From Friday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On President Obama’s trip to Afghanistan — the fourth time he has been out of the country during the release of unemployment numbers:
I’m sure it’s entirely a coincidence. It’s also the fact that the president likes to do stuff on his own anniversaries. For example, he signed the START treaty — or he initialed it — earlier this year on the one-year anniversary of the day in which he gave his speech in Europe about denuclearizing the world.
This visit comes a year and two days after he announced the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. He sees himself as world-historical and honors his own anniversaries. …
Nonetheless, it’s good that he goes. The troops need to see the commander-in-chief. And in some way, it makes up for the fact, although I think not entirely, that he doesn’t keep the nation in on the war. He doesn’t make the kind of speeches a president has to make — FDR did — that presidents have done when you’re in the middle of a war and it’s a serious war. You want to address the country on this. He does it very sporadically, and it’s not surprising that there’s so much unease and even opposition to a war that the president does not speak about often in public.
On Alan Simpson’s metaphor for the debt commission plan: “We took a big banana and threw it into the gorilla cage, and the gorilla has picked it up like they do, they peel it, mash it, play with it. But they will eat some”:
It’s half a banana, but it’s still a meal.
I think this is really an important moment because what you have is a national consensus that the problem is catastrophic, it’s coming soon, and you have to do drastic stuff.