Andrew J. Bacevich thinks President Obama’s troops escalation in Afghanistan is a really bad idea. Max Boot, on the other hand, mostly approves. This is way not reassuring.

On the other hand, the Glenn Beck Christmas show bombs, big time. Heh.

Big health insurer Aetna plans to pump up profits by dumping coverage for 600,000 clients.

Moosewoman, facing new ethics charges, thinks we should all rededicate ourselves to God.

Max Baucus has a girlfriend? Yuck.

There are times when messes are so messy I don’t even want to know about them. This is one of those times.

Paul Krugman: “Reform or Else.”

Karen Tumulty: “Where Did Health Care Reform Go?”

In a nutshell — health reform legislation is being gutted of the most critical cost control measures by “centrist” legislators who complain the cost control measures are too costly. So the aspects of the bill that make it fiscally responsible are being removed in the name of fiscal responsibility. At the same time, Republicans who for years have badmouthed Medicare and sworn to dismantle it are scaring seniors by telling them the health care bill would ruin Medicare.

One other peeve, sorta kinda related — as you know, most of the American public is perpetually soaked in right-wing propaganda, to the point that a factual and logical discussion of any issue in national media is just about impossible. Often polls come out with figures saying a majority of Americans believe X, “X” being a right-wing generated falsehood relentlessly promoted by corporate and special interests, rightie media and “think” tanks. Then this poll number is held up triumphantly by the Right as “proof” of the truth of X, when it really is nothing but a measure of the effectiveness of rightie propaganda campaigns. Recent examples:

Americans Skeptical of Science Behind Global Warming

Poll shows desire for tort reform in health care package

Joint us again tomorrow for another episode of “The Decline and Fall of America.”

Some problems cannot be solved, rectified, or un-SNAFUed. Some messes cannot be tidied up. That’s the plain truth of it. And I say that’s the case with Afghanistan. I think that whatever beneficial result might have been obtained there slipped away late in 2001 and was irretrievably lost in 2003.

In the early paragraphs of his speech yesterday, President Obama restated the reasons for the military action in Afghanistan in 2001. In 2001, I thought those were legitimate reasons. Eight years later, those reasons are moot. Bringing them up now as a reason for further military action in Iraq strikes me as a “gassing the Kurds” argument.

(For those who don’t get the reference — in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, righties screamed incessantly that Saddam Hussein must be deposed because he was “gassing his own people.” But the gassing to which they referred took place in 1988. It was a little late to ride to the rescue.)

At this point, there are these are the issues that need to be addressed:

1. Can anything of tangible benefit to the United States be accomplished by further investment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan? And is that benefit worth the cost? Put another way, is that benefit obtainable for the amount of blood and treasure we are willing to pay?
2. Would our abandonment of Afghanistan enable a genuine threat to the United States?
3. Would our remaining in Afghanistan enable a genuine threat to the United States?

I lack the expertise in Afghanistan to even pretend to know the answers to those questions. President Obama’s argument for escalation in Afghanistan is that it would serve a genuine national security objective. There remains a connection between the the Taliban, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan, he said. He administration’s purpose is “narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qaeda and its extremist allies.”

Now, I don’t disagree with the objective. The Taliban are (is?) thoroughly malevolent. From what I know of them, they are less interested in striking the U.S. than in enforcing their toxic religious ideas in the Middle East. However, they are a destabilizing influence in the Middle East, and the stronger they are, the more support they can offer al Qaeda. So there is some benefit in “disrupting, dismantling, and defeating” them.

However, would the action the President outlined yesterday be effective enough to be worth the cost? I am skeptical. Juan Cole really, really doubts it. David Ignatius, on the other hand, is mostly supportive, although not without quibbles.

Another way to look at this issue is to consider the resources we have to spend on national security and how most effectively to use them. Thomas Friedman argues that our resources would be better put to use by “nation building” here at home and by developing energy sources that are not oil. Very basically, Friedman says oil money keeps repressive Middle East regimes in power, and the repressive regimes create a context that grows violent extremism.

Indeed, in the speech, the President said,

That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended: because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.

I hope he means that.

Reactions to the speech from Left and Right are mostly negative, although for different reasons. Negative reactions from the Left mostly boil down to “it’s too much like Bush,” or “it’s not a big enough departure from Bush.” Many lefties don’t agree that there is a substantial benefit to be purchased with additional blood and treasure. Either Obama will keep us bogged down and hemorrhaging in Afghanistan, or else whatever might be accomplished with this escalation will disappear as soon as we leave, so what’s the point? Lose/lose.

