Saturday, December 05, 2009

That law of unintended consequences

I'm very concerned about this:

Next year's midterm elections could be a disaster for the Democrats. That's what happened to Lyndon Johnson. After winning by the largest plurality ever in 1964, bringing with him huge majorities in the House and Senate, in 1965 he escalated the Vietnam War. The next year, Democrats lost 50 seats in Congress.

That's just one of the possible effects of this fateful decision, one that could scuttle Obama's campaign promises of social and other reforms just as surely as the Vietnam War did President Johnson's. Guns and butter, LBJ said; for a time he thought we could pay for both. We could not.

Money that could be spent generating jobs, improving education, fighting global warming and world hunger is poured into this bottomless chasm of war. Some estimates put the ultimate cost of occupying Afghanistan at a trillion dollars. Add that figure to the mind-numbing numbers we've already spent on the occupation of Iraq. It keeps mounting even as our cities and states are running out of cash, unemployment benefits are drying up, and we're trying to figure out how to pay for health care reform -- which some politicians are suggesting we back burner so that we can "focus" on the war in Afghanistan.

The above excerpt is from an article entitled The Afghan Ambush by Michael Winship.

Then someone said this in one of the comments:

Obama could have stuck with the folks who elected him and offered change, but he has not.

So is this going to be a one-term presidency?
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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous10:14 PM

    yep, and I firmly believe he deserves it. The only way I'll go vote for him is if Palin is on the Republican ticket. All I wanted was backbone, and what we got was yet another corporate shill.

    ReplyDelete

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