Lupica: All Hopenchange is Lost

Poor Little Mikey. He had such grand hopes for The One, but now according to the diminutive jock-sniffer, he's morphed into George W. Bush.

There was the press pass at the bottom of a drawer Sunday, from Jan. 9, 2008, Saint Peter's College, "Change We Can Believe In" written in great big white and blue letters. It was the first time I ever saw and heard Barack Obama speak in person, heard the highest language and ideals we had gotten from a presidential candidate since Robert F. Kennedy 40 years before him.

"We are at a defining moment in our history," he said that day.

Obama's oratory delivered from a TelePrompter that day was so stirring for Lupica he kept the press pass as a memento to be cherished. And now it's all over. Images of RFK have vanished. You almost want to help him wipe away the tears.

Now, nearly two years later, Obama is President and Tuesday night he isn't in a basketball gym in Jersey City. Instead, he gives a speech to the whole country from the United States Military Academy, using West Point like the backdrop of a movie set.

This speech isn't about the change he talked about as a candidate, or the audacity of hope. It is expected to be about hopelessness, the President perhaps increasing troops in Afghanistan by as much as 50% over the next year-and-a-half. Somehow he is expected to outline his exit strategy at the same time.

Sure he will.

You know when Obama is quickly losing his most ardent Kool-Aid drinkers then he's in deep trouble.

You know when we are going to be out of Afghanistan, where the United States has become just one more losing road team? Sometime around the 12th of Never. The more who die there, the more we send over. This is Obama's surge, just without him calling it that, because that would make him sound too much like the big war President before him.

If he makes this announcement about more troops Tuesday night, it is the beginning of Barack Obama's own approval ratings ending up where George W. Bush's did.

"We're going to finish the job there," he says, and really does sound more like Bush than ever.

Somehow Bush fooled the country into a second term. The way things are going for Obama, there isn't going to be one for him. It is why there is this growing sentiment, even from people who voted for him, that the gate-crashers at the White House aren't a former cheerleader and her husband (did the Secret Service learn defense from the Knicks?), it is the President and all those advising him.

Read the rest if you need another tedious exercise in talk of chicken hawks and Bush bashing. Some things don't change in Lupica's world. But he sure does sound as if he's jumping off the sinking Obama ship.

Update: A much larger guy named Mike also weighs in.

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you're doing it so you can "end the war") will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you've said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone -- and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout "tea bag!"

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

We the people still love you. We the people still have a sliver of hope. But we the people can't take it anymore. We can't take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of "landslide victory" don't you understand?

Awww, fatboy still loves him. But not for long.

Democrat civil war, anyone?

Jules Crittendedn live-mocks Mikey Moore.