Possibly the most controversial part of the speech was the President’s announcement that we will begin to withdraw troops in July 2011. However, as Fred Kaplan points out, the pace of the withdrawal will depend on a lot of matters outside of our control. Thus, quagmire remains a real possibility.

Reactions from the Right are mostly that the speech wasn’t rah-rah enough. For example, Andrew Malcolm complained that in he speech President Obama didn’t once use the word victory. Bush was a better war president, see, because he used the word victory a lot.

Righties on the whole refuse to acknowledge that military victory is an outmoded concept. As somebody once said, when the enemy is a stateless movement, not a government, trying to achieve “victory” through military power is like playing whack-a-mole with mercury.

Righties also refuse to acknowledge the finite nature of America’s military and other resources. They don’t want to pay taxes, but they want the federal government to be infinitely resourceful; good luck with that.

Fred Barnes wrote,

I had hoped Obama would declare that nothing will deter him, as commander-in-chief, from prevailing in Afghanistan. But it turns out a lot of things might deter him. He listed a few of them: the cost of the war, its length (if more than 18 months from January 2010), the failure of Afghans to step up to the task sufficiently. He hedged.

It’s called “being honest,” Fred. We had eight years of George W. Bush mouthing meaningless words about “victory” and “resolve” that had little connection to anything happening in the real world. President Obama was acknowledging that there are limits to what we can do, and those limits are getting tighter all the time.

Today President Obama is scheduled to announce sending more troops to Afghanistan. I have withheld criticism of this until I hear what the plan is, exactly. But I have misgivings, to say the least, and I’m sure many of you do also.

So what does Dana Milbank focus on in his column today? He thinks we lefties are supposed to be upset because the speech will be delivered at West Point.

Wow, that’s so like … not an issue.

One of the common complaints of George W. Bush’s presidency was his tendency to politicize the military and turn troops into props. The man seemed to make more appearances before military audiences than Bob Hope did. But now Obama is antagonizing many in his party with an expected announcement that he is sending more troops to Afghanistan, and, to rub it in, he’s making the announcement at one of Bush’s favorite military locations: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point — the very birthplace, seven years ago, of the Bush Doctrine.

I had massive issues with the Bush Doctrine. The fact that it was announced at West Point was not one of those issues. It seems appropriate to announce a military action at a military venue. If the policy involves troops, let troops be present at the unveiling.

What I hope President Obama will never do is dress himself in some kind of quasi-military uniform, whether a flight suit, a bomber jacket or an army windbreaker, as Bush did. That was utterly inappropriate. The two presidents who really were West Point graduates never wore anything military as President. The President is a civilian, and he represents civilian authority.

But the President also is Commander in Chief, and it is appropriate for him to visit military bases and address troops. If he never did that, it would be an issue, especially at a time when troops are in combat.

Milbank writes, “Obama’s flirtation with military imagery should be of concern to his allies on the left, who are already unhappy with the hawkish direction his Afghanistan policy has taken.” Addressing troops is not necessarily “use of military imagery.” It can be, under some circumstances (See: Bush in flight suit, U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, “Mission Accomplished”). But the mere fact of addressing troops is not “use of military imagery.”

Interestingly, the only person Milbank actually quotes as objecting to Obama’s speaking to troops is … Glenn Beck.

Two weeks ago, Fox News’s Glenn Beck played an image of Obama speaking in front of uniformed troops and complained: “I’m sick of it, especially when it comes to the soldiers. They are not props.”

No, but they are citizens, aren’t they? And Milbank, please stop assuming what we lefties “should” be concerned about.

Joe Conason adds some more background to Mike Huckabee’s pardon habits:

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state’s draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.

Yet Mike Huckabee chose to execute Frankie Parker sooner, because Frankie Parker made the mistake of converting to the wrong religion.

I think it is important to call the public’s attention to Frankie Parker’s story. One might assume Gov. Huckabee was just gullible, or soft. But the way he handled Frankie Parker’s request for commutation reveals something much more sinister about the governor — that he had no compunction about exercising the worst kind of religious favoritism.

If Huckabee had simply not intervened in Parker’s sentence and allowed the execution to go ahead as scheduled, it wouldn’t have been so blatant. But Huckabee took the trouble to make the execution date six weeks sooner. And he did this even as Mother Teresa and many Buddhist monks and priests, including the Dalai Lama, wrote requesting that Parker’s sentence be commuted. I think that says something really ugly about Mike Huckabee.