by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama tackled two of the most difficult fronts his administration faces this week, authorizing a significant increase in the U.S. miliitary deployment to Afghanistan and confronting the leaders of the nation's largest banks behind closed doors at the White House.
The bankers heard his message of the need for "restraint'' on Wall Street, he says in an interview with CBS News airing this weekend, and now "the proof of the pudding is in the eating.''
With the Obama administration ramping up the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Obama insists that the mission must focus on the terrorist target there.
"This is going to be hard,'' Obama says in an interview that will air Sunday morning on CBS News' Face the Nation - an excerpt ran last night on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric..
"I am under no illusions -- if it was easy it would already have been completed,'' the president tells CBS's Bob Schieffer, "and so we're going to have to go with a strategy that is focused, that is narrowly targeted on defeating al Qaeda.''
The president, of course, is asked about the AIG bonuses in the interview, and responds that Wall Street has to start understanding how Americans view all this.
"Show that you get that this is a crisis and everybody has to make sacrifices,'' says Obama, who met with the CEOs of the big banks at the White House on Friday - and what did they say? Schieffer asks. "They agreed and they recognized that.,'' Obama says. "Now the proof of the pudding is in the eating.''
Comments
Remember when Obama hated deficits? NRO recalls what Obama said just last year:
"Barack Obama used to get very upset about federal budget deficits. Denouncing an "orgy of spending and enormous deficits," he turned to John McCain during their presidential debates last fall and said, "We have had, over the last eight years, the biggest increases in deficit spending and national debt in our history...Now we have a half-trillion deficit annually...and Sen. McCain voted for four out of five of those George Bush budgets."
That was then. Now, President Obama is asking lawmakers to vote for a budget with a deficit three times the size of the one that so disturbed candidate Obama just a few months ago. And Obama foresees, for years to come, deficits that dwarf those he felt so passionately about way, way back in 2008."
Posted by: Dissent is Patriotic | March 28, 2009 10:50 AM
Some are already calling Afghanistan 'Obama's War.' We think that is premature. We do not call Vietnam 'Nixon's War.' .....................
http://thefiresidepost.com/2009/03/28/obamas-war-afghanistan/
Posted by: Ohg Rea Tone | March 28, 2009 12:03 PM
ORT,
.
VietNam would be LBJ's war.
Posted by: Terry | March 28, 2009 2:25 PM
Over 100 people showed up to protest the war Obama is continuing that Bush started today in Macomb, Illinois.
We've heard from a counselor about the psychological distancing from war, a soldier who was in Iraq when a fellow soldier came home from Iraq and killed himself after the VA turned him away; from former Gubernatorial Green Party Candidate Rich Whitney on why this war is still illegal, and a variety of singers.
The invasion and occupation is illegal and unwarranted and not going to lead us to security and safety.
Please look up why this war is wrong--regardless of which political leader is pushing it.
Please learn about this at:
lawyersagainsthewar.org
Posted by: OBAMA = LBJ? PLEASE RECONSIDER YOUR LEGACY, MR. PRESIDENT | March 28, 2009 2:26 PM
Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of George Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision..."Government is not the solution to our problem," declared Ronald Reagan. "Government is the problem." So why worry about governing well?
Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s "Southern strategy," which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: "You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites." In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
By the way: small government Sarah Palin actually increased spending in her state. So why did we presume that she supported small government and less spending? Simple: because she is a Republican from a state that doesn't have a Chicago, Detroit or Harlem in it.
The Republicans worst nightmare:the possibility that a majority of Americans might vote for an African-American for President - has come true. And not just vote for one, but get used to one. Americans might become accustomed to the idea of an African-American family living in the White House, and being its public face to the world. That in the process, Americans might actually make leaps and bounds forward on the issue of race and thereby remove the most effective wedge in the Republican toolbox for decades.
And then all Republicans would have left is their deeply unpopular drive to abolish the New Deal. It would, in short, spell utter doom for the Republicans outside of the deep South and certain pockets of the Midwest.
Nor would it be an easy wedge to replicate...
And that is why this past election terrifies the GOP. In just one election cycle, an entire agenda and electoral strategy spanning over three decades could be dashed on the rocks, with no credible replacement. Milton Friedman's privatization agenda would be dead in the water, without hope of rescue barring military coup. Republicans in this situation are like a desperate, dangerous cornered animal.
Posted by: Dissent is Patriotic = RNC Bruce | March 28, 2009 6:08 PM
What is this, the Twilight Swamp or something?
ORT-Do let us know when it officially becomes Obama's war will you?
LAW-Your website is just more litter along the misinformation superhighway. What do you have against well designed websites anyway?
DisRNC-So far the best part about this past election IS that our president is an African-American.
-
Is there a full moon or something tonight. When I used to bar tend I could always tell.
I hope I can get out of here.
Posted by: Rob | March 28, 2009 6:52 PM