airport in Pennsylvania, they slid in this nugget.

Mr. DeMint pleaded with his colleagues that “if we can’t cut funding for this project, we can’t cut anything in Washington” and that the Senate will have declared “there’s no such thing as waste, there’s no such thing as fraud and corruption.” He lost, but voters keeping score can add it to their mental tally of why we have a $1.6 trillion deficit.

As Harry Shearer would say, are you shitting me?  We’re talking about $150 million out of a $1.6 trillion deficit.  Put another way, it’s point-one-five billion out of a one-thousand-six-hundred billion dollar deficit.  What the Senate was trying to do this week was completely insignificant and ignores several elephants in the room.  I would say it’s like sacrificing a pack of gum a week when you’re spending five-times that daily at Starbucks.  But even that doesn’t do it justice.

Look, the $150,000,000 we’ve spent thus far on Murtha’s airport buys us about a day in Iraq.  You want to start taking a whack out of the $1.6 trillion, may I suggest we start by looking there.

Seems pretty simple to me.

Sullivan points us toward an interesting graph.  Basically reality is worse than the bank stress tests’ worst case scenario.  Ugh.

I voted for Obama because I genuinely believed he was a realist.  I’ve become increasingly disappointed with his version of reality.  The banks are quite obviously in trouble, from the big national boys all the way down to the building and loans down the street.  They all bet heavy on real estate and they all lost.  The faster we acknowledge this, the faster we can begin to recover.  Rather than allowing us to take the hit and maybe hope for a recovery in a year or two, he’s letting us slowly bleed, and that’s not right.

To be clear.  Despite my disappointment, Obama and the Democrats still have my support.  Unless there’s a major change within the Republican party and its supporters in the next four years, I expect to vote for Obama again in 2012.  The Republican party still shows zero interest in governing seriously.  Because of this, an ineffective Obama is much preferable to a know-nothing like Palin or a poll-driven chameleon like Romney.

Madison and Jefferson both got 2 terms.  If Obama gets two terms, he’s is on pace for a few north of 70.  Not quite in the same league as the greats, but still pretty damned impressive.  Better than Reagan, at least.

Hat tip, and all praises to: Sullivan.

I watched a debate on Facebook several weeks ago between a couple of grade school friends of mine. One, a conservative Republican, the other a liberal Democrat. The Republican at one point complained that Obama just stood for everything he was against. My Democrat friend replied, “welcome to my last 8 years”. It was an aha moment for me. It probably shouldn’t have been. Losing has consequences. It’s what the Republicans kept telling us during the Bush years. Now they’ve lost and they can’t handle the consequences.  It’s tough to find any sympathy for them right now.

The thing is, I think there is a space right now for a spirited debate about the role of government.  What we do and don’t want it doing.  I would love to get out there and mix it up.  Unfortunately, one side of the debate is completely bereft of meaningful ideas beyond tired bromides and vague complaints about “Potato Day”.

They’ve been left sputtering to themselves and among themselves.  It’s a fascinating and dangerous thing to watch.  The Republicans desperately need someone to come in and talk them back from the ledge.  Unfortunately they drummed that leader out of their ranks years ago, whoever she was.

Tom Ricks had a reading at Powell’s tonight. To call it depressing would be an understatement. Driving home, I just wanted to crawl into a hole. In Ricks’ opening remarks, he laid out his case for the failure of the surge. Yes, it’s tamped down the violence, but it hasn’t created the political stability the president promised in 2007. By that measure, Ricks says, the surge has failed.

What’s worse, there’s still no way out of Iraq. Not now, and maybe not ever.

Here he is six weeks ago discussing many of his points with Jon Stewart.

Stewart went on to call Ricks “Mr. Sunshine”.  He ain’t kidding.

Early on Ricks said it’s unconscionable that we might stay, but what would happen if we left would be even worse.  As I recall, that’s what Ricks said when he was here in 2007.  There are still no good options for us getting out of there.  And what’s worse, is we’re going to go broke by staying.  As he started to talk about the Romans and their excursions into Mesopotamia back in the day, I started to wonder if we weren’t headed down the same path.  One which will ultimately lead to our end.  That’s why I titled this Eat, frink, and be merry.  I don’t know that we have another option at this point.

He made a few other interesting points.

