let me finish tonight with this. rachel maddow, my colleague on msnbc has just published a sharp argument against the modern american propensity to make war. it makes a brisk case that this country s leaders, men of the right, have made it easy to fight bite-sized wars like grenada and we the citizenry are kept from the pain and the interest the war once drove in our population. in her book, entitled drift, she takes off the painkillers that create the delusion of peace even in the war s reality. she said we know there are wars going on abroad but do not feel that life and death struggles being carried out by the united states. congress doesn t formally
people are those who don t talk consequences or minimize them. it seems in the iraq fight and people who debate that, they re like, oh, it will be a cake walk, it will be over in a couple weeks. we ll get cheap oil out of it, all kinds of jobs. remember that, the arguments? it s always the cost benefit analysis that says go to war. it will pay for itself, is my favorite, that we will somehow reap some sort of loop in having it pay for itself. i think what s happened is we ve come up way series of decisions, some them more craven than others, but all of them understandable to make war less of a hassle. so we figured out ways the president can wage war without congress. if the president wants to wage a war as a national security interest that he can t persuade the public on, we figured out a way to do it without debating with the public, sometimes keeping it entirely secret from the public. we don t want the public to get upset about the cost, we tell
we should get to decide how to choose. take a look at this recent poll, the new york times cbs poll. in the war on afghanistan, we should not be involved, 69%. 23%, we re doing the right thing. so we re anti-war in afghanistan. let s look at the tricky part. let s look at the iranian prospects right now. 56% support u.s. military, not israeli, action if there is evidence of a nuclear weapons program, 39% opposed. is it possible we re in the habit of getting tired of wars? there is war fatigue but not generally. certain fronts become tiring, and yet we re just as perhaps trip wired, ready to go in the next fight. that s exactly the right question. and do we think of our military as being super capable? you think of them as having super heroic powers. the thing that bugs me in the
plus, talk about an image problem. in just the last week, mitt romney has had his etch a sketch moment, revealed that he s building a house with an elevator just for the cars, and yesterday he joked about when his dad shut down a factory in michigan. can anybody save this guy from himself? plus, the tale of the tape. george zimmerman said he shot trayvon martin after martin broke his nose and repeatedly slammed his head into a concrete sidewalk. but newly released videotape of zimmerman arriving at the police station appears to show no evidence of a broken nose or obvious wounds to the back of zimmerman s head. it doesn t prove anything exactly, but it is raising more questions about what exactly happened that night. and from our own rachel maddow, she s got a new book out, drift. the unmooring of american military power. it s been progressively easy for our country to go to war with fewer consequences for fewer
video. there s a lot of emotion and outrage and people are making up their minds about this. people who support zimmerman will see what they want to see and people who support trayvon martin will see what they want to see. there has to be some sort of resolution in this matter. resolution. will we get there. thank you, ron allen for the nbc news and sari horowitz for the washington post. i believe rachel maddow in her new book that war is too painful for most of us and too easy to start. open up. we have come for the foul, unholy beast. the one with the red markings. the miracle whip? stand aside that we may burn it. [ indistinct shouting ] have you ever tried it? it s actually quite sweet. and tangy. i like sweet things. [ man ] shut up, henry.