The Afghanistan speech that President Obama should give

Tom Dispatch writes the Afghanistan speech that President Obama should, but won't, give. Here are three excerpts:

We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day.

. . . I have decided to send no more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national interest of the American people that this war, like the Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops and resources will be brought home in an orderly fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate security for the men and women of our Armed Forces. Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.

But we must not be scared. America will not -- of this, as your president, I am convinced -- be a safer nation if it spends many hundreds of billions of dollars over many years, essentially bankrupting itself and exhausting its military on what looks increasingly like an unwinnable war. This is not the way to safety, but to national penury -- and I am unwilling to preside over an America heading in that direction.

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Hunger and Hypocrisy

Peter Singer offered this challenge in the Oct/Nov issue of Free Inquiry (not available on-line):

Imagine that you are walking through a park past a shallow ornamental pond, and you notice that a child has fallen into that pond and seems to be in danger of drowning. You look around for the parents or the babysitter, but there is no one in sight. What should you do? Obviously, you should rush into the pond and save the life of the child. But wait a minute--you are wearing your most expensive shoes, and you don't have time to kick them off. They will be ruined if you go into the pond with them on. Do your shoes make a difference in your decision? Everyone agrees that they don't. You can't let a pair of shoes mean more than a child's life. So how about giving just the cost of an expensive pair of shoes to an organization that is saving lives in developing countries? I don't think it is any different than saving the child in the shallow pond. Yes, it is different psychologically but not morally. Distance doesn't make someone's life less valuable.
Singer's implicit assumption is that your dollars are fungible. When you spend a dollar on a luxury, it is dollar that you could have spent to save the life of a dying child. In other words, dollars don't come pre-categorized such that some dollars can only be spent on luxuries. You cannot escape this logic. Therefore, If Jesus (or whatever God you might believe in) were watching, you closely, and you knew it, you couldn't possibly pay $300 for a pair of shoes when perfectly adequate $100 shoes were also available and when you knew (as you always do know) that the other $200 could be used to save the lives of innocent children. I get frustrated with those who think that the commandment "Do not kill" is not being violated by those who spend excessive money on fancy clothes, cars or houses (or buy any luxury) in the same world where children are dying every day and those deaths are preventable. That said, I don't think that "Do not kill" is a workable rule. It rings nicely to simple ears because it is phrased uncategorically, but we really need a new rule that recognizes that we are not exactly a nation of murderers when we buy a steady stream of unnecessary luxuries (especially at Christmas time), but it's something like that when we completely unhinge our consciences from our wallets, which so many of us in sanctimonious American do almost every day. I don't really know how to articulate such a rule, but I do want to take this moment to recognize this undeniable fact as part of my "Life is Real" campaign: Every day, most of us in American choose to buy things with dollars that could be used for saving the lives of real children. That's the way things are down here on planet Earth, and going around claiming that "Do not kill" only means don't shoot or stab innocent people doesn't change things one bit.

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Matt Taibbi discusses how the media makes and breaks politicians

Yes, the media makes and breaks politicians. They tell us who the "serious" politicians are before the race has even begun, and it always seems to be about who can raise money. At his blog, Matt Taibbi writes thoughtfully about this issue of the way the media caricatures politicians:

The political media has always taken it upon itself to make decisions about who is and who is not qualified to be taken seriously as candidates for higher office. Without even talking about whether they do this more or less to Republicans or Democrats, I can testify that I witnessed this phenomenon over and over again in the primary battles within the Democratic Party. It has always been true that the press corps has drawn upon internalized professional biases, high-school-style groupthink and the urging of insider wonks to separate candidates into “serious” and “unserious” groups before the shots even start to be fired.
Taibbi's post then morphs into some observations about Sarah Palin, who has constantly complained that she is not being treated fairly by "the liberal press."

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