Progressives Shun Afghan Escalation Address

Just received my daily Smirking Chimp e-mail and the reviews are not good for President Obama's announced escalation. And I wonder if the Afghans were consulted. A sample:

William Rivers Pitt President Barack Obama delivered the best speech George W. Bush ever gave in his life On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama delivered the best speech George W. Bush ever gave in his life. Mr. Bush, if he was watching, would have recognized virtually every facet of Obama's speech, for it was the Bush administration that hammered out the template used by Mr. Obama to deliver the news that he is doubling down on the war in Afghanistan ...

Mike Whitney Worse Than Bush George Bush never pretended to be something he wasn't. The same cannot be said for Barack Obama. Obama exploited the persona of a reformer to the maximum extent. And it worked. He rode into the White House on a wave of public enthusiasm. As soon as he was sworn in, he kicked the left to the curb, expanded the GWOT, and reinforced the regressive policies of ...

David Sirota Some Simple Questions After Obama's Afghanistan War Speech Just a few quick questions to ponder after President Obama's speech announcing a massive escalation in Afghanistan - the very first being shouldn't we be able to honestly answer these queries before mindlessly cheering on a deployment of more troops to a Central Asian war zone? Here they are in no particular order: - What percentage of those kids in ...

Robert Scheer Here We Go Again It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama's own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and ...

Doug Giebel Obama: Sold Out "Suspicion is spreading that Obama has lost some of the character that made him special; that he has taken on the ways of this town, thinking in conventional terms dictated by a brain trust and self-serving, entrenched Washington interests that make this city go 'round." --Colbert King, The Washington Post (Nov. 28, 2009). Colby King's cogent observation ...

Mary Shaw More war but still no jobs It sounds as though President Obama plans to keep us in Afghanistan through most, if not all, of his first term. Is he gambling with his own political future even as he is gambling with our tax dollars and -- more importantly -- our soldiers' lives? In his December 1st address to the nation from the West Point Military Academy, Obama shared his plans to ...

Jayne Lyn Stahl Afghanistan: the Sisyphus War As Albert Camus once said, "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor." After tonight's speech, there can be little doubt that Afghanistan will be ...

And so on.