Mitt Romney recently criticized “peacetime spending” in an era in which we have numerous wars going and are devoting about half of discretionary spending to wars and the military.
Netroots Nation has just announced 70 panels of progressive commentators. Of those panels, 69 do not discuss the wars or the military, their moral costs, their economic costs, their environmental costs, or their destruction of civil liberties and representative government.
One panel is called “Means to an End: Resolving Conflict in Afghanistan”
One wonders what the end is, and what the means. Here’s the panel description:
“This year marks 10 years in Afghanistan, making it one of the longer wars in our country’s history. We elected a President who promised to end our engagement there but instead, it has only escalated. This panel of experts will tackle questions about what needs to happen politically to end our engagement in this seemingly unending war and how the Netroots can help apply pressure.”
This is bizarre. Candidate Obama promised to escalate the war in Afghanistan, to escalate the use of drones, and to enlarge the U.S. military. And he has done so. “It has only escalated,” indeed! Can’t find a subject for that sentence? Obama escalated a war he had promised to escalate.
It’s not clear who these experts are. We can only hope that what they think needs to happen involves the need for us to impose majority will on the Congress and the President. Here are the polls:
-By 73% to 21% Americans say: withdraw a substantial number of U.S. combat forces from Afghanistan this summer — ABC/Washington Post
-By 63% to 30% Americans want complete withdrawal — Bloomberg
-By 72% to 25% Americans want to speed up the withdrawal — USA Today / Gallup
-By 53% to 39% Americans say U.S. troops should not be involved in Afghanistan — CBS
-By 50% to 44% Americans say: remove all troops ASAP — Pew
-By 64% to 31% Americans say the war has not been worth fighting — ABC / Washington Post
-By 58% to 40% Americans oppose the war — CNN / Opinion Research Corporation
Come on, people.
This is looking like more nets than roots at this point.