House of Eratosthenes

Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities, and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama’s timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the 18-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.
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This is not like the previous conflict with Bush and Cheney, who were easy to ridicule. Now this orphan of a war has a persuasive advocate, a formidable debater…

“Easy to ridicule.” There’s a window into the hard-left liberal mind.

In my list of Fifty Fucking Sick Things, items 10-13 deal with liberals directing a frothy rage toward women, blacks, Jews and homosexuals who happen to believe in something conservative — a special nastiness that will not ever be experienced by six-foot straight white guys keeping all twenty-one digits, like myself. President Obama, perhaps, is experiencing this from liberals like Sen Hayden.

Bush was a dimwit, Darth Cheney was evil.

Obama cannot be caricatured. So it’s time to haul out that special white-hot napalm. Hayden, to his credit, buttresses this dripping bile with something resembling a coherent argument; many other lefties don’t bother to go this distance, the bile is good enough.

Still and all, the recommendations are something, aren’t they? All theory, no practice. It’s been quite a while since you’ve heard a hardcore bay-area liberal say “they should do xxx, it was tried in yyy back in zzzz and it worked pretty well.” No precedence. All gonna-dooz. No have-dunz.

FrankJ’s one-liner is a more than apt response to Sen. Hayden’s proposal, methinks:

Hippies are for punching, not for getting foreign policy advice from.

They experience friction in their own lives when their theories butt up against reality. President Obama has done a wonderful job representing the interests of those theories, against reality. This week he represented the interests of reality against theory. He didn’t want to; He was backed into a corner. But regardless of that, now He’s asking the other side to do some compromising in the middle of the split-second fender-bender…the other vehicle is absorbing some of the impact…and this does not fit in well with their mindset. They aren’t accustomed to it.

So out come the sticker-scrapers.

Tom Hayden should be reminded at every public opportunity that his sabotage of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 was directly responsible for the deaths of 2 million Laotians.

This is the farthest of the Far Left, and his disenchantment with his creature is a bitter satisfaction indeed.
- rob | 12/06/2009 @ 09:04
Speaking of stickers… My “President George W. Bush” sticker from 2004 is still on my windblocker, but it’s only visible when the top is down. And you probably wouldn’t be surprised at all the faded “W” stickers in these parts. We’re pretty red here on The High Plains of NM, unlike ABQ or Santa Fe, where all the frickin’ O-Bambis live.
- bpenni | 12/06/2009 @ 12:40
A formidable debater? Really? I’m fucking sick of these idiots masquerading as adults. Has this guy been right about anything other than sticking it in Jane Fonda? Even that probably wasn’t worth it in the long run.
- chunt31854 | 12/06/2009 @ 16:33
Maybe something he caught from Jane Fonda caused this
- Fai Mao | 12/06/2009 @ 16:58
Speaking of liberals telling us what to do based on past experience, today we have Stephen Henderson at the Detroit Free Press advising us at the end of his column: “We’ve got to get people back to work, and the government may have to be the primary vehicle for doing so. ” He doesn’t mention how well that plan worked when FDR insisted that it was the government that created jobs. For more foolishness, you can read the entire column at: http://www.freep.com/section/search?cx=000717386087086100666%3Aqx5f4i99qjg&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=roosevelt&sa=SEARCH#1115
- sonofsheldon | 12/06/2009 @ 17:13
He doesn’t mention how well that plan worked when FDR insisted that it was the government that created jobs.

As I recall from my history textbook, the Republicans who were in Congress during the Depression believed that it was better if the government took a “hands off” approach and allowed the market to sort things out on its own.

FDR didn’t listen, and I’ve heard many times now that economy recovered not because of the New Deal, but in spite of it. I have wondered on and off over the years what the “Great Depression” would have been like if the federal government had listened to the likes of Calvin Coolidge and done absolutely nothing. (Good ol Silent Cal…where’s he when you need him? He said things like, “The business of the American people is business,” and left it at that.)

Many observers will also point out that World War II had something to do with the recovery, and a subset of that group might insist that government spending on military goods could be looked at as a sort of “stimulus.”

And….I’d disagree with that argument. The wartime diversion of resources into military production meant a drop in the manufacture of civilian goods, and the standards of living didn’t really rise until the war was over. The war years were lean times for most Americans, with government-imposed rationing of just about everything, and everyone having to “get by with less” so that soldiers “could have more.” Not that anybody had a problem with that, but you’re not going to sit there and tell me that happy times were here again just because people were being put to work building battleships and airplanes, or being sent overseas to be shot at by the Axis.

The real recovery didn’t kick in until well into the postwar years, and into the 1950s. You don’t just have to rely on the data; you could probably ask American who is old enough to remember that period clearly.
- cylarz | 12/07/2009 @ 00:35

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Sen. Tom Hayden: I’m Stripping the Obama Sticker Off My CarSunday, December 6th, 2009

Sen. Tom Hayden: I’m Stripping the Obama Sticker Off My Car
Sunday, December 6th, 2009