Ezra Klein has changed his mind on social security and says we don't need cuts or a higher retirement age.
Frank Rich, writing about President Obama's Iraq speech last week, says Obama has grown tone-deaf in office.
[M]ore than 4,400 Americans and some 100,000 Iraqis (a conservative estimate) paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were wounded, and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation’s most valuable human capital, went into exile. The war’s official cost to U.S. taxpayers is now at $750 billion.
Quoting history professor Andrew Bracevich, Rich writes:
The war’s corrosive effect on the home front is no less egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New Dawn — a “name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,” Bacevich aptly writes — the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The price will be to keep repeating it.
And on the other casualties of the Iraq War, Rich writes:
The other American casualties of Iraq include the credibility of both political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media, which barely challenged the White House’s propaganda about Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds.
It looks like "tone deaf" is the phrase of the day. Here's Lindsay Graham on Obama on this morning's Meet the Press:
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: ...[T]he only way the President can possibly survive is come back to the middle. He’s tone deaf. Putting KSM on trial in New York City made no sense. Interjecting himself into the mosque debate made no sense. He’s tone deaf on terrorism issues and he’s certainly tone deaf on the economy.
Obama may be tone-deaf, but following Lindsay Graham's advice on anything is tantamount to the blind leading the blind.
Machiavelli would be proud of Graham. On Iraq, he says:
History will judge us not by what we did wrong at the beginning, but what we got right at the end.
I'm signing off to enjoy my final day in Aspen. This is an open thread, all topics welcome.
