CHANGE THE CHANNEL

I ponder, sometimes, whether Barack Obama is campaigning for War Criminal In Chief.

On his tour of Afghanistan he told reporter Lara Logan that we must move a couple of brigades from Iraq to Afghanistan to finish the job. We all know the Afghan war is going badly with coalition casualties now exceeding those in a more peaceful Iraq. Of course, we don't measure Afghan casualties, in part because we refuse to confront the truth of our blasting untold thousands to kingdom come to complete our takeover of a nation that has refused to be conquered for as long as memory can measure. When Logan correctly asked him what if those token brigades don't get the job done, our intrepid change agent responded, "Well, then we'll keep at it till we do".

That sounds suspiciously like the failed war policies of Democrat Lyndon Johnson regarding Vietnam and Republican President Bush regarding Iraq. The change we really need next January is to end senseless, criminal wars that are destroying our economy as surely as destroying our soul, focus our military like a laser beam on real terrorist plots, and use that trillion dollars or more to rebuild our crumbling economy.

And some advice to future President Obama: Stop channeling failed war criminal presidents.

Originally published in Daily Herald, August 13, 2008