The line on every American's mind should be we should not make the enemy the good of the perfect. And, by that, we should make sure that any reform, plan for change, or answer to any single problem being promoted in society doesn't give a role to the very thing that created the problem in the first place.
So, with health care, for-profit insurance or pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be given the chance to be a savior when they have spent decades proving they will always be more interested in profit care and not patient care. Yet, Americans including progressives are willing to let health reform provide a bright future for for-profit health care companies, willing to let Congress and Obama shower them with millions in subsidies and even let them enslave consumers by letting them force consumers to purchase private insurance under penalty of law.
When it comes to the banks, Americans too often allow the fox to guard the henhouse. Or, as I like to say, they let the terrorists run the Homeland Security checkpoint.
Matt Taibbi wrote about how Obama packed his "economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway." He wrote about how Obama replaced those who had been emphasizing populism during the campaign but were replaced with "a group of Wall Street bankers."
Obama, Taibbi points out, chose to build his team around the one person most responsible for the economic turmoil experienced in 2008---Bob Rubin. Rubin's history with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, or the Hamilton Project, a think tank he led to promote his philosophy of balanced budgets, free trade, and financial deregulation, didn't send off signals to Obama to keep him out. Neither did the fact that he was a driving force behind the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act or the deregulation of the derivatives market bother Obama.
And, with Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal is leading the newly ignited Obama "surge." The man who some call "the Pope", who shares close connections with Gen. David Petraeus who was President George W. Bush's guy for keeping the Iraq War going and promoting it to the public, is in charge.
Gen. McChrystal allegedly witnessed torture and refused to let the Red Cross into the military prison Camp Nama (which stands for Nasty-Ass Military Area), a conscious violation of the Geneva Conventions. He also played a role in covering up what really happened to Pat Tillman when he died and he typically chooses military action over counterinsurgency operations, which are tactically less brutal (although all war or conflict is brutal).
Americans have acquiesced and agreed to support a strategy for ending a war in Afghanistan that involves escalating the war to ultimately withdraw at some point in some amount of years that has been stated but altered by individuals in the higher-ups of government who have the power to change and alter these terms for withdrawal as they please even if they make pledges that the people usually expect they will keep.
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