Courtesy of To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a “This Week” exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, "We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.”
Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.
“We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,” Geithner told me. “And that’s going to require some very hard choices."
George Stephanopoulos Aug 2, 2009
Back on November 1, 2008, I published my endorsement of Barack Obama for President. To say I have been disappointed would be a gross understatement. My previous political cynicism, which I thought was slayed and erased by Obama’s candidacy, has returned with a vengeance. Like a Swine Flu virus temporarily muted by the vaccine of the moment, my political atheism has mutated once again and this time the result is a complete obliteration of faith in political leadership.
It’s not that I retract my endorsement, or that I would now have voted for John McCain, electing Obama was good for our country in narrowly defined ways, good for the global community as well, but he has revealed himself to be just one more in a long line of lying, deceiving, incompetent political hacks.
Obama ran on the promise to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home in 16 months after he took office, by May 20, 2010. Instead, he has acted to just bring some of the troops home by August 31, 2010. Not a big deal? Say that to the soldiers who are slain or maimed between May and August of 2010, or to those who will be part of Obama’s "residual force" of 50,000 troops who will be staying until December, 2011.
In Afghanistan Obama has embraced George Bush’s indefinite occupation policy as well as the extension of that war into Pakistan.
Similarly, Obama is defending and even expanding the Bush administration’s war-on-terrorism powers, which have constituted among the greatest infringements on civil liberties and privacy in our nation’s history.
Obama ran on a clearly anti-Washington establishment platform, promising an administration of new names and
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