Did you see the cover of Newsweek this week?  “St. Sarah” (Palin).  Scary as all get out.

I let out the same sigh I let out every time I get an over-wrought email or read an over-wrought post about Palin somewhere. But this one  does prompt me to respond and to think about the comment which came, as the “Oh no!!!!!! Sarah Palin–run for your lives!!!!” comments always do,  from someone who has center left politics. (And please don’t tell me there’s a left in America. There isn’t. There’s a center left, there’s a center, there’s a center right, there’s a right and there’s an extreme right. Alas, no extreme left. That handful of octogenerian Commies in Greenwich Village  still arguing Trotsky v. Stalin does not count. Seriously. When we get a left here like we had in the 1960s or like much of Europe still has, then we can talk leftists. Until then it’s center left definition for you.)

Here’s what I think about Sarah Palin. I don’t care about her. She’s pretty, she’s charismatic, she has great skin, she wears clothes beautifully. But I do not care about her or whether Inside Edition thinks she had a boob job because they can’t tell the difference between a form-fitting t-shirt and a suit jacket. I do not care who she supports or what she says about the Gulf. She’s marginal. She’s relevant only in as much as she is the prop to keep Obama from completely gutting his presidency. Without Sarah Palin, what would Obama do? He’d have to go back to hating Hillary. He’d have to find a new deflection from his own massive mis-steps.

That’s what I think about Palin. 

No one can hold Palin accountable for anything she says because really, she only answers to her fan base, which is large but also largely marginal, and the press which can’t decide if it loves or hates her but does know it likes her on magazine covers because she sells. Well.

So why the center left’s obsession with her? Sure a lot of people like her–she’s incredibly charismatic. but she has no real power. Why has anyone forgotten that? To paraphrase Gwen Stephani, she’s just a girl in the world. Obama is president. He has he power. Doesn’t use it for squat, but he does have it. 

So when I think about Palin, I think the focus on her from the center-left  Obama supporters  like moveon and the DSCC and Code Pink and people who laud themselves as progressives is all about getting our attention off Obama and saying, “No—look over there! THAT’S what’s scary.”

I acknowledge being a strident optimist. I don’t know how cynics get by in life and don’t especially want to know. That said, I’m increasingly cynical about the current administration and its apologists.

Remember when we progressives were against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan? Remember when we thought the refutation of the rule of law under the Bush Administration was tantamount to if not an outright war crime? Remember when the Abu Ghraib photos first appeared in The New Yorker  and how shocked we were?

Cut to election night and the throngs in Grant Park and the tears and the cheering and the not having to wait for three days or three months to find out who was going to be the next president. Even if you weren’t a big fan of Barack Obama (I was a stalwart Hillary Clinton supporter, but voted for Obama in the general), you had to feel relief.

The enthusiasm and yes, hope, of that night is long gone. Now we are sitting right where we were a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, eight years ago—listening to excuses for things that are inexcusable, listening to the Democrats explain yet again why they have no spine (not all of them, but certainly well more than a quorum), listening to a President explain how a troop surge (what else do you call 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan?) will “finish the job,” listening to what we found loathesome under George W. Bush and making excuses for why it is okay under Barack H. Obama.

It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. Anyone who twists their integrity and logic around to excuse these inexcusable crimes—war, torture, recision of the rule of law, indefinite detenti0n—is simply lying:  to themselves, to the country, to the world.

This is not change. This is the status quo we have been listening to for nearly a decade. It’s what we spent years defending against under Bush.

I voted for change. I didn’t expect all the change that was promised. But I did expect some modicum of difference. I did expect that I would be able to discern at least a subtle if not tectonic shift in the political status quo. But instead I have been seeing a Democrat in Republican clothing where a progressive was supposed to have been elected. And almost everything I read in the left-leaning blogosphere keeps saying it’s all the Republicans’ fault.

How? Since they’re not in power, I mean?  

I have come to disbelieve that this President wants change. He keeps saying change is hard. But how would he know? He hasn’t effected any. Listening to this mantra of Obama’s that change is hard just sounds so very…Bush.

