Obama and the War Dead

I love Maureen Dowd's op-eds in the NY Times. She sends barbed zingers and wickedly nails the truth. I love the following because she gets her digs in on George Bush:

On the tarmac in the darkness, he stood at attention, saluting, as 18 flag-draped cases were taken off an Air Force C-17 and carried to Port Mortuary by military teams in camouflage fatigues and black berets.

The Halloween-eve parade of death included casualties from America’s most horrific day in Afghanistan in four years, and its bloodiest month of the war.

It may have been a photo op, another way Obama could show he was not W., the president who started the Iraq war in a haze of fakery and then declined to ever confront the reality of its dead.

...

Dona Griffin of Terre Haute, Ind., the mother of Army Sgt. Dale Griffin, who was among those Obama saluted, appreciated the president’s presence.

“Unless we can see the images and look into the eyes and the faces of those that are sacrificing, we forget,” she said on “Good Morning America.”

As Obama conducts his White House seminar on war, Dick Cheney accuses him of dithering. He and W. not only didn’t dither before Iraq, they never bothered to ask “Whither?” Debate and due diligence were for sissies. Far more fun playing Jove, heedlessly throwing thunderbolts.

I am amazed at the fact that roughly one-third of Americans still don't see that George Bush was a disaster. The US was over-extended and he pushed the US beyond the breaking point. This current recession, a product of his wierdly right wing "no government is the best government" philosophy, has seriously wounded the US and it isn't clear that the US will ever really recover.

When I was a kid, the US was head and shoulders above the rest of the world because it came out of WWII unscathed. But that wealth of America has been frittered away on petty wars with no real purpose (think Vietnam and now Iraq) and with political giveaways to the demented right (think de-regulation, trillion dollar tax cuts, and the cult of supply side economics). In the 1950s the US was truly a "beacon on a hill" but the idiocy of the Vietnam War tarnished the image, and the lurch to the right in the 1980s put the US on a pathway different from all the other liberal democracies.

It isn't clear to me that the US can drag itself out of the hole it has dug for itself. And the real tragedy is that most people don't even realize the problem they are in because they've lapped up the promises of politicians. The failing comes from the fact that politicians are ephemeral while the problems are deep-seated and persistent.

I think back to how long and difficult the struggle was in the US to break the chains of slavery. A horrendous Civil War was fought. But the achievements were thrown away during the Reconstruction which was followed by the era of Jim Crow in the Deep South and silent discrimination in the North. The Blacks led a Civil Rights uprising from the 1950s to the mid-1960s but this social change crashed on the rocks of a society breaking apart over the division of Vietnam. Quietly after the 1960s change seeped into institutions around the country and the last shackles were thrown off with the election of Barack Obama. But that is a 150 year struggle to correct a historical wrong. It shows you how hard it will be for the US to crawl out of the hole it has dug for itself with its infatuation with right wing extremism over the last two generations.

As Maureen Dowd states in closing her op-ed:

Obama wants to be the cosmopolitan president of the world, and social engineer at home to improve the lives of Americans.

But what he had in mind for renovating American society hinged on spending a lot of money on energy, education, the environment and health care. Instead, he has been trapped in the money pits of a recession and two wars.

For now, the man who promised revolution will have to settle for managing adversity.

It is, as Yogi Berra said, “déjà vu all over again.”