Obama, War and Trust

Last night ABC News itemized some ludicrous items in the White House data about the stimulus money. Two more items reported tonight: Nine pairs of shoes were counted as nine jobs in one real District. A onetime raise for 300 employees scored as 300 new jobs. The local people said the White House ordered them to report this way.
This doesn’t terribly surprise me. In 1964, as a government peon, I was pulled off my regular duties and told to start going through all the magazine reprints and publications in the Diabetes Program of the US Public Health Service. Anything we hadn’t used, sent out or was more than fifteen years old was to be tossed—and the throwaways counted and listed with the ORIGINAL COST.
I came up with about 300 for perhaps the same amount of dollars and gave the total to my boss. He passed it on up the chain. Apparently there were lots of peons doing just what I had done. About a month later the White House issued a press release proclaiming that the President had just saved tax payers huge bucks by eliminating unnecessary publications.
It is a source of wry satisfaction to me that I contributed to that fictitious savings. So why shouldn’t Obama do the same? But here’s something else to think about.
THREE TIMES in the Twentieth Century Democratic candidates found themselves running for president with a war looming over them. Each candidate proclaimed his Republican competitor to be a war monger and promised HE would keep up out of war.
In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran under the slogan, “He kept us out of war!” (WWI) and accused Republican Charles Evans Hughes of wanting to join the fighting. Wilson won, was sworn in on March 4, 1917, and in April declared war on Germany.
In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt ran the same line against Republican Wendell Wilkie. When people pointed out that he had just created our first peace time draft, he vowed NEVER to send those boys overseas to fight. He won his third term on a “peace plank”.
He was inaugurated on January, 20, 1941. Within months he had declared most of the Atlantic to be a killing zone where US ships were authorized to open up on German U-boats. He had B-17 bombers flying bombing missions over Germany to test their capabilities.
He was giving England all sorts of war materials—at no cost. He had moved the Pacific Fleet out from its home base at San Diego to Pearl Harbor to attack the Japanese Fleet. He denied Japan any fuel, steel, iron, copper and a full list of one hundred items needed to maintain a society above the level of a Stone Age society. He also froze all their assets in New York.
He refused to meet with the Japanese emperor to negotiate some sort of truce and finally goaded the hot heads in Tokyo (who recognized they had only eighteen months of oil left) to attack us later that same year—which took care of any need to declare war on the Axis, since they obliged by declaring war on us. Never mind that he had been working with the British on joint war plans since the fall of 1939 while he promised to keep the peace in 1940.
Then came 1964—while I was in Washington. Lyndon Johnson ran against Barry Goldwater, whom he depicted as a thoroughly scary and irresponsible pro-war militant. His peace plank worked so well he won by the largest land-slide in American history.
Never mind that in August of that year he tricked Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—which gave him carte blanch for nine more years of war. He was sworn in on January 20, 1965, and two months later American combat troops were in action in Vietnam.
Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson—and now Obama? Last year Mr. Obama made pacific enough noises about our wars in the Middle East to convince most of his supporters that he planned to cut back those wars (unlike that war monger McCain).
Want to place a side bet?