I don’t want another president deluded by his own power into believing that he  is the answer. Obama isn’t the answer in Afghanistan. You can ask “how many Afghanis does it take to change a lightbulb?” again and again but the answer will be the same–the Afghanis have to really want to change the lightbulb and move from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the present. 35,000 more American troops will not force that change. Cannot force that change. We need to leave. We need to let these people fail or rise on their own. We can’t give them a pill to end corruption, we can’t change their deep desire to entrust their futures to war lords and corruption and repressive religious theocratic dictatorships. We can’t force democracy. We can’t even force it in our own Congress.

I feel we are back to the shell-game politics of the Bush Administration: look over here! No–look over here! First it was health care reform, then a jobs summit, now Afghanistan. No one is saying these aren’t all pressing issues. They are. Nevertheless, it seems as if there is just an endless stop/start routine between the President and the Democrats in Congress that stymies any and all actual progress.

It’s depressing. It’s not hopeful. And it’s definitely not the change most of us who voted for Obama were expecting. Stasis is not change. Someone as smart as Obama has to know that. And if he doesn’t, someone smart who is close to him should tell him. Before it’s too late and his one-term presidency is sealed.—VAB

It’s lunacy to think that what is going on in Afghanistan–an internal drug war (yes, our troops are running interference on the opium trade) compounded by the infiltration of Al Qeada–is somehow fixable or even manageable. And the slow bleed into Pakistan as a second (or third, if we are still counting Iraq) front has just served to expand and extend any escalation that occurs. How long before we are actually told that we need troops sent directly to Pakistan.

It seems inconceivable that this Administration has the arrogance to believe that sending 35,000 more American troops will somehow end this war. There are few nations as corrupt at their core as Afghanistan. Zimbabwe and Somalia may be the only ones that qualify. We do not have a strong partner in the war in Hamid Karzai who definitively was involved in manipulation of the votes in the recent election. Karzai was implicated to such a degree that the run-off election was called off when the Karzai’s opponent, Abdullah Abdullah protested the insidious nature of the ballot-fixing and withdrew from the election, leaving Karzai the erzatz winner in an election that was deemed by all standards–local and international—corrupt, flawed and even illegal. When you fix hold an election and can’t win 50 percent of the vote despite jailing, killing, threatening and coercing voters, what does that say about your ability to lead?

And yet this is the man that Obama has decided will be our partner in what the Pentagon and generals on the ground have determined will be at least five more years but more likely ten more waging a war that will not, as Obama clearly stated before Thanksgiving, be “nation building,” but will rather be to keep al Qeada from our shores.

Deja vu  all over again.

Meanwhile, what is the cost for this war—apart from the harrowing toll of dead and maimed and collateral damage like those assassinated at Ft. Hood?

Every network has followed ABC news in reporting last week a staggering $1 million per troop per year.

DP notes that we don’t have this money to begin with–we are borrowing it–from the future, from our children and of course, from China, our big banker to the East.

Do we institute a war tax? A handful of Democrats with spines are suggesting that’s the only answer.

Personally, I’d like to see some Vietnam-style protests. If the teabaggers can get their little legions out there, why can’t majority America which opposes this war take to the streets en masse?

I also think unless and until we reinsitute a draft which starts to cull the children of the privileged, these wars can and will go on indefinitely. No one cares about people they don’t know being killed and maimed except in some abstract way. Take their sons and daughters (and there is no front line anymore, so daughters are fair game) and the wars would end tomorrow.

It’s difficult to understand how anyone, particularly someone as obviously smart and well-educated and well-advised as Obama could believe that we can “win” in Afghanistan and “finish the job.”  That’s positively Cheneyesque.

Lest we forget what’s most at stake in this arrogant escalation, below are the latest numbers of what we’ve lost to these wars thus far. It will make your stomach churn. Or should.—VAB

Last Week: US Iraq Casualties Rise to 75,172

like many of the sunday squakers, i have 30 years experience as a reporter covering politics for some of the bigger and better newspapers and syndicates in the country. this makes me one more pundit among many with either more or less or more recent or less vast experience than i.  like other pundits my opinions are based concomitantly on inside sources plus personal insights that have evolved out of all those years in and around and beyond the beltway.

one such experience is my politically activist youth. i was a teenager during vietnam, but i got arrested quite a few times in demonstrations–all peaceful–against that war. i sat in a few jail cells with other protesters twice my age and more. i felt genuine outrage of the sort usually associated with adolescence, but which was clearly mirrored for me by adults i knew who were equally outraged by the war. war has a way of coalescing sides and eradicating the barriers of age, gender, race, etc.

usually.

as a catholic school girl in a parish where the priests were followers of the berrigan brothers, and living in a mixed-race working class neighborhood, the general tenor of my teenaged surroundings was solidly anti-war.  this may have been because the war had been going on for such a long time and folks who had initially supported the war were tired or it may have been because there had been so many kids coming home in body bags. it may also have been because nixon was becoming so universally reviled–it’s hard to know. i was a politically sophisticated teenager, but a teenager nonetheless and thus had no backstory on which to draw for my politics. it was all here, all now.

older brothers of high school friends of mine were drafted and some never came back. one of my former husband’s older brothers came back, but his depression (what we now call PTSD) wrecked his marriage and damaged him for many years after his service.  a high school near the one i attended held the national record for most alumni killed in vietnam.

i may have only been a teenager, entering high school after richard nixon began “vietnamization,” but it was clear to me even then–because i was well-read, politically active and my parents were socialists–that the war was wrong.   

looking back on the certainty i felt in those years, a certainty that the adults around me also seemed to feel, that vietnam was a huge mistake that could have no good end, i’m flummoxed by the current stasis in washington over afghanistan. if it’s not vietnam revisisted, then what is it?

and what is the big question, really? candidate obama seemed so clear in his anti-war stance. we heard repeatedly that he was against both wars, although he hadn’t been in political office when those wars were started, so his opinion was much like the rest of us who had a WTF? response. nevertheless, he seemed clear: the wars were a mistake.

then during the primary, obama began to lean toward a withdraw-from-iraq-and-devote-the-troops-to-afghanistan stance. and because everyone was ga-ga over obama, no one challenged this. in fact in one stunning exchange that should have made headlines,  obama said at the new hampshire debate that he would consider bombing pakistan with no warning. hillary clinton gave a solid foreign policy response that took india and pakistan as nuclear nations into account. but the exchange barely made it to the blogosphere. because obama was golden and hillary, was, in obama’s own words at the time, someone who thought foreign policy experience meant having had tea with the wives of world leaders. (of course he chose her for secretary of state, so either he changed his mind or it’s one more sign of his own inexperience that he picked her or he realized that he had no clue about foreign policy and better get her on board. clinton told ABC’s cynthia mcfadden last week that she hadn’t wanted the job, but when your president asks you to serve, you do.) 

the key reason obama fired mckiernan from the afghanistan post  and replaced him with mcchrystal was because mckiernan had called the war unwinnable and was leaning toward the perspective that the u.s. should withdraw. a narcostate with no infratstructure run by political corruption that makes pakistan, iraq and iran look pristine by comparison, afghanistan has never had a truly solid government and has been involved in one or more conflicts for decades. anyone looking at the country’s history for more than five minutes (less time, apparently, than george bush spent checking it out) could see that entering into afghanistan would become, to use the overused word of the day, a quagmire.

and quagmire it has indeed become. unlike in iran where the corrupt and rigged june election was called fair and uncorrupt by the very people who rigged it because they really know how to run a dictatorship there,  the election in afghanistan has now been deemed rigged after weeks of vote counts. there will be a run-off. our guy (and why is karzai our guy???) will win again, as secretary clinton said this sunday with an unmistakeable note of regret in her voice.

but there will be no more stability after a more carefully orchestrated run-off election. because afghanistan is corrupt to its core. to re-direct the politics of that nation requires more than mere nation-building–it would require sowing the ground with salt and starting over from scratch.

we can’t win there. we can’t. we aren’t the first country to get stuck with this tar baby and we likely won’t be the last. just as we weren’t the first in vietnam.

the best option is the withdrawal option. joe biden, who’s had almost nothing to say that wasn’t foot-in-mouth during the whole of the obama presidency, has been stridently opposed to escalation in afghanistan. so much so that arianna huffington suggested on CNN that biden should resign in protest if obama escalates in afghanistan. (like that would happen, but read it here:  www.huffingtonpost.com/_320929.html )

rahm emanuel was doing the talk show circuit with a vengeance on sunday, doing double duty in putting off the afghanistan question and slamming the public option.

according to emanuel, there can be no decision on afghanistan until the election results have been codified. really? was there a point where anyone believed this was a fair and free election? was there a point where anyone with two brain cells to rub together thought hamid karzai–our guy in kabul–wasn’t corrupt and was a strong leader capable of pulling his country together? even diane sawyer seemed stunned when she interviewed him a few weeks ago at his summary expectation of gullibility from the west. (perhaps he thinks that cool cape he always wears is magic…)

on ABC’s this week the two issues of the day–afghanistan and the public option—faired n0 better than they had on CBS’s face the nation or on CNN. it was easy to ignore anything peggy noonan had to say (perhaps if she didn’t look/sound drunk every time she appears on the show it might help her credibility, although that seems so damaged as to be irreparable). and usually it’s easy to ignore george will, with his retograde amnesia about history/politics. but since will came out so stridently against continuing the war in afghanistan (albeit seven and a half years too late), he makes occasional sense as he did yesterday. his concern: that obama will trade up with afghanistan and the public option to look tough.

if democrats are still doing the “we have to look tough” routine, then we learned nothing from the clinton health care debacle nor from the eight loooong years of the bush/cheney regime.

democrats in washington, especially those in the white house, take note: you have the floor. the house floor, the senate floor, the oval office floor. the democratic president just appointed a latina woman supreme court justice (she’s a centrist moderate, but ignore that for the moment). we can do stuff. really, we can.

we can force a public option, we can withdraw from afghanistan. we can become the change we always wanted to be or whatever new change mantra obama is selling this week. (he seems stuck on “change is hard” these days.)

 what we cannot and must not do is revert to type, by which i mean the quaking fear of losing congressional seats that has stymied the democrats in ways it has never worried the republicans.

since when is ONE REPUBLICAN SENATOR enough to create a bipartisan bill? since we gave them that much power. as long as we cede everything to the republicans, we will continue to have nothing.

rahm emanuel used to be the best knife fighter in the democratic party after hillary clinton. whither the guy who sent a dead fish to an opponent who shafted him? obama chose him to be his chief of staff because emanuel didn’t care about getting his hands dirty. which then makes us wonder: if he’s being sent on the talk show rounds to damp down the public option and scuttle the afghanistan question, then where the hell are we with both?

obama promised a health care plan that would provide for most americans as well as provide better coverage than americans had before he took office. has anyone in the white house actually looked at what max baucus came up with? or was the president too busy lauding olympia snowe as the second coming of bipartisanship?

this bill–which will be whittled down even further before passage–is devoid of everything obama and hillary clinton fought so bitterly over during the primary. most americans’ eyes glazed over when the debates turned to health care reform because it always seemed the two were deep in the weeds on the specifics. but the fact is, obama made substantial promises on health care. not as many as clinton, but then she had been holding the health care grudge for 15 years. nevertheless, obama did promise a public option, he did promise a level of mandate, he did promise no lobbying with big pharma (he forgot that one first–to the tune of $88 billion–in june), he did promise (even john mccain promised this one) that americans could get cheaper drugs from canada.

seen those things in the baucus bill? nope–because it’s been eviscerated of everything obama and clinton battled over. (it doesn’t even have provisions mccain campaigned for, not that mccain has mentioned those, but that’s republicans for you. moderate my ass.)

most of us who weren’t born yesterday or didn’t drink the kool aid have known for a long time that obama is no progressive. but we also thought that as a democrat with a democratic majority in congress he would at least make an attempt at creating some functional change.

listen to his two main honchos, emanuel and axelrod, however, and the fix appears to be in. we’re out of everythig we want/need on health care reform in a big way–we may get a bill, but it won’t be a bill most of us will want to live with (and it won’t even do what obama has insisted it would, that is, keep current coverage intact). as for afghanistan, that one is anybody’s guess. with any luck, obama will borrow a page from the nixon and bush playbooks and orchestrate the run-off in afghanistan so that abdullah abdullah wins and then we have an actual partner to negotiate with for however many more years we are stuck in that lawless state. until then, it’s more (non)change you can’t believe you voted for. and a very long road ahead.—vab