This past week, the talking heads obsessed over RNC leader Michael Steele’s candid declaration that the war in Afghanistan was “of Obama’s choosing” and is unwinnable. Instead of adding my own commentary, I want to reproduce a few excerpts of another American leader’s views on the matter:

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Afghanistan. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Afghanistan. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.   Read more…

This morning, I open the Washington Post opinion section to see this headline: “In Afghanistan, real leverage starts with more troops.” Coming as this does only a few weeks after we celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I will reprint part of a past post. I wish I didn’t have to repeat this message, but we fall into the same damn trap time and time again:

Sadly, it seems our government learned the wrong lesson when the Berlin Wall fell. Again, when it comes to American history, we have an uncanny ability to remember only what we want to.   Read more…

Album: One Nation Under a Groove (Warner Bros. Records)
Year: 1978
Written by: George Clinton, Garry Shider, & Walter Morrison
Billboard Hot 100: #28

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Put partisan affiliation aside for just a moment. This video made my day:

I am, yet again, behind the times. This time the culprits were a flight from Philadelphia to London, a bit of jetlag, and a search for an apartment (which ended successfully). Meanwhile, my second blog post went live on the Sun-Sentinel site three days ago. It’s an analysis of Barack Obama’s political strategy to pass health care reform. The conventional wisdom among the chattering classes is that he wasn’t assertive enough, that he put too much power in Congress’s hands, that he didn’t take his case to the public early enough. The paradox is that conventional wisdom also holds that Bill Clinton failed in 1993-94 precisely because he took control of the issue and basically handed Congress the finished product. I look at it from a different angle. You can read my take here. As usual, a few addenda:   Read more…