Fired up at The New York Times

During the campaign, President Obama talked about some lady in South Carolina whose enthusiastic proclamation he adopted as a campaign chant: "Fired up and Ready to Go!" It's starting to seem like the folks at The New York Times are fired up and ready for a couple of things to go--our involvement in the Middle East process for example. Surprisingly, Tom Friedman in a Call White House, Ask for Barack says:
"This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home."

If only.

Bob Herbert in A Word, Mr. President, is also fired up and full of suggestions for President Obama, like:
"We have spent the better part of a year locked in a tedious and unenlightening debate over health care while the jobless rate has steadily surged. It’s now at 10.2 percent. Families struggling with job losses, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies are falling out of the middle class like fruit through the bottom of a rotten basket. The jobless rate for men 16 years old and over is 11.4 percent. For blacks, it’s a back-breaking 15.7 percent.

We need to readjust our focus. We’re worried about Kabul when Detroit has gone down for the count."

Now, I have my complaints about the pace, rate and direction of the CHANGE we all believed in as many do. But I can't help but think WWYD, in the "What Would Jesus Do" sense, that is, What Would YOU Do? This President unlike others is a peer, generationally, and I can scarcely remember where my cell phone is most of the time; I can't imagine all the cylinders that have to be firing correctly in his head all the time.

The Middle East Process, well, I don't know why the US has always been so up in that anyway, unless there's some credence to conspiracy theorists claims of the powerful Jewish lobby that's running America. I think we can afford to bow out of that one. Building more electric cars should stifle the whole "we need the oil" contention.

But, if we leave Aghanistan and Iraq...there will be even more unemployed. Folks join the military to serve the country, sure, but also, because it's a viable employment opportunity where fewer and fewer exist. What then?