13 months & 1 day ago...

(being my first post in over 2 months, not much has gone on in D.C. other than wheel spinning on health care reform)

...I expressed my desire to have Obama be the next President.

Generally speaking, I have liked the results.

I think/thought he could have been much stronger in whipping some of those asshat Senate Dems to back a full public option; I think he took the wrong lesson from the Clinton fiasco. He took the lesson to be to not make a big public push against the drug companies, when the real lesson was, don't let your wife whom everyone hates run the operation.

However, he is completely failing a lesson from the JFK Presidential years; Or at least a pseudo-lesson.

JFK essentially learned the hard way not to trust the military industrial complex (*cough* Pentagon *cough*); The Bay of Pigs.

Obama is set to deliver an address where he will be sending troops to Afghanistan, but with some sort of strings attached, which includes a reportedly fairly vague endgame.

The problem is simple, once you given the Pentagon people the OK to go, they will create reasons to stay once there. As Keith Olbermann noted tonight in his Special Comment, these people are in the BUSINESS to keep war and/or occupations alive.

Make no mistake about it, WAR is big business. It's what they like to do, and they are like an excellent surgeon who thinks every medical solution to any medical problem is to operate. It's incredibly foolish.

Moreover, it puts troops in harms way for what? What will we really gain from this endeavor besides heartache and pain on many levels.

Finally, this may doom Obama in 2012. Unless something drastic happens, war (much like it wasn't in 2008) will NOT be the top concern of the body politic.

Election year, after election year, James Carville proves to be prophetic: "It's the economy stupid."

I don't know what this will do to any glimmer of an economic recovery, but I cannot imagine it would be good. And if this plans SOMEHOW manages to go on track as planned, it sounds like there is a soft date of 2011 to get out.

What generally happens after a war is over? The economy tanks. Ask Bush 41 what happened to his economy in 1992 after the Persian Gulf War.

No matter what happens tomorrow night at 8:00am, I will be disappointed with ANY troop increase/movement.