With his favorability ratings tanking at a critical time before the midterm elections, President Obama desperately needs a win on some front, any front. It is in this new mood of desperation that Obama, for the first time, finds his credibility ratings faltering as well. Obama has always been a cool customer, as a candidate and in the first few months in office. It is unsettling for many now to see him losing his cool and coming slightly apart at the seams. One thing no one might have anticipated from Barack Obama is that we would see him freak out.
His claim of ending the combat mission in Iraq as promised rings almost as false as Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' moment. Clearly the combat mission is not over for the 56,000 remaining troops or the thrice-bolstered numbers of mercenaries trying to contain Iraqi civilian unrest. All that has really shifted there is that sizeable numbers of troops have been redeployed to Afghanistan, where the situation is even more bleak. If this is what winning looks like, why even bother?
However the falsest bit of good news to which Obama still steadfastly clings is his rosy assessment of the economy, and the recovery. Having unwisely hitched his star to the questionable financial motivations of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner at the start of his term, the President seems unable to truly grasp the severity of the problem and finds no irony keeping in power the very characters who led us down the path to financial ruin in the first place. It's easy to say that no one really knows how to pull us out of the dive, although a massive FDR-style jobs program wouldn't hurt. Instead Obama has taken various timid steps in many directions, unable to commit to any as a sweeping solution, and unable to command forces in Congress because of his timidity.
To this date, we have yet to enter into a period of recovery, jobless or otherwise. All that has been accomplished is that we have reached a plateau, a point of stasis during which bad things are still happening but they are happening slightly more slowly. Many financial prognosticators, including Paul Krugman and the ever cheery Gerald Celente, have hinted at not a double dip recession but a coming depression at the current rate of recovery effort. Some go so far as to suggest we are in for the Greatest Depression of all time. There is definitely tension in the air. Maybe you've noticed.
Of course, I juxtaposed Obama's handling of the wars against the financial situation at home for a reason. Just imagine if Obama withdrew half his funding support for the Pentagon and placed that amount instead in a comprehensive jobs program (infrastructure, renewable energy and the like).
It seems so obvious that, among other brave acts, we will have to cut the Pentagon budget, by choice now or by necessity later on. The faster we reapportion war funding to job creation, the faster we will begin to dig our way out of this mess. Gone is the day where we gain significant benefit from investing heavily and militarily in other countries whose resources we covet.
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