A few quick-hit observations of the past couple of days...
1. Really, Nobel Prize committee? Really? I hear the IOC is already putting this winter's gold medals in the mail to athletes with great potential. Based on similar metrics (i.e. popular opinion before anything meaningful happened), the Patriots would already have this year's Lombardi Trophy in hand, but yesterday's result seems somewhat anomalous.
2. Speaking of which, what a crappy day for New England sports fans yesterday--Pap gives up his first postseason runs, allowing the Sox to be swept by the Angels of all teams (don't we always beat them in October?), and Tom Brady loses in OT for the first time.
3. Incidentally, what part of "Hoodie" don't you understand, Coach Bill? He lost a certain Super Bowl when he traded in his usual monkish garb for some bright red, pimp-my-sideline-apparel job and dropped a highly-anticipated contest to onetime offensive coordinator/mentee and current hoodie-wearer Josh McDaniels in Denver yesterday while wearing a puffy blue jacket and some very intriguing headgear. I'll turn it over to Peter King, who noted in today's real "Ten Things" that "Bill Belichick has to be verrrrrry secure in his masculinity to wear that cheerleadery pompom ball on the top of his hat." While we're on NFL style, however, McDaniels may have had the right idea with the hoodie, but the same can't be said of his men between the sidelines. Antitrust exemptions be damned, the Merger was worth it if only to get AFL teams like the Broncos to wear normal things like blue and orange instead of mustard yellow and "No. 2" brown. Note to Reebok uniform makers: the vertical-striped socks weren't that great to begin with, but once they got all swirly in the high-contact environment of an NFL tilt, the mustard/brown barber pole look really didn't do it for me.
4. I think Obama needs to hurry up and decide on his strategy for Afghanistan. Remember that press conference when he touted his administration's re-imagined strategy, fully thought through and ready for implementation? Once Gen. McChrystal deployed the "F" word, all strategies were once again murky and under discussion. McChrystal was ordered to be blunt in his report and he was, but putting America and failure at war in the same sentence has never gone over well, and sure enough it sent this administration into orbit as well. The LBJ watch beginneth--Obama might have a new America or he might have a new Afghanistan, but can he really have both?
5. I think, about the previous point, that both sides are being far too public in their deliberations. Since when was foreign policy conducted through dueling press releases from the White House and its chosen commander? The administration has unwisely put itself in the position of being uncomfortable with its strategy when pushed and thus having to publicly and interminably agonize over it; Gen. McChrystal pulled a MacArthur and threw in his two cents (and then some) from London. That's not how chain-of-command works, General. If Obama was going to ask for a blunt report, he should have anticipated what he got and been prepared to act in one way or another. Dithering for weeks is no good. If protecting Americans is the goal, let's man up and decide whether the guys on the frontiers in Afghanistan need to hold ground for reinforcements or pull back for Joe Biden. They need a decision the worst; reading stories of all the SNAFU's on the front in tiny outposts where guys are getting overrun by Taliban is just heartbreaking. If we're going to pull back and shack up, let's get on the hoof, because we don't need to be losing dozens of men for little valleys that are suddenly no longer of strategic importance. How do you defend something your commander in chief can't decide is important? More importantly, who wants to be the last to die for it? I get it that McChrystal is trying to force a decision that he really needs, but he's still out of line to offer his own opinions in public.
6. I think I'm getting a little antsy about Iran. That is a nasty situation that's not about to improve, and Russia and China are not seeming too eager to help out. We're weaving all kinds of rhetorical traps for ourselves in promising to get tough on Iran, but it's less and less clear that he of the peace prize will actually be able to enforce anything significant. The last thing you want to do with rogue regimes is create even bigger problems of credible commitments than you already face, and that's what we're all about these days.
7. I think Hillary Clinton deserves kudos for her role in getting the Turks and Armenians to sign on to something that seeks to resolve almost a century's worth of tension over the massacre (genocide?) of Armenians by the Ottomans. The agreement almost fell through on the content of the after-signing speeches; Clinton saved it by talking both sides back from the brink and getting them to both shut up and sign--literally. Since no mutually-acceptable concluding remarks could be found, none were made. Hopefully this agreement leads to some real reconciliation between the two countries.
8. I think, if you're an American of about my age or younger, you should be really pissed right now. You should also do your homework on the health care debate and start applying all the pressure you can muster on the government to fix it once and for all before condemning us to downward mobility. The people who are being most adversely affected by the health-care conundrum are not really getting a seat at the table because they are either too young to care, too young to vote, or unborn. The AARP/Medicare/Medicaid crowd (they of the 50% consumption of our national health costs) already has way too many voices fighting way too hard for it; the futures of today's young people are being mortgaged out the wazoo. As Robert J. Samuelson points out today, even if we get out of the recession and resume fairly healthy economic growth, health-care spending as it's currently trending would quite possibly lead to downward mobility by about 2030. In other words, by the time I'm likely to be having and raising my children, there's a good chance that their economic prospects will be worse than mine. I don't particularly want to raise my kids in a home that represents the highest standard of living they'll ever see (or find myself in the same position). Anybody with me?
9. I think (but I hope I'm wrong), that Bob Ryan may have been right all along: for Boston sports, the good old days were the beginning of this decade. I'm certainly not writing off the Patriots for this year, and I'm not denying that being annual post-season contenders in at least one and usually several major professional sports is a huge step up from where we were, but we was spoiled pretty bad for a couple of years there with back-to-back Super Bowl wins, two World Series trophies, etc, etc, etc. Thankfully, the Redskins and Nats are hardly a threat to my loyalties!
10. I think, for the record, that the best outcome for Afghanistan will be reached through McChrystal's recommendations, but I think the best outcome for America may be found in Obama's (at least candidate Obama's) domestic recommendations. As you may have noticed, there's Great Recession on and this nation is somewhat in debt (!); it's unlikely that we can finance and logistically empower both an intensive counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Great Society 2.o at home. It's strategic crunch time: we need to decide ASAP whether America is better off trying to secure itself abroad or improve itself at home. The first choice potentially does what no one else ever has and secures/democratizes the AfPak region while bankrupting the country from the inside; the second (hopefully) gets our domestic house in order at the potential cost of instability/hostility and/or terrorist strikes from abroad. As noted, LBJ couldn't have his war and his Society, too; it's almost certain that Obama can't, either.