Sometimes you go into combat and you get hammered, ambushed, and everything you've got for backup gets shot full of holes. Meanwhile there are other objectives that have to be taken at the same time and if those sectors don't go any better than yours the whole advance stalls after which it just becomes a massacre.
Historically its better to stand your ground in that situation or even try and advance than to break your ranks. No question its going to take a toll on those in the front lines but what you hope for is that its also going to take a toll on the opposition if they find you were tougher and harder to take out than what they figured.
In situations like that leaders are born. I don't know what makes people like Alan Grayson have the guts to look the opposition in the eye and find bold new ways to take them out but it seems to happen a lot in combat. Afterwards we may get our heros back short an arm and a leg, an eye maybe, but they have followers and like Dean and Sanders and Kuchinich and Weiner, they have principles they don't give up easily.
Maybe warfighting should be a required part of a political education just like actually building something should be part of an architects resume. Constitutional scholars, lawyers and poly sci majors seem ro prefer to settle differences amicably. My sense is this isn't the right time for either Ghandi or Howard Dean.
I'm actually more concerned about how a decent healthcare bill might have been designed to make things easier for small businesses and stimulate the economy and provide jobs than I am about how much it costs, we can count our chips when the dealing is done.
I actually side with Barbara Lee that Obama has been a great president. There are those who are good at making decisions and if they happen to make the right one so much the better. I see them as the contractor class. Obviously we have another class of critters that are good at making deals. I see them as the merchant class.
Obama is deliberative but also a bit stubborn. Once he decides on a course of action he doesn't seem quite as pragmatic as he gets credit for being. If he was into doing whats best for him he would pander to us, make sure his base was happy. Instead I see him focused on whats good for the planet and in a class of his own.
He will get us out of Afghanistan and afterwards we won't be proceeding into ungoverned areas with armies of troops and expensive equipment. I expect we will see more diplomacy, more covert action, but less Blackwater rather than more.
I think that when he talks about Right makes Might and taking the decision making process to the local level he means to talk to the Taliban. The Taliban has its base in Pakistans ungoverned areas on Afghanistans borders. The Talibans decision about who to follow has a lot to do with balancing the pain of corruption in their village against the pain of hunger in their childrens belly.
At the same time thats going down he needs the economy to turn around. Sure the Republicans have already stolen and spent all the money. The haves and have mores have their tax breaks, bailouts, subsidies, deregulation, loopholes, no bid contracts and blank checks. I kind of like that Obama shows no fear of charging the future and when he's through putting all that danger behind him I'm betting on him coming back from the valley of deficit fear with real change in his pocket.
If Obama turns out to be a one term president I hope he leaves a breach in the insurance companies half century healthcare stonewalling where this bill, bad as it is and costly as it is, gets our foot in the door and maybe a little later when we are doing the moping up and piling up casualties, fighting hand to hand through every little pocket of resistance, and approaching the tipping points, we get something in the end thats worthy of a Kennedy.
Maybe he can go beyond pulling us back from the brink of economic depression and pull us back from the kidnapping, torture and murder; the holding without rendition that got sold to America's pundits under Bush.
Sure, right now it looks like he's going in the opposite direction, but wait... now we have actual trials coming up in New York. Trials are better than presumption of guilt on accusation and indefinite detention under torture with no recourse to a lawyer. Now we have detention in the US instead of wherever Jepperson airlines chooses to fly the CIA ghosts.
I'm hoping that when Obama shows up in Copenhagen he gets to be the one who speaks the growing consensus among the 110 world leaders gathered there who having read "Stories of our Grandchildren The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity" by James Hansen that whatever it costs this is our last chance to save the planet.
Then after that maybe we begin to see some legislation to curb the power of the bankers, corporations, lobiests and special interests we have been watching try to tear America doen for the last six months.