.... If there is one yearning that Obama is capable of satisfying in the short term, analysts say, it is a change in the national mood, a restoration of confidence in the shaken country. If he can do that, they say, the public will allow him more room to fulfill the bold, long-term goals. "He's got a lot on his plate, but the big thing on his plate is the same thing Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to deal with: fear," said Larry Berman, director of the Washington program at the University of California, Davis. "It is about as real today as it was in 1932, and it's really a fear about our way of life."
Yup, we are ALL ABOUT FEAR in this country -- no matter WHAT the issue is!!!
There may be a parallel to Roosevelt, but so, too, is there one to John F. Kennedy, whose biggest early accomplishment after his election in 1960 may have simply been improving the national psyche by forging ahead to a "new frontier."
Only to be CUT DOWN when he tried to do it:
"Commencement Address at American University in Washington, June 10, 1963
.... I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived -- yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women -- not merely peace in our time but peace for all time. I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by 11 of the Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use the is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles -- which can only destroy and never create -- is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war -- and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task....
Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.... No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.... For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
--MORE--"
*****************
Obama's most pressing investment is the giant economic recovery plan, a $825 billion effort to rescue America's struggling economy. But there are many others he wants or needs to make early in his term: spending capital in Congress trying to overhaul healthcare; spending valuable diplomacy to diffuse the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza Strip, spending military resources to beat back a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
Yeah, Afghanistan: Peace President Plans to Annihilate Afghanistan
I'm appalled, folks, at the next level of atrocities this man who KNOWS bin-Laden is DEAD is going to take these PHONY WARS!!!
The long-term dividends on such investments could be huge - an economy rescued and growing again; near-universal health coverage and lowered premiums; peace and stability in the Middle East - but so are the risks. Will the reckoning bring a runaway federal deficit? Yet another politically damaging failed healthcare overhaul? Further hostility among Jews and Arabs, and an emboldened insurgency in Afghanistan?
Answers: Yes; No (he'll get his taxpayer giveaway to health care corporations through Congress); No (that's Israel's call, not his); and Yes (you can't "win" there. Not now, not ever).
********************
It all begins with the economic recovery plan, a mixture of tax cuts and hundreds of billions of dollars in new infrastructure spending. Within the plan, Obama and Congress are looking to make a series of what Obama has called down payments on the future, such as expanding broadband Internet access to give the whole country access to the information economy, and retrofitting federal buildings toward energy efficiency, to save on long-term energy costs and make a dent in climate change....
I'm so sick of everything that the society stands for or bases its actions on being a damnable lie, aren't you?
Aside from the concrete investments Obama plans to make, he has also promised to reimagine America's image, in part by closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and reversing controversial Bush administration programs on domestic spying and interrogation.
Yeah, sure he has (keep reading).
Even if those efforts also take time to bear fruit, Obama may enjoy an immediate yield merely by asserting a new approach to a world hungry for new leadership in Washington.
Even if it is all an illusion!
His first big test in this regard - one fraught with political peril - may be the fighting in the Middle East, which Obama has said he will address his first day in office. Even the slightest shift away from Bush's full-throated support of Israel's military campaign would surely send ripples through foreign capitals, but could set off alarm bells among Israel's defenders at home.
Yeah, and that is the LONE FOREIGN CAPITAL that would be "rippled' in that effect. Now, if 'bamer turns on his Zionist masters, then the rest of the world's capitals will ripple!
Obama will engender some disappointment by delaying or scrapping some of his campaign promises....
Yeah, like ENDING TORTURE and the WARS!
