Health care: Crisis. Global Warming: Crisis. Afghanistan: Let me think about that

Domestically, enacting Obama;s agenda has been sold to the American people as fixes for one pressing crisis after another. Congress is so pressed by these crises, in fact, that there is simply not enough time to read the bills.

But when faced with a real crisis in Afghanistan (the "good war") well, hold on now, and let's not be hasty, little hobbits. These things must be deliberated, discussed and properly spinned in enough news cycles so as to avoid all making the tough decisions. Too bad Obama can't vote present anymore.

Here's Charles Krauthammer, via the Corner, on Fox All Stars last night. He's worth quoting at length:

Well, I think what's really important here are two dates. The first is August 30. That's when the McChrystal report was sent to Washington. That is three weeks ago. Obama has had a single meeting [on that report] since then.

He says he hasn't reached a conclusion — I suppose because he is spending all his time preparing for Letterman and speeches to schoolchildren — to focus on a war in which our soldiers are in the field getting shot at and, as the president himself is saying, without a strategy.

Now, the other date is the 27th of March, when Obama gave a speech in the White House flanked by his Secretaries of Defense and State, in which he said, and I will read you this, because it is as if it never happened, "Today I'm announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan."

So we for six months have been living under the new Obama strategy, of which he says today we have none. And his next sentence is, again in March, "This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review" — not the beginning, the end of the policy review.

So it has been his policy, and now he tells us we don't have a cart and we don't have a horse.

What's happening here is he announced the strategy of counterinsurgency in March. He said at the time that we “cannot afford” an “Afghanistan that slides [back] into chaos.”

He said "My message to the terrorists who oppose us — We will defeat you," And now he's not sure he wants to defeat them.

On the political consequences of Obama’s indecisiveness:

I'm not sure it's a political problem. I think it's a problem of what it does to the morale of the military and of the commanders in the field.

You are in the middle of a war and you have an urgent request — this is not just a general but an urgent request. And the logic here — it is all spelled out in a sentence or two; it is not a difficult proposition — the logic is we're in a downward spiral. The enemy is gaining. We can stop them with American troops.

Once they are stopped and the spiral is reversed, as happened in Iraq as a result of the surge, then the Afghan army can, in principle, at least, take over, as happened in Iraq. That's the idea.

You either can act on that or not. It's not a complicated idea. Obama is not stalling because he's studying all this. Obama is stalling because a) he doesn't know and b) he doesn't want to go politically against his own party.