Back to the Future

One of the most depressing paragraphs I've read in a long time. From Craig Crawford at CQ Politics:

Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton as an anti-war candidate. But it was a lie that his supporters chose to ignore. Gen. David Patreus' congressional testimony on Tuesday makes clear that the Obama Administration is for more war, not less. He advocated more fighting in Afghanistan by loosening the rules of engagement, and all but erased the President's faux deadline for exiting by next summer. It's hard to image he would say such things without Obama's tacit approval. Let's face it, for whatever reason, Obama played his base for the fool, winning the Democratic Party nomination in 2008 by perpetuating a fraud.

It seems worth revisiting Obama's speech against the Iraq War, bravely given in 2002 when he was an Illinois State Senator:

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair."