Just think­ing aloud…

Yes, I know that health care is kinda defin­ing moment for our man Bar­rack in Wash­ing­ton right now..or at least that’s what we’re told a mere 8 months into his regime. Does that mean that it’s over if he messes up this..8/48s in and it’s all FUBAR???

No, of course not but clearly there is more rid­ing on this than, say, gays in the mil­i­tary (as much as many of us would like to see that one go through, just because, sim­ply, in this day and age, such a thing is a moral anom­aly in any edu­cated nation).

Myself, I’m rather more keen to see him resolve a few other those other issues that made the world dis­like, and then, increas­ingly, despise his nation’s for­eign poli­cies in the years since, ohhh, about 1963.

We had such high hopes and whilst many of those were sim­ply unre­al­is­tic, given his vot­ing record and ver­bal stance, the word “hope” was applied to the Obama can­di­dacy once or twice.

But, given such expec­ta­tions, real­is­tic or not, it’s look­ing an increas­ingly sad record beyond the rhetoric right now: Israel is furi­ously build­ing in the West Bank and Netanyahu is hap­pily thumb­ing his nose at Obama with the sort of impunity that an Israeli PM always enjoys, civil­ians are dying all over Afghanistan, which is cur­rently turn­ing into the sort of clus­ter­fuck it always threat­ened to be; Gitmo remains open, an looks likely to for god knows how long; Amer­i­can troops seem stuck in Iraq; they’re talk­ing to those lovely bleed­ing hearts in Colom­bia about build­ing mil­i­tary bases (ohhh, that’s gonna sta­b­lise the region…)

Not much of any sub­stance seems to have changed since Jan­u­ary 20th, which makes me won­der why those on the right feel the need to slash and abuse. He is, after all, mostly just fol­low­ing his predecessor’s poli­cies in the (it’s not called this any­more, so I’ll lose the caps..substantive change alert) war on terror.

On this anniver­sary, have they still (and by ‘they’ I include Obama) not worked out, 8 years after 9/11, why that tragedy happened?

I’ve still got my hope badge and I won’t put it away for a wee-while yet, but its fad­ing fast.

Update: Andrew Sul­li­van gets it (although I take issue with the notion that it was one of the most despi­ca­ble mass mur­ders in history…perhaps in Amer­i­can his­tory, but I can quickly think of dozens of episodes in the last cen­tury alone that were worse. They just weren’t as tele­vised, or close to home for the most media-heavy soci­ety on the planet. They’re all despicable).

This is kinda inter­est­ing but less than sur­pris­ing is you’ve read Lawrence Wright

For­mer FBI trans­la­tor Sibel Edmonds dropped a bomb­shell on the Mike Mal­loy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Fried­man (audio, par­tial transcript).

In the inter­view, Sibel says that the US main­tained ‘inti­mate rela­tions’ with Bin Laden, and the Tal­iban, “all the way until that day of Sep­tem­ber 11.”

These ‘inti­mate rela­tions’ included using Bin Laden for ‘oper­a­tions’ in Cen­tral Asia, includ­ing Xin­jiang, China. These ‘oper­a­tions’ involved using al Qaeda and the Tal­iban in the same man­ner “as we did dur­ing the Afghan and Soviet con­flict,” that is, fight­ing ‘ene­mies’ via proxies.

[From Daily Kos: State of the Nation]

Of course, if true, the very uncom­fort­able part is that this impli­cates both Bush / Cheney and Clin­ton. Not that that is such a sur­prise as it was mostly under Clinton’s watch that half a mil­lion Iraqi kids were sanc­tioned, with Sad­dam tak­ing a fairly hefty por­tion of the blame too, to an early grave.

Petraeus on Gitmo:

Army Gen. David Petraeus said the U.S. mil­i­tary is “beat around the head and shoul­ders” with images of detainees held in Guan­tanamo, the facil­ity in Cuba Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has vowed to close. He said clos­ing Guan­tanamo and ensur­ing detainees are dealt with by an appro­pri­ate judi­cial sys­tem would bol­ster the nation’s war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I do believe very strongly that we should live our val­ues,” he said. “Gen­er­a­tions of sol­diers have fought to defend those val­ues, and we should not shrink from liv­ing them, from oper­a­tional­iz­ing them, on the battlefield.”

[From Hot Air Head­lines » Petraeus: Yes, it’s time to close Gitmo]