Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

OBAMA LIED TO ME AGAIN!!!

Peace on earth?  F**k that.

So, it appears that Obama will discuss progress in Afghanistan and conclude that we will begin drawing down troops right in schedule.

The link is to Daily Kos, so you may need to reboot your computer to flush the hate out of your CPU.  Basically, Meteor Blade (whose writing I used to love) reports that - indeed - the draw down will commence on schedule and then proceeds to catalog what a clusterfuck Afghanistan is.

Yes.  I understand that.  And I agree that doubling down on Afghanistan was a poor decision.

But once again, Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do.  He said he would double down on Afghanistan - and he did.  He said troops would withdraw beginning in the summer of 2011.  Troops will withdraw beginning in July 2011.

The second part of the post catalogs the problems that will exist even after doubling down.  As I've pointed out elsewhere, those problems will exist if we stay there for a decade.  I have no problem acknowledging that it was not perhaps the best strategy to double down.

But if you read Daily Kos two years ago, when Obama announced his intention to surge in Afghanistan, this was the first evidence that Obama was a weak willed political virgin who would get rolled by the generals in the Pentagon.  He would crumble before Petraeus when Big P wanted another "Friedman Unit" to whip Afghanistan into shape.

Now, he still could crumble.  But my guess is he won't.  He can't.  He understands how this tax deal cut into his credibility.

But the fact is, as he pointed out in his presser the other day, he's done or tried to do almost everything he said he would do on the campaign trail.

Now the guys at Kos and FDL like to talk about the narrative and "setting the narrative" and "shaping the narrative".  But they can't see that they've fallen into their own narrative trap.

Obama can't be trusted.  He has no core principles.  He'll say anything.  He's captive to the generals and Wall Street.

Well, here he is, fulfilling a promise he made.

And all I hear is that it was a bad idea to begin with.

OK.  It was never going to work.

But consider our last President.  The one who couldn't think of a mistake that he'd made?

Compare and contrast.

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