• Colin Powell’s political skills as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff scared the crap out of the civilian military leadership.  So much so that every succeeding CJCS has been weaker politically than the last.  He described them as pliant.  He did have a few good things to say about current CJCS Mullen, who is a Gates appointee.  Perhaps we’re in good hands going forward.  But he seemed to blame Myers and, to a lesser extent, Pace for not standing up to Bush 43 when they should have.
• He believes we’ll be out of Pakistan and Afghanistan long before we’re out of Iraq.  Ricks believes India and Pakistan are on a collision course.  India, he says, has been very restrained in their response to the Mumbai attacks.  It can’t last.  At some point he believes India will strike at Pakistan’s nuclear arsinal and we (the US military) won’t want to be in the neighborhood when that happens.  So we have that to look forward to.
• Ricks believes Obama has been rolled by the military.  He sees Obama’s lips move, but hear’s George Bush’s words.  It pains me to hear that as an Obama supporter, but I think he’s right.  However, even Ricks acknowledged the economy has got to be priority 1 for Obama right now.  So we continue Bush’s policy for another year.  The more I look at Iraq, the more I think we’ve hit a pause button there.  We can come back to it once we’ve cleaned up our other messes.  Is that an apt analogy?  It’s as close as any.
• Ricks wonders what a troop drawdown may mean.  I missed the first part of the story he told to illustrate his point.  The conclusion, however, involved American planes being called in on a strike which was called by, I believe, either a Kurdish or a Turkish officer.  The American planes called off the strike after they arrived because they didn’t see anything wrong on the ground.  Without American eyes on the ground, how are we going to know who and where the bad guys are?  This was our problem leading up to the invasion.  We didn’t have any idea what awaited us on the ground.

The one question I wish I’d asked, was based on an observation he made about the political and military situation in Iraq should the US leave.  He painted the result pretty starkly.  He said the Turks wouldn’t allow an independent Kurdistan on their southern border, so the Turks would come in after we left.  The Iranians would come from the east to help out the Shiites.  And because of that, the Saudis would come in to help out the Sunnis.  It would turn into a three-way regional war, and it would be our fault.  Another reason we cannot leave.  So I wonder, given all the different regional players in the area, what made Saddam successful?  That is to say, we’ve popped the top on a regional can of worms that up until a few years ago, one guy was able to contain.

Now I know the short answer is brute force.  Tom Friedman made a fantastic point in From Beruit to Jerusalem when he said the one thing everyone respected in that neighborhood was brute force.  You may not be on the same side as the big dog, but at least you knew where you stood.  But how did Saddam manage to climb to the top and consolidate his power?  And won’t this be the template for the next guy, whether it’s Maliki or Sadr or someone else?  This is what I wonder, because at some point there’s going to be a Next Saddam.

As depressing as the talk was, and it was relentless, he did throw out a glimmer of hope.  I wish he would have made the point more forcefully and not simply used it as a throw-away line.  Our way out of this is by ending our need for foreign oil.  Period.  He called Friedman a pompous ass before declaring he was right about our need for renewable energy.  He suggested if we’d invested the money we’d spent to date on Iraq on renewable energy instead, we would have all driven to the talk in cars powered by water. A stretch, to be sure.  But it’s something we need to get serious about.  And now.

Ricks’ talk was filmed by the website pdxjustice.org.  I’ll post a link to it here when they have it up.  Just make sure you don’t have any sharp objects around when you see it.

One gets the feeling Ed Henry sent an aide back to the Oval Office after the presser and had them attempt to retrieve his manhood for him. Tomorrows question will be “were they successful?”

I guess I’m going to be the only one to stick up for Peter DeFazio regarding this airport incident of his.  Look, we all know air travel post-9/11 blows.  It’s a complete hassle and a waste of everyone’s time.  But we also know it’s not going to change without some sort of Congressional mandate.  They, of course, don’t want to do it because of the political backlash of looking soft on terrorism.  And so here we are.

The only way we had any hope of changing things was to get someone in power pissed off enough about how they were treated to actually go do something.  Well, hopefully that’s what happened to Congressman DeFazio earlier this week.  Was he a dick during screening?  I certainly hope so.  And I certainly hope he follows through on his promise to review procedures.  It would be a welcome change.