Matter of Priorities

What is really important? With America engaged in a world-wide war on terror, with massive combat forces deployed in Iraq, with growing problems subduing the Taliban in Afghanistan, President Obama has evidently talked to his commander on the ground there, General Stanley McChrystal, just once, but Obama has been so intimately involved with his adopted hometown Chicago's effort to lure the Olympics that he is personally flying to Copenhagen to boost that city's effort to clinch hosting the games. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns- even many Chicagoans, who are not Daley machine insiders who will profit from the games or politically- connected Illinois Democrat elites with vested interests, do not want their city and state burdened with the costs of hosting the games at a time of great economic dislocation. They know that cities formerly hosting Olympics have often been buried with an aftermath of debt. They remember terror attacks in Atlanta and Munich that could be replicated at a time of vastly worse global war on terror in which terror appears to be holding its own if not winning, particularly on the aforementioned Afghan front and in neighboring Pakistan. With America's economy beset and the Midwest grievously afflicted, many in Illinois want bread before circus and most Americans want the President's laser focus to be on waging and winning (victory- a notion Obama has said he is "uncomfortable"with) the war before he worries about generated bribes and kickbacks for his old Chicago pals. In Chicago, the political class has always believed in taking care of itself first, so I guess the troops out there fighting for all of us just have to go pound sand.