Tim Thomas is a Jerk

Yeesh. My headline expresses my thoughts but so does this parenthetical remark by the writer:

(Is it any wonder that the country is so politically fractured when a bunch of guys can't agree to just get together and talk sports?)

Tagged Obama Politics Sports

David Bromwich: The Afghanistan Parenthesis

To take a country farther into a questionable war ought to be harder than opening a parenthesis and saying you know where you will close it. Yet Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan had all the composed clarity of a logical proposition. Throughout the speech -- which sought to justify the most important act of his presidency -- Obama was poised and moderate-sounding. His idea of what his escalation would do seemed moderate, too, and definite: self-contained and self-terminating. The 30,000 troops will go into Afghanistan quickly, he said, so that the last arrive within six months. They will commence their departure a year later, in July 2011. It was a gratifying picture and an orderly one; and yet it raised a question. Can you turn up the violence of a war and then turn it down? Will it stop, like that, when you tell it to?

via huffingtonpost.com

Bromwich has one of the most elegant and well-thought-out takes on Obama's speech and its policy implications that I've read. I expect him, as a Literature prof at Yale, to be articulate but that doesn't always mean he's insightful. This is one case where he is.

I encourage you to read his entire piece. It may open your eyes even if you support the President in this misadventure.

Tagged Afghanistan Obama politics

"Less Spocky, More Rocky"

My buddy Tony Seton's daily SetoNotes today bemoans the lack of guts and courage among Democratic leaders, not just today but in the recent past as well. He views President Obama as someone who is "not a warrior," and quotes Maureen Dowd as saying we need someone at the helm who is "less Spocky, more Rocky." Clever turn of phrase but perhaps not too far from a real truth.

Tony says that if Al Gore had gotten mad and really fought for the stolen election he "lost" or if John Kerry had not let the lying Swift Boaters do him in, we'd have been spared the Bush-Cheney debacle. And he's right. "What we need," he concludes, "are more warriors...for peace and justice." I'm not sure you can go to war for peace, but certainly we need leaders who can ignite passions in their team members and in their followers to pursue important goals like health insurance reform with more vigor and perhaps a willingness to become righteously indignant at the scurrilous lies and ad hominen attacks so freely indulged in by their unprincipled, win-at-any-cost opponents.

Has it actually become true that in a public debate he who is willing to tell the bigger lie with the loudest voice wins? Or has it always been that way and I've been to naive to see?

Tagged Democrats Obama Politics

Tony Seton to Obama: "Come Back Home Where You Can Do Some Good"

My friend and colleague Tony Seton takes President Obama to task this morning on his daily audio blog post for racing around the world accomplishing no good goals while things at home continue to crumble slowly. He bluntly accuses our president of failing to exercise leadership.

Tony's been beating up on Barack a good bit lately. My label-resistant friend carefully cultivates an image as an independent curmudgeon and does it better than most who get paid to do that. I generally find myself in mild disagreement with him but lately I've been finding more and more resonance in his pieces. I'm no longer sure Obama is the leader and the outside-the-box thinker I thought we elected a year ago now or if he was just such a relief from the guy he followed that he looked like a genius. I was reading this morning that Obama has been trying to get some concessions on the traditional Sino-American dividing issues and making absolutely no headway. There's a shock. You can't tell the banker who holds your mortgage to stop playing golf at the segregated country club or you'll take your business elsewhere. There, as here, there is no elsewhere.

Globally, things are going to continue to morph into very different scenarios. I'm not sure Obama is up to that challenge. Maybe he needs to send Joe Biden. Or leave it to Hillary while he attends to the massive and unyielding socio-political problems here at home.

Tagged Obama politics

Hey, Mr. President! When Do You Start Leading?

We sent President Obama to the White House with a clear mandate for change but he won't use that power where it's most needed. Instead, he prefers to allow the Know-Nothing, No-Everything Party to have far too much influence on public policy in a sadly misguided effort to be bipartisan.

The latest casualty: the public option in health care reform. That loss would be totally unacceptable, Mr. President, to your "base". Trust me. Your base already feels betrayed by your early decision to take a single-payer plan off the table without a single second of debate. If you allow this provision to be gutted from the bill as well, you might as well just do like your predecessors and let the health care insurance industry write the legislation. Nobody who's been paying attention the last 30+ years believes we will ever reform health insurance without a public option. It's the only real lever in the current legislation that has a hope of getting the health insurance industry to curb its greed and act responsibly.

Please, Mr. President, stop the ridiculous posturing on bipartisanship. Notice that word begins with the prefix "bi" meaning "two". You can't achieve bipartisan governance when the opposition is only interested in being the opposition.

Your job now should be to use your bully pulpit and convince those independents who have been influenced into changing their views on health-care reform by the screaming madness of the un-American opposition to return to their previous understanding of what's good and necessary and then to get back to D.C. and impose some party discipline to get this job done.

I don't want to see you be a one-term President but if you keep up this lack of real leadership from strength, I fear that will be the result.

Tagged Democrats Obama Republicans health care politics
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