Just four days after his trip to Afghanistan, Obama said that money saved from ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should help pay down the national debt and go to health care, education and infrastructure.
"After more than a decade of war, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home," he said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday.
First of all, as the troops he just met in Afghanistan are prepared for one last American-led offensive in Regional Command East, it is offensive to me that he says he is turning away from a war ending in Afghanistan. He's worried about a "war on women?" How about the actual war on our military?
Given how much the president has increased our debt in his tenure, his claims to want to reduce the deficit and spend on health, education, and infrastructure--the very things that dominate our growing debt on his watch--are just astounding. The man has nerve, you have to admit.
But what gets me is that only now he wants to focus on home and turn away from foreign affairs. Good grief, is he really claiming he was focused on foreign affairs before this moment in time?
I guess it is mission accomplished in restoring our reputation abroad. Russians threaten to attack NATO and China is furious with us (I guess it wasn't Bush's fault that we did not get along), Iraq is shaky without our troops, there is doubt that we will stand with Afghanistan, I've yet to see the post-war plan for Libya, Syrians are dying at the hands of Assad's goons, Canada wonders about our reliability as a trading partner, North Korea is preparing to light up another nuke, South America lurches left and anti-Americanism is rising (with Argentina threatening our ally Britain which the Obama administration has also thrown under the bus), and Iran thumbs its nose at us over their nukes. To name the big ones.
If that's the result of focusing abroad (that would explain not reading the health care bill before urging passage and just letting Congress write the stimulus, I suppose), I seriously fear what focusing his attention on America will do to us.
But like many things the president says, it is silly. And untrue. Foreign policy has always been an unpleasant distraction from his real love of nation-wide community organizing.
In the world, our president has created a desert and called it "peace." God forbid he will focus on desert-building here at home.
