and little things like that
Last April 27 I posted this picture. My friend Beth saw the title and thought I was writing about bin Laden – prescient, I realize now, because five days later Obama got him.
This same tree is has now been bearing its heavy load again for several days. We’re at least two weeks early here.
He hasn’t done much about global warming (“climate change,” which for some Republican reason everyone now seems to say instead), but at least he’s eliminated the Laden confusion.
Okay it’s time to do this. I’ve been putting it off for days now but I have to just face facts.
Barack, I’m just not this person anymore.
I don’t mean the guy with all the buttons on his hat and his lapel and are those ear protectors? No, I mean the awestruck lady gasping next to him.
It’s so hard to write this. I feel so disloyal; I feel as though I’m writing for one of those left-wing websites I’ve abandoned, like Firedoglake or Daily Kos or, worse, like someone paid by Andrew Breitbart.
But it’s just time. I used to try to tell myself he was a pragmatist, threading his way though the dregs of Republican teabags, getting the best, the only, deal he could. But now I wonder. Why, for example, didn’t he invoke the 14th amendment and just raise the debt ceiling – especially since he seems quite a fan of executive power (witness Guantanamo, the prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the Libyan action)? How could he give Boehner 98% of what he wanted, with no revenue increases? And how, then, could he agree to yet another recipe for gridlock: the “super-committee,” where, to get on it, you have to draw lines in the sand?
Why did he appoint the Simpson-Bowles commission and then ignore the results (like Bush and the 9/11 Commission)?
Was this, from that cold January day, just oratory?
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.
Was he ever the guy we thought he was? 
Or (I’m really sorry to even bring this up) is he really more like this?
It’s not a total breakup, of course. He’s still so much better than the alternatives; than his predecessor, of course, or Huntsman or Bachmann or Romney or, God save us, Perry.
But now I’m putting aside my childish awe. In his words, again:
[I now]understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.
Earn me back, Obama.
Kahn and the Obamas at a dinner during the G-20 conference in September 2009.Photo: The IMF Flickr
Well, positively, anyway. Here we go:
President Obama has continued the Bush policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East. He did not scrub the mission to get Bin Laden. In fact, it may be that President Obama single-handedly came up with the technique in order to pull this off. You see, the military wanted to go in there and bomb as they always do. They wanted to drop missiles and drop bombs and a number of totally destructive techniques here. But President Obama, perhaps the only qualified member in the room to deal with this, insisted on the Special Forces. No one else thought of that. President Obama. Not a single intelligence adviser, not a single national security adviser, not a single military adviser came up with the idea of using SEAL Team 6 or any Special Forces.
I just feel so proud of him (Obama, I mean – but, actually, Rush too): the guy (Obama) who was just a freshman Senator when he moved me to goofy adoration in our high school gym. I remember thinking, then, that I’d look back at these pictures and marvel at how I got to meet him, and at how un-gray his hair was.
Under Obama’s leadership, they found him (which President Bush couldn’t do, in all of his eight years). Obama authorized the mission (which President Clinton, when they found Osama in the late 90s, was afraid to do because of potential civilian casualties); and the mission was successful (unlike poor President Carter’s disaster in Iran). It’s going to be a bit hard to question his leadership, as 47% did in the last Gallup poll; or whether he can “keep us safe.”
No matter what his college grades were. But this could be a real opportunity for Mr. Trump. There’s the DNA evidence and the lab that produces it to question; there’s the picture, if they release one – photo-shopped? And there’s the whole ocean to troll for the body.
I wish him well – very well. It would be so nice to have him on the 2012 ballot.
Okay. I’ve never taken a constitutional law class, much less taught one, but if Obama had asked me, back in 2009, if I thought he (in the form of his Justice Department) should defend the horridly-named Defense of Marriage Act, I would have said Are you crazy?
And if he’d said Well, there’s precedent for the Justice Department to defend laws that are on the books until Congress changes them, I would have said Well there’s precedent and there’s what’s right, not to mention what’s constitutional.
And just to reprise what I wrote about it back then, when Obama didn’t ask me:
Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival.
The Supreme Court of the United States, June 12, 1967
Obama wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for this ruling (Loving vs. Virginia, against miscegenation laws), so it’s incomprehensible to me that his Justice Department is trying to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act (enacted under Clinton, of all people, who maybe thought he could bring some sanctity back to his own marriage if he kept gay people from joining him).
So now, one year and seven months later, the New York Times tells us Obama has suddenly changed his mind? What took so long?
It’s the process, not the content (a distinction management consultants are wont to preach about), of course, that bothers me. I once worked for a guy who was very smart, and very adamant about what he thought were his smart decisions. He reversed himself once, and when I pointed out his previous position, he said something like Well you can’t expect me to be consistent – which made absolutely no sense to me. If you’re smart, and thoughtful, you think things through before you act, and you don’t need to reverse yourself.
And I just can’t imagine that a thoughtful former Constitutional law professor didn’t think this through in 2009. So what gives?
My new hospice patient had Fox News on yesterday, and now you can find me inside the fair and balanced bubble. The Obamas’ vacation? Well, they got criticized for going to Acadia instead of the Gulf Coast, so now they’re going to Pensacola. It’s all a political stunt: you know Bill Clinton did polling to figure out where he should go. Fortunately, the two Bushes and Reagan had their own compounds for their vacations.
And do you know why the Democrats are turning against Obama’s Afghanistan policies? Well, they really don’t care for foreign military engagements in the first place, so they had to bite their tongues about Afghanistan, but now that it doesn’t look so good they’re reverting to their default position.
And a lot of people in Arizona were waiting with bated breath (and appearing every fifteen minutes) for the judge’s ruling on their immigration law and they were sure the judge would see it their way, because the administration clearly doesn’t care about all the criminals preying on the white people there.
And I also now know more than I ever wanted to about the couple whose son died in Iraq (“Thank you for your service,” says the chirpy pretty anchor lady) who are being told by his cemetery to take down the ten-foot flagpoles they put up.
This day is getting away from me, and all I have to worry about is the heat and the loud air handling unit across the street that goes on and off during the night and drives me insane and categorizing press clips for the guy running for Joe Sestak’s Congressional seat and formatting my hospice newsletter and calling my friend who is sitting in a car in North Carolina waiting for her husband’s all-day meeting to end who can’t read because she has non-dominant lobe aphasia and finding an electrician to fix our porch fan that doesn’t work and canceling the hotel reservation I made for a night when we won’t be anywhere near that hotel; and I wonder how on earth Obama does it all.
Okay, so the volcano-whose-name-you-can’t-pronounce changed McChrystal’s plans, and he ended up on a long bus ride with the Rolling Stone reporter. And the bus was stocked with beer.
Now, it’s important to note that this is a general so disciplined he manages to eat just one meal a day, sleep four hours a night, and run six miles a day.
Think about it. If the Rolling Stone reporter could manage to keep his cool during that long bus ride long enough to get McChrystal on the record, who’s the more disciplined?
And if McChrystal is the only one in the whole military armamentarium capable of carrying out Afghanistan policy, what does this say about the military?
