This is not a criticism of your point, or of Obama. I just find it interesting that people/pundits/journalist are acting surprised about Obama's cabinet. It shouldn't be a surprise at all if people paid close attention to what he has been saying in his speeches and in his books.

It's not going to change.

That's neither hopelessness nor any abrogation of responsibility, individual or collective.

It's reality.

This is not a criticism of your point, or of Obama. I just find it interesting that people/pundits/journalist are acting surprised about Obama's cabinet. It shouldn't be a surprise at all if people paid close attention to what he has been saying in his speeches and in his books.

It's not going to change.

That's neither hopelessness nor any abrogation of responsibility, individual or collective.

It's reality.

This is not a criticism of your point, or of Obama. I just find it interesting that people/pundits/journalist are acting surprised about Obama's cabinet. It shouldn't be a surprise at all if people paid close attention to what he has been saying in his speeches and in his books.

It's not going to change.

That's neither hopelessness nor any abrogation of responsibility, individual or collective.

It's reality.

With that out of the way….

Wanna know why I went there? It seems like liberals/progressives (and, yes, some conservatives as well, myself included) really expected Obama to come in, clean out the temple, and appoint people whose beliefs were as far left as the campaign he ran.

So, now that he's not doing that, people are getting pissed. And I don't understand that….especially on this one.

It's not like Gates hasn't already thought about how the drawdown's going to go; he was part of the Iraq Study Group, which also recommended a withdrawal timeframe. Considering what he was handed from Rumsfeld, he's done a good job…and there's no compelling reason-digging or otherwise-to not let him (ahem) finish the job that so far, he's done admirably.

This is one of them. The Medea Benjamin crack was uncalled for and you know it.

This digging is not irrelevant, but then again, you're a war hawk and head cheerleader for Gates, anyway.

We're not going to agree on this one, but as I said, your Medea Benjamin crack was uncalled for, and the fact that you looked at all of John McCain's race baiting, denounced it and then slid in a comment that you voted for him anyway and hoped we wouldn't notice in all the celebrating going on here, almost places you in concern troll mode.

OTOH, if Medea was made SecDef, maybe there would be peace in the middle east, and there would have been a request to Congress to declare war on factual evidence as opposed to making shyt up to make sure your contractor buddies profitted from a manufactured war effort.

GAME OVER. Maybe YOU need to stand down….AGAIN.

If Obama was serious about “ending the war 'responsibly,'” he really had no choice but to keep Gates on through its successful conclusion. Under Gates' leadership, the Iraq War has been all but won (victory celebration to follow), and is probably in the best position to continue the stabilization of Afghanistan than anyone else.

So, all this digging…is really irrelevant.

Course, I guess if Obama had picked Medea Benjamin as SECDEF, then the left would've been happy.

No offense, but I am a little older than you. When I was a young man that would have been an almost unthinkable and hopeless kind of statement, abandoning one's individual and collective agency and responsibility. I don't like saying it this way but at one time people were actually impatient with injustice.

Until more of us raise our expectations of each other, our politics and our world and regain that old impatience with war and injustice, not much is gonna change.

And when you think about it, you and I both agree we know why Jack Kennedy caught that bullet in Dallas back in 1963, and a crazy lone gunman wasn’t the reason. Up until Kennedy’s assassination, there hadn’t been an assassination of a sitting POTUS since McKinley.

That Oliver Stone movie, “JFK” was the convincing factor. The reason people laid into Stone for making that movie was the fact that he stepped on some toes and came too close to home with what he inferred.

Hillary Clinton and keeping Bob Gates on at Defense is sending a message that Obama's not adverse to keeping the effort going for a while, but as long as he's not into starting shyt, like Bush did…

America was founded on a war. The presidents who aren't Pro-War get shot.

It's a fact of life we need to deal with.

I hate it. But it's not going to change.

“Tiers to war” are not the issue. Lies to justify war are the issue, and Gates has been manufacturing these for a long time now. It's hard to believe that everybody is tainted. Anbd even if that was true Gates is arguably the MOST bloodstained relic of the Reagan era still in public life, short of Dick Cheney himself.

Iraq is a lost war. Afghanistan is a lost war. There needs to be people in Defense and the State Department who see this and act accordingly. The problem is that too often these folks interests are so tied to the military industrial complex they cant divest themselves even if they want to. They know which side the bread is buttered.

When Democrats swept into the White House and controlled the congress in 1992-93 they dropped all investigations of the folks not already pardoned by Reagan and Bush, and allowed him to slip into private life as a Bush family retainer, president of Texas A&M. Still, this is a guy who should be serving a long sentence in a penal institution somewhere.

Furthermore, we should be calling the Pentagon what it is, Not the Department of Defense, but the Department of War.