An Enthusiastic Endorsement of Obama

Here’s an interesting item from a Rasmussen poll – 63% of Americans want the troops brought home from Iraq within a year, 26% immediately.

In other news, 55% of Americans believe in the “Rapture”, or that Jesus will one day come back to earth on a white horse with a sword, and will start killing us by the billions. Christians will get to watch the carnage from above, and will then come down and have the planet to themselves.

Americans are now officially tired of this war, but that’s not important. Americans always tire of long wars. Americans tired of the Vietnam War in 1968, at Tet, but that war went on into 1975. The important thing was the initial push, the mobilization that got us into the war, the huge propaganda campaign. For Vietnam, is was Tonkin, a staged incident. For Iraq, it was WMD’s, a lie. These things always work because they tap into our basic instinct – we like war, killing, and blowing things up. We just don’t like the aftermath too well.

With Iraq, perhaps that 55% also believed that it was part of the end of time, leading to Rapture. Imaginary white horses have played a role in in all our wars.

Let’s be frank. Americans like war. This perhaps explains the phenomenon of our distaste for protesters even as we support the ideas of the protesters. Americans may be tired of this war, but not war in principle.

We’re a confounded lot, but surprisingly easy to manage. Now that we are at odds with our leaders, politicians are somewhat of a bind. We’re not leaving Iraq – not now, not until the oil is gone. But it’s voting time, and public sentiments have to be taken into account. We’re currently given three choices – two candidates who voted for the war, one of whom said she made a mistake but didn’t really and won’t apologize anyway, one who supports the war and wants it to go one for one hundred years, and one whom we just don’t know about, since he never really voted on it.

The likelihood is the any one of the three will keep us in Iraq. We’ve built bases now capable of housing 100,000 troops, and we’ve got 180,000 mercenaries there, working off-camera and probably involved in acts of terrorism, torture, subversion and infiltration. If Iraq is a place where we want democracy to flower, it doesn’t add up. But if oil is the prize, then the Iraqi people are the enemy (just as the Vietnamese were), the occupation as permanent, and it all makes sense.

We’re staying. Get over it. The question is, what to do about public opinion? Frankly, and as any true leader will tell us, the public is not to be consulted in matters of serious policy. We are emotional and fickle and uninformed, lacking depth. There’s nothing to be mined in public opinion – it only need be managed. Opinion against the war is troublesome, but will not dictate policy. So if one looks closely at Obama’s or Clinton’s policies on Iraq, it will become readily apparent – they are hedged to the hilt. Each calls for phased withdrawal as circumstances permit, and trust me, once elected they will discover that circumstances do not permit.

I find myself supporting the Obama candidacy – I get caught up in emotion too, I like his wife, and he is saying all the right things. But he’s offering food to a strange dog – I’m hungry, but I don’t trust. I’ve lived through Bill Clinton, I’ve seen how candidates can turn on a dime, screw their own followers, and still command their loyalty. And I’ve seen how little real policies matter in politics. So I am ever so tentatively edging closer to him, ready to take the morsel.

Enter Lucy, the football is in place. I’m ready to give it a go. Metaphors sufficiently mixed, I’m enthusiastically supporting Obama. He’s our savior.