Where are we headed?

I am deeply deeply depressed about where we seem to be headed as a country, and particularly the dismal level of debate.

I've tried to be jaunty and witty. For some reason it seemed like the thing to do. "Eisenhower Socialist" is a bit of nonsense I made up as sort of a protest against everybody to the left of Milton Friedman (or Rush Limbaugh) being called a socialist or better yet Marxist.

Has Obama seemed to have a problem with the phrase "War on Terror"? Well, I have a problem with it. If apocalyptic minded Islamic fundamentalists are scattered throughout the world, then the history of warfare doesn't give us much insight about what to do about them, or maybe it gives us very misguided insight: pick an enemy country and start bombing them. Where did 9/11 come from? From a failed state where warlords prevailed, and the official Talaban government was very compatible with Osama Bin Laden's bloodlust and desire to have a world dominated by a new Islamic caliphate (the good news for us is they have to conquer or convert the Sunni Muslim powers as well as the secular and/or Christian West, Hindu India, officially atheistic China, and so on and so on).

Anyway, the terrorist cells were spread around the globe in many different countries, and there was a mood of many countries wanting to participate in rooting it out that mostly went away when the "War on Terror" was used as an excuse to have a "regular" war with Iraq, which was mostly irrelevant to Al Qaeda style terrorism except that we turned Iraq into a new breeding and training ground for terrorists while failing to follow through on transforming Afghanistan so it would never serve that purpose again.

Basically, Bush's war on terror has left Afghanistan in a state where if we walked away today it might just welcome in a new Osama Bin Laden or start growing one of their own.