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Fair warning: this is not a synchronicity.Rob calls these posts my rants. He’s right.

It seems that some mention should be made of the fact that the U.S. combat mission in Iraq has ended.President Obama’s speech tonight should be applauded in that regard. He fulfilled a campaign pledge to pull combat troops out of that country. Never mind that troops are now escalating in Afghanistan; Obama never promised a withdrawal from that country.

We now know, of course, that the Bush administration lied from the beginning about the reasons for invading Iraq. There were