Doesn’t it make you wince when you watch an old flick and think, “Man, he used to look like that? And now he looks like this?”

It’s bad enough to watch relatives age, but seeing it happen to impregnable famous athletes and movie stars is more sudden dispiriting. Yes, yes, looks are superficial and all that, but what about brains? Until I saw Judge Guido Calabrese majestically and literally hold court in the Second Circuit, I was having trouble wrapping my head around the older and wiser concept.

Then you’ve got health issues, oh man, the health issues. It’s pretty easy to picture that part of the journey.

Long gone are the days when I would knock myself unconscious diving into a brick wall playing Chinese handball. Recently I pulled a muscle while I was sleeping. Tough times indeed. Nobody ever is what he used to be. But now there’s a new cause for agingaphobia, and it has to with Sergei Brin, Steve Jobs and all the other techno mad men.

Watching a sexagenarian open an attachment is painfully unfair. They worked all their lives to get this far, and now they can’t even open the modern envelope. I gasp- that could be me one day. After all, I declared boldly in 1998 that email would never take off. I was the last guy to get a cell phone, preferring to memorize numbers in my head or scrawl them on my hand as I marched into the night with quarters in my back pocket. I didn’t send a text message till 2006, and learned how to upload pictures what seems like yesterday.

As we get older and stop making sense, our children and grandchildren will play with toys that seem like magic, and young associates will roll their eyes every time we say, “the what?” or “how/where?”

Every step you fall behind now is two you’ll have to make up later.

Lyndon Johnson knew this- that’s why the Great Society begat Head Start. Every runner knows this- that’s why you’ve gotta work the hills. The internet is no information highway, my friends, it’s a raging river, and all boats are sinkable. My new year’s resolution is to keep my head above water, fear of technology trumped by fear of falling too far behind to enjoy the future milk and honey years.

This deeply distressed and depressed some of the Democratic faithful, but not me.

No, I’ve loathed the man for so long that his antics only make me mad at his enablers, in this case Obama and Reid.

The man who said during the 2006 election that he was with the Democrats “on everything except the war” also turned out to be against them on the central domestic policy plank of the party over the last four decades.

I dug up an old post I wrote during the 2008 election on my sister site, Roving Storm. I’ll quote only a snippet here, but if you’re pissed at Joe Lieberman, the full rant is really a treat:

Let’s be clear: Lieberman was always a total loser.

He was the guy so lame he made Gore look like the vibrant one on the 2000 ticket, and he was so soft on Cheney in the vice-presidential debate that people came away actually liking the Monster.

In 2002, during the Lamest Presidential Campaign in History, I got to pin Smokey Joe down on why his name was listed on a statement by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a fanatical right-wing group supporting the suppression of academics and students speaking against the war in Afghanistan.

Lieberman said his name had been placed on the list by mistake, and that he did not think those who opposed the war were unpatriotic.

Turns out Lieberman was lying through his teeth- he had FOUNDED the organization with Lynne Cheney in 1995.

Indeed, I remember that moment like it was yesterday.

Lieberman was full stride in his “strong on defense” campaign for the Democratic nomination, a quixotic journey that started with him claiming a “three-way tie for third” after he clearly came in fifth in the New Hampshire primary, and ended with a “last stand” in Delaware, where he lost to Kerry by over 30 points.

I could write a whole post about what a loser he is. But that would be off topic. The point here is that he is a war monger.

What makes his warmongering even worse than than the fanatics like Bush and Rumsfeld is that you can tell, due to his overwhelming transparency, that Lieberman talks the talk for cheap political points.

Yes, Lieberman ruined healthcare reform. But he’s also ruined the lives of thousands, if not millions, with his remorseless bloodthirst.

I asked his New Hampshire Students for Lieberman about this back in ‘04, and he responded, “the Senator is pro-defense.”

I shot back quizzically, “What does that even mean? Who isn’t pro-defense?”

We both chuckled.

“Whatever…” he smiled. “We all make up our own bullshit.”

Its title, Five Flawed Assumptions of Obama’s Afghan Surge, says it all, and the piece itself summarizes concisely points that this site and many others have been arguing for months:
1. Expanding the ground war against the Taliban will in no way guarantee us any greater success in finding and confront members of Al-Qaeda.
2. We cannot build an Afghan National Army capable of defending its national sovereignty within a few years.

3. We cannot work with President Karzai.

4. A an alleged withdrawal date will not exert pressure on President Karzai, who has been forging alliances with the expectation that we will leave eventually anyway.

5. Pakistan may take on insurgents that challenge its own government, but it never has, and probably never will fight members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban on the border if they are merely using the region to launch attacks into Afghanistan.

Conducting a war under these realities is a lot harder than waging one under the false assumptions the Obama administration has presented.

Surprisingly, the Time article does not even offer an “on the hand” argument. This article is firmly against Obama’s Afghanistan policy, in more decisive terms than any publication of its stature. It’s worth checking out.

The most recent Time issue also includes a typically wishy-washy editorial from Joe Klein, who does include a gem of a sentence in which he calls Obama’s deliberations over the war: the struggles of a highly intelligent, dispassionate man to find a rationale for a mission that is crucial but slightly crazy, a decision that will define his presidency.

Amen.

Quickly reviewing all major post World War II wars, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg asks a series of tough questions he would like the president to answer on Tuesday:

Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg?

Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us?

Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum we are already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary ways we could deploy that sum which would advance our goals as efficaciously?

Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?)

Any counterinsurgency campaign, we’re told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

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Speaking of Pakistan, Washington Post columnist Colbert King asks a perfectly reasonable question: But what happens if, in the face of an U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda moves its terrorist network to Pakistan or beyond? Will U.S. forces follow?

I suppose the short answer is that Blackwater is already there, and U.S intelligence is undoubtedly working with the Pakistani military. The question is whether our soon to be 100,000 troops will be fighting a single Al Qaeda operative six months from now. Some would call that a reason to claim victory and go home. If we get bogged down fighting the Taliban, along with related and completely unrelated insurgents, however, that war could last a lot longer.
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A graphic from the National Post, a Canadian paper, highlights the geographic hotspots where NATO forces have suffered their casualties. The Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southwestern Afghanistan lead the way, with 342 and 210 fatalities respectively. The charts also provide some visually jarring data of the increase in NATO deaths and deaths from IEDs from the relatively tranquil days of 2005 to the present.
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Reuters runs a speculative article quoting administration sources that believe the U.S will begin drawing down troops from Afghanistan beginning in 2013.

Their logic is that by then the U.S will have concluded its training of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police, such that they can help themselves.

Other officials scoffed at the notion, calling it unrealistic. One truth we can be assured of is vague ‘future withdrawal’ rhetoric from the Obama administration, whether from his lips or in the form of ’secret leaks’ to the press.

This will be done to damper down opposition to the war. Rank and file Democrats will say, “I don’t approve of this war, but I guess it will be over soon.” We all know how this will go down. And yet we watch…