Where Is This 3 Trillion Dollar War Taking US?

Frankly, I am glad I am not Barack Obama. But if ever this country needed someone of his intellectual capacity, strategic brilliance, ability to bring people together, it will be the first day he steps into the Oval office And brothers and sisters I am here tell you, the deep shit hole Bush has left us in will require not just Obama but a team of equally brilliant people to begin to address how we, as Americans, are going to climb out this seeming insurmountable abyss and turn our country around. But there is Obama and for that reason I have hope.

I cannot do this Diary’s title justice – but I read an article, no a brilliant summation, late last night in The Guardian that does. Entitled The True Cost of War, it is a review of a forthcoming book, The Three Trillion War, and has been written by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz

http://www.guardian.co.uk/prof…

It is a blistering account of negligence and greed as it breaks down exactly what this war has cost to date – 3 trillion – how it is affecting the global economy – how the bush administration had absolutely zero, no, notta strategy for going about this war, and I suppose one of the worst parts – what the money could have been used for instead and I am not talking tax breaks. What this book – and frankly this article, accomplishes is helping the reader understand what the next President will inherit on day one.

Here’s the good news – and it is important for those of us already committed to electing Obama as our next President:

He has already put feelers out to Stiglitz to have a position in his cabinet should (I say When) he becomes President. And I have no doubt there are other brilliant people he is speaking to as well.

I’d like to close with a personal comment to Hillary Clinton before you all go off and read this MUST READ article:

Hillary, the reason you are not more prepared than Obama to fill the Oval office on Day One – as your campaign has tried and failed – to sell over this Primary season – is evidenced by the strategy upon which you based your own campaign. And a very faulty one at that:

(1) Selling Top Down doesn’t work in Contemporary America – this only comes in handy when abusing power; we have been transformed forever by the Internet into a grass roots, community styled, progressive force that will inject itself into American politics for decades to come;

(2) The American people have been forced to grow up under the severe abuses of the Bush Government and its total destruction of both our constitutional rights and economy; The American people rose to this challenge, crept out one by one from under their rock of fear the Bush Administration would rather they had stayed behind and got educated – very damn educated. From big city to farms from red state to blue state, we have gotten very fucking educated all right and that makes me proud. It also shows a grand and wrong assumption about your campaign. It’s not the 90’s anymore. We are not counting on a Clinton to clean up a far more complicated far more disastrous Bush mess. We are counting on ourselves led by a competent leader.

(3)It has often been said by your staffers that you speak specifics while your opponent speaks in terms of lofty ideals. Well listen up Bill and Hillary:



I have listened carefully to all those crafted sound bytes you provide the American people during the debates that are an attempt to sound very specific. At first you had me fooled. But as I have watched over 10 debates I have come to a stunning conclusion – at times you are “dumbing down”  Obama’s ideas so as to co=opt and make them your own in simplistic language. You also dumb down your own ideas into sound bytes that on the one hand may make you sound ‘specific’ but on the other hand sell the American people short on their ability to understand the complexity of our current situation. It hasn’t worked.

This has proved to be a fatal miscalculation of your campaign- and it will be even more so for Cain. Barack Obama is the first leader since FDR who does not talk to the American people as if we are all in Kindergarten. He speaks with the fulcrom of his intelligence and invites us into the conversation.

THAT is the leader we need in the oval office on day one and America is smart enough to know it.

Thanks for listening.