Thank you (for my teachers)

Ingrid makes me smile. And cry like a wee little girl.



Thank you Ms. Legg, Ms. Thomas, Marty Rothwell, Mr. Jestmore, Ms. Taggart, Ms. Bucci, Ms. Washington, Mr. Babich, Professor Ericson, Chris, Carson,  and every teacher who ever believed in me like this.

Thank you for seeing me through the various and turbulent storms my heart saw. And making so many celebrations in my life possible, at all.

It meant the world to me. It really did.

Just how little do we care?

It's so funny and sad to see a world obsessed with proving how little it cares, simultaneously obsess about how too little it cares.

Why is He Sending Them?

It also happens to be the most important question the President faces, right now. And a dead-on observation about the President's ambivalence, in the matter.

"What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war while announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One who doesn’t have his heart in it. One who doesn’t really want to win but is making some kind of political gesture. One who thinks he has to be seen as trying but is preparing the ground — meaning, the political cover — for failure.

Until now, the above was just inference from the president’s public rhetoric. No longer. Now we have the private quotes. Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, drawing on classified memos and interviews with scores of national-security officials, has Obama telling his advisers: 'I want an exit strategy.' He tells the country publicly that Afghanistan is a “vital national interest,” but he tells his generals that he will not do the kind of patient institution-building that is the very essence of the counterinsurgency strategy that Generals McChrystal and Petraeus crafted and that he himself adopted.

Moreover, he must find an exit because 'I can’t lose the whole Democratic party.' This admission is the most crushing of all.

First, isn’t this the party that in two consecutive presidential campaigns — John Kerry’s and then Obama’s — argued vociferously that Afghanistan was the good war, the right war, the war of necessity, the central front in the War on Terror? Now, after acceding to power and being given charge of that very war, Obama confides that he must retreat lest that very same party abandon him. What happened in the interim? Did it suddenly develop a faint heart? Or was the party disingenuous about the Afghan war all along, using it as a convenient club with which to attack George W. Bush over Iraq, while protecting Democrats from the charge of being reflexively antiwar?

Whatever the reason, is it not Obama’s job as president and party leader to bring the party with him? This is the man who made Berlin coo, America swoon, and the Nobel committee lose its mind. Yet he cannot get his own party to follow him on what he insists is a matter of vital national interest?

Did he even try? Obama spent endless hours cajoling and persuading individual members of Congress to garner every last vote for health-care reform. Has he done a fraction of that for Afghanistan — argued, pleaded, horse-traded, twisted even a single arm?...

...Senator Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asked many years ago: 'How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?' Perhaps Kerry should ask that of Obama.

'He is out of Afghanistan psychologically,' says Woodward of Obama. Well, he may be out, but the soldiers he ordered to Afghanistan are in.

Some will not come home."

Perhaps a country trying its damndest to prove just how little it cares might consider the strong possibility that, the truth of the matter is, they, in fact, care too little. And a lot of soldiers' and civilians' lives are on the line in that quest.

The question remains.

Just how little do we care?

The decent folks stuck in the middle of this mess might just like to know.