I agree with your dispassionate and logical point of view, however that and two subway tokens will get us from Harvard Square to Park Street station. Being dispassionate and logical hasn’t done much for President Obama in his first year in office.

Sadly, the dispassionate and logical need not apply for attention in the “lamestream” media. The reality of past policy and current actions by the U.S. is not up for discussion among either the general public or the commentariat’s bloviating pundits.

Today, the U.S. political arena is populated by a disloyal opposition Republican Party whose only hope of avoiding being relegated to the scrap heap of history is to bring down Obama and Democrats who cower like a deer in the headlights whenever the issue of terror comes up.

Only a small sliver of the press still makes any effort to inform the public. While the major media outlets, fed by the blogosphere, prefers to inflame public opinion.

According to many of the Obama’s critics, he is a linguistic appeaser – the Neville Chamberlin of presidential rhetoric. They argue that he puts the world at increased risk, whenever he dispassionately discusses the threat from extremists and logically explains the official rationale for the U.S. military and security plans and details the manpower and trillion dollar investments aimed at the terror thereat.

The pundits – both right and left – when they say Obama is way too cerebral, although they don’t see the connection, imply that the U.S requires a Commander-In-Chief, who can channel the passions of Chavez or Castro or maybe Ahmadinejad when they address national security. Maybe, if he could rant a little more, al Qaeda might back off. Maybe if he took off his shoe and banged the podium when he discusses the Islamic threat to life as we know it or tells our enemies we will get them “dead or alive” – that would end the matter. Of course, they ignore that such an approach didn’t work for the Bush, but that is beside the point.

Amnesia and absurdity seem to rule the day in public discourse.

I am less critical of Obama than you, as I think his options – strategic, militarily and political – are fatally circumscribed. I wish it were otherwise and that our nation would wake up from it’s fifty year hallucinatory dream state. But it won”t.

That being the case, I guess the option most likely to satisfy the anti-raghead crowd, their Republican fellow riders and the USA-all-the-way press gaggle would be to round up the 1.4 billion muslims from around the globe including the majority populations from 50 countries, rent Siberia from the Russians, and send the actual handful of jihadists and their billion-plus potential sympathizers to a new mega-Guantanamo/Gulag, surrounded with wall like in old Berlin. It could be called the Back To The Future Initiative.

The world has become pretty absurd and absurdity may be the last refuge for those of us who used to make a living and maintain our sanity being logical and dispassionate.

In any case welcome to 2010!