It is strange, after thinking of myself as your basic liberal moonbat, to come here and find myself stuck in the middle of pie fights. Don't seem to fit in. Today, for example. I come across a fairly nice diary that I had some reservations about. Then, I run into a comment from someone I usually agree with, and I'm struck by the disagreement.
At the end of the day, I'm feeling more pragmatic.
So here's the diary: Afghanistan: Accept Good, Push for Better. Right out of the gate, ugh. This isn't helping. Come on. Whining? That was a distraction begging to happen, and it did not disappoint.
Rather than make our president look weak by whining, we should give him our full support, and then ask for more on top of what he's already given us.
In the course of reading and commenting I considered an idea in opposition, one that occurred to me in the context of the budget battles earlier in the year. There was a point in time where everyone thought that Obama had agreed to tens of billions in cuts. I remember really not liking that, and I wasn't alone...and then, the cuts were shown to be not nearly that big or immediate or even that consequential.
Does Obama need liberal opposition? Does it make him weak -- or is it the honey to lure in Republicans, when they see liberals like me making noise against Obama's plans? Would they have bought it had we all been sitting off the side, covering our mouths with our hands to hide the snickering?
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Well, instead of that I found myself picking on what seemed like some poor criticisms, fixating on the whining remark and such, until I found myself in opposition to a Kossack I usually agree with, Maikeru Ronin. This is not meant as some kind of calling-out, because honestly your arguments are similar to what my thinking on Afghanistan has been. It's the penultimate argument from principle. I had to go back and rec it because it is as clear an expression as can be, and I respect arguing from principle.
The Republicans (3+ / 0-)
aren't the ones at the top of the Pentagon's org chart. The President is. And there are plenty of people from both the Republicans and Democrats who want to keep our troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, notwithstanding what you, the diarist and others here may have chosen to believe.
Let me be perfectly clear, so there's no misunderstanding: I don't care how Obama matches up with the Republicans when we criticize him. I don't care how my criticism affects his prospects in the next election cycle. What I care about are the people who are going to be needlessly killed and maimed between now and the time we finally pull out of Afghanistan. What I care about are the billions of dollars we're going to waste over there when we have 14 million people unemployed and 50 million going without health insurance over here.
It's a good setup! Does this mean if I oppose immediate and full withdrawal from Afghanistan, I want to get more people killed and waste more money?
Well, no. And it doesn't take a game of 11-dimensional chess to spell this out.
I don't care how my criticism affects his prospects in the next election cycle.
Is this compatible with caring about innocents being maimed and killed in the warzone, with caring about billions of dollars going to waste? I don't think so. For the sake of argument, let's say me and Maikeru and millions of other critics of Obama's policy express our disdain, whether it be by speaking out or not voting or whatever, and some Republican takes over. And we don't care; Obama's prospects were not under consideration.
The party in charge at the top changes things. There's no way we can ignore the warmongering of Bush the Younger, or candidate McCain singing 'bomb bomb Iran'. Think for a second that he didn't mean it? McCain would be busy sending Seal Team Six after Ahmadinejad, not bin Laden. Bush didn't even need half a reason to pick a fight with Iraq; he made up some, and has brazenly gotten away with it. Is there no difference between what Obama did and what McCain would have done about Iran? As if the threat of a nuclear weapon wouldn't be enough for McCain? The mirage of one was enough, a decade ago. Just the idle threat of a mushroom cloud.
So anyway, I am not satisfied with this surge-retraction plan, and I acknowledge the basic math that shows we will still have a lot more troops in Afghanistan than we did in 2009, and this means money is going down the drain there, and more importantly people will die because of it.
But as much as I may criticize, and go on criticizing...I do care about Obama's prospects next year. It doesn't mean I like doing the worse/worser math when the units of measurement are in human lives lost. I just can't take principle that far. I empathize with the argument from principle. I don't intend to piss on it and make fun with remarks about ponies and rainbows. I hope the critics will understand why I cannot go that far. I think the pragmatic choice serves the principle -- as best we can, anyway, with the choices we have.