Well, first, the supposed "45,000 deaths" statistic is questionable. Columnist Robert Samuelson recently dismantled it. Second, if this bill is so important, why doesn’t it take effect until 2013?
The fact is that lawmakers are racing to pass measures they haven't even written down. because they don’t understand them yet. Once they do, they'll be astounded at the wide-ranging changes they’ll have made to the health care system. Meanwhile, a bill passed in haste this fall will sit around until after two more congressional and one more presidential elections, by which time voters will have forgotten who to blame for the bad policy.
Not long ago, liberals championed our mission in Afghanistan, and blamed the Bush administration for any failures there.
"They have taken their eye off the real ball," presidential candidate John Kerry told The New York Times in September 2004. "They took it off in Afghanistan and shifted it to Iraq." A year later, then-Sen. Joe Biden added, "The administration took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and diverted our attention and resources to Iraq prematurely."
Even Obama himself, as a candidate last year, claimed, "We've got to see this in a bigger context, which is that our invasion of Iraq resulted in us taking our eye off the ball. We should have been focused in Afghanistan, finishing off al Qaeda." At least they all got the liberal talking points correct.
But now, our president has time for health care reform, time to chair meaningless United Nations Security Council meetings, even time for a fruitless trip to Denmark to lobby for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Chicago. Having been swatted down, in person, by international elites, Obama may be tempted to paraphrase Sally Field: "They don't like us. They really don't like us."
Still, even with all this other important stuff going on, the least our president could do would be to sketch a plan for military success in Afghanistan. "Either accept [McChrystal's] assessment or correct it, or let's have a discussion," an unnamed Pentagon official complained to the Post. "Will you read it and tell us what you think?"
Time's-a-wasting. We need our president to put his eye, well, back on the ball.