Counting My Chickens..

Hooray for the new economy!

Considering I was up at 5:20am to drive a student to the airport and am still groggy (and now behind on my work), I'm in a very positive frame of mind.  Which is weird.

First, the more I read Bondad's blog, the more it looks like we are headed for the real end of the recession.  All the leading indicators look good and we're even having hints of major new hiring.  Hooray!

Second, unless the House manages to pull some crazy monkeyshines, I think the tax deal will become the tax bill and that will be that.  Hopefully, we have bought two years of economic recovery from this.  Combined with the news above, I actually have some hope.  Or change I can believe in.  One of those.

Third, when the tax deal was first brokered, I said that if the tax deal led to START ratification and DADT repeal, that would constitute an acceptable trade-off as part of the plan.  START really shouldn't matter with the influx of new GOP Senators - it should be ratified unanimously... OK, Coburn, DeMint and Paul can sit it out - but it needs to be ratified as soon as possible.   

The possibility that Joe Lieberman - a man I openly loathe - might have brokered a deal to end DADT is interesting.  In fact, there are many reasons I hate Joe Lieberman, but one is his fetish for "bipartisanship" over "good legislation".  It was annoying as hell during the HCR debate.  Of course there are other reasons, including the fact that he's a liar, a warmonger and a hypocrite, that I dislike him, but I'll give him credit if he gets this done.  And if he does get it done, it will be because of his absurd fetish for bipartisanship.

I will also enjoy watching the heads explode over at Daily Kos Troll.  They have been whining about DADT since 1/20/09.  If Lieberman is the one who actually brings it in for a landing, and it also vindicates Obama's lame duck strategy... Well, I'm sure it won't change one mind over there.

Fourth, the Pentagon review of Afghanistan shows that Obama is doing the same thing as Bush, except completely opposite.  Bush fixed the intelligence to lead us into the war in Iraq.  Obama is fixing it to get us OUT of the war in Afghanistan.  Look, it's a whitewash.  Afghanistan MIGHT have been fixed if we spent 2002-2006 focused relentlessly on that benighted country.  But we didn't and it won't.  We have to get out.

Obama fulfilled his campaign pledge to increase our troop commitment to Afghanistan.  He launched his own little Cambodia by sending a wave of drone attacks into Waziristan on the Pakistan side of the border.  And when he did so, he said the commitment was NOT open ended.  So, now he's going to start withdrawing troops in July.

I hate to dwell on the anger at Daily Kos (and I can't imagine what FireDogLake is like these days), but it's striking how they are automatically assuming that Obama was going to betray them on Afghanistan, betray them on HCR, betray them on financial reform, betray, betray, betray.  They still assume that he's going to cave on Afghanistan and still say we're "at war in Iraq", when we're really not.  They just assume that he's a betrayal machine.

So when he made compromises and did the necessary things that have to be done in a democracy, they inflated those acts of compromise into treachery.  

In fact, he was simply and methodically fulfilling campaign promises.  One after another.  

Now, I'm still not happy about the absence of torture trials or the ending of some of our more ridiculous overreactions to 9/11, the fact is, he promised to end waterboarding, not to frogmarch Cheney into the docket.  I may not like it, but that's ultimately MY problem.

It will be interesting if we are seeing 7% and falling unemployment and significant reductions in American overseas military commitments by the winter of 2012.  I'm assuming that Obama will then use the 2012 election to run on tax reform that takes less from the middle and working class and more from the rich, including the closing of loopholes.  

I'm assuming this, because it's what the dude says he will do.  

And so far, for better or worse, he's been remarkably true to his word.