Below are extracts from a political column published in the northeastern US, which someone sent to me. My thoughts are in italics.
Politics as I See It
President Obama announced his decision to increase our troop strength in Afghanistan by 30 thousand, which, although substantial, was less than the 40,00 requested by General Stanley McChrystal, theater commander in Afghanistan. Furthermore, it took Obama three months to make that decision. During that time Vice President Joe Biden was advocating publicly no increase. The President also noted in his speech at West Point that he would start withdrawing troops in 2011, a little more than one year before he plans to run for reelection. I think that President Obama made the right decision, but for the wrong reasons. Clearly, he is concerned about alienating his left-wing base, which is one of the reason he waited for three months before his announcement. Maybe he hoped that health care would have passed by then, which would have made the troop increase a lot easier to sell. However, he had MSNBC’s Chris Matthews animated enough to describe West Point as the “enemy camp,” which may very well match the thinking of the extremists who constitute President Obama’s political base. Senator Joe Lieberman (I – D, CT) was asked on Fox News the next day if he could imagine Vice President Dick Cheney’s disagreeing publicly with George W. Bush’s position on a national security issue. Lieberman replied that he couldn’t and commented that if there were disagreement that the public would never know about it. That is the way a mature organization operates, but the Democratic Party has been schizophrenic on the subject of national security for over 40 years. The American people are nowhere near as dovish as the dems are. Assuming there is no single issue which endears Barack Obama to the American people, Obama may well lose the election in 2012 over the irresponsibility shown by so many Democrats to the geopolitical interests of the United States of America.
I don’t see a troop increase of any size in Afghanistan creating a victory for America. Didn’t the Soviets already prove the impossibility of winning in Afghanistan? Has our military gone mad? Is President Obama crazy for even listening to the military? Is he crazy for not already have ordered all American troops out of Afghanistan? Or is he, as the columnist suggests above in so many words, crazy like a fox? Of course President Obama is playing politics. That’s what children do. Adults cut to the chase. Vice President Biden is supposed to be a rubber stamp? Sell his soul? Hell no! He is supposed to speak out in public, if he disagrees with the President. The Republicans and Democrats alike, and Americans in general, need a serious crash course in Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth. If that were to happen, their worlds would be turned upside down and inside out, forever and ever. Amen, and the change and hope Barack Obama promised when he was running for President and snowing a substantial majority of Americans and apparently the rest of the world would come to pass. As it is, Obama now has doubled the number of American troops that George W. Bush put in Afghanistan.
For at least 20 years it has been conventional wisdom that global warming is a very serious problem that can only be avoided by imposing Herculean restrictions on international business. Al Gore has made himself a multi-millionaire, and been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, by saying that global warming is so horrendous that denying its existence is equivalent to denying the existing of the Holocaust. The facts about the Holocaust are easily verifiable, whereas the “facts” about global warming are projections of possible future damage to our planet. There has always been considerable doubt among many climatologists about the accuracy of the data or the magnitude of the potential damage. A university group in East Anglia, England, has been accused of suppressing emails that contain significant challenges to the conventional wisdom. Many political commentators are talking about a “ClimateGate” scandal. Newsman Jack Cafferty voiced these concerns on CNN’s Situation Room on December 2. Maybe Al Gore has been exaggerating the truth for many years. Will Gore return his Nobel Peace Prize money as well as the millions of dollars that he had made selling global warming to the power elite? Don’t hold your breath until that happens.
From all I have read, we are experiencing global warming. It is irrefutable that humanity is treating Mother Nature and this planet we call Earth and her atmosphere as a public sewer and toxic waste dump. It is irrefutable that we are pretty much strip mining this planet of its natural assets. Global warming may be part of this planet’s natural cycle, as it has happened in the past, as has global cooling, as in ice ages. And Global warming is getting some help from humanity’s polluting ways. There is nothing that can be done about a natural cycle of global warming, but live with it. However, there is much that can be done about human beings polluting this planet. Al Gore may have been off a bit on global warming, focusing almost entirely on environmental pollution, but he was dead on the money about environmental pollution, except he conveniently left out the massive air pollution caused by smoking tobacco. Tsh, tsh, Al. Tsh tsh. Your family made its fortune growing tobacco, didn’t it? As for Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize that bothers me is the one President Obama is soon going to accept, even though he’s done nothing to deserve it. If he was a honest man, he would decline it. If he was an honest man, he would resign from office and give Vice-President Biden a chance to help God change America and bring hope to this beleaguered world.
Sloan Bashinsky