Instahoglets Sunday

By Steve Hynd

A link-dump thingy, or reading for a Sunday afternoon.

-- The Afghan elections are this Thursday and will change nothing - Afghanistan will still be one of the two or three poorest nations on Earth, plagued by violence, corruption, US-allied drug trafficking warlords and abysmal human rights. The truly awful police force, which is supposed to stand up so we can stand down, will still be more hated than the Taliban and Afghan men will still be allowed by law to starve their wives if they won't have sex.  Can the "good war" survive? I doubt it. The 2010 midterms will be the crunch point.

-- Michael Cohen says we're at a tipping point on the Obama administration's Af/Pak policy, with more and more prominent figures voicing their misgivings. I could wish that we'd blown past that point, especially with Holbrooke jumping the shark this week, but apparently progressives are still willing to cut the Obama administration plenty of partisan slack on all kinds of subjects that they'd never have for Bush.

-- Which brings up Cenk Uygur asking if Obama is "just another politician?" Duh! "Better than George" is a pretty low bar and Obama has shown - on healthcare, secrecy, illegal detention, Afghanistan escalation and the power of the Imperial Presidency - that he's more Tony Blair than Abe Lincoln.

-- Case in point: if President Obama really wants a public option, as mouthpiece Valarie Jarrett told Netroots Nation, who does his NY Times op-ed not mention it at all? He's the freaking President, in the New York Times! Is there a better platform to insist a public option be included? Nope, Senator Conrad is right, the public option is dead in the water. Jarrett just wants progressives to keep playing Charlie Brown with Lucy's football.

-- Over in the UK, they've just recorded their 201st soldier lost in Afghanistan and many are wondering why Britain is still there. The New Statesman is the latest mainstream press organ to publish an editorial calling for a swift withdrawal, in the process demolishing the hawks' "we're staying to prevent Al Qaida attacking us again" arguments. It's well worth a read just for that but more importantly the New Statesman was the intellectual powerhouse of Blair and the New Labour establishment - that it has come out against the occupation is a real tipping point in British politics.

-- Finally, how's Bush's other misadventure doing? Well, Iraq has just "abandoned plans to hold its first census in two decades because of fears it could inflame tensions in northern areas disputed by Arabs and Kurds." The census was originally intended to provide data for reconcilliation programs. Oh what a success that Surge was...