By Steven T. Jones
For more than a year, I’ve been defending President Obama against his critics on the left. They’d complain that he’s enabling hyper-capitalism and the military-industrial complex, and I’ve always urged them to give him time. The problems are huge and the political climate is stormy, so we needed to keep our immediate expectations reasonable and be patient.
But I’m beginning to lose hope.
The escalation of war in the Afghanistan was his third strike. First, he bailed out Wall Street, preserving an inequitable and unsustainable economic system. Then he abandoned his past support for a single-payer health care system, propping up the costly and corrupt insurance-based system. And then he decided to perpetuate the dangerous delusion that our military can make the world safe and secure and turn Afghanistan into a functional, modern state.
And now, as icing on the cake, it looks like Obama is backpedaling on his Afghanistan exit strategy and working with Senate Democrats to give up on the public health care option, leaving a “reform” bill whose most notable characteristic is that we’ll all be required to buy overly expensive health insurance from a profit-driven corporation.
Hope – it was nice while it lasted.