{"id":12649,"date":"2011-11-02T20:12:06","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T04:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=12649"},"modified":"2011-11-03T07:07:04","modified_gmt":"2011-11-03T15:07:04","slug":"thank-obama-for-ending-war-that-al-gore-wouldnt-have-started-says-democrat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/02\/thank-obama-for-ending-war-that-al-gore-wouldnt-have-started-says-democrat\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank Obama for Ending War That Al Gore Wouldn’t Have Started, Says Democrat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Hayden<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On Saturday, the day after Obama\u2019s statement, my heart felt good as I introduced Representative Barbara Lee at a Los Angeles fundraiser. In the lightness of her mood I sensed a burden had been lifted from her heart as well.<\/p>\n

Some of the hundred people in the room were baffled by the Obama withdrawal decision\u2014understandably so, after a decade of several wars, a stolen election that led directly to Bush\u2019s Iraq invasion<\/strong>\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This again<\/a>? Who knew Tom Hayden was such a party man?<\/p>\n

A certain jadedness has affected our consciousness after this very bad decade. Some people in the room didn\u2019t believe Obama was actually going to pull out of Iraq. He would sneak in 5,000 manipulative mercenaries to take over from the last of the American troops. And what about those other wars? Wasn\u2019t he worse than Bush? Yada yada yada, ad nauseam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No, he’s swell<\/a>, Tom. A real champion of the little guy<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nAnyone paying attention (which, it turned out, was not too many) could see that Obama was \u201cleading from behind,\u201d in a political sense, on both Iraq and Afghanistan. In Bob Woodward\u2019s history\u00a0Obama\u2019s Wars<\/em>, the president is quoted as saying in private, \u201cI can\u2019t lose the whole Democratic Party.\u201d \u2026
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We will never know\u2014cannot know and perhaps should not know\u2014what is in a president\u2019s mind, a kind of computer that is storing, retrieving, sending and deleting all at the same time, delivering outcomes that are a mixture of desire, presentation and necessity, all with an inaccessible hard drive. \u2026<\/p>\n

Never making a definitive statement, Obama, like the Sphinx\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, I’m just going to stop there, but read the rest<\/a> if you must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Hayden: On Saturday, the day after Obama\u2019s statement, my heart felt good as I introduced Representative Barbara Lee at a Los Angeles fundraiser. In the lightness of her mood I sensed a burden had been lifted from her heart as well. Some of the hundred people in the room were baffled by the Obama […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,61,440],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-12649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-democrats","category-liberals"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12649"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12670,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12649\/revisions\/12670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12649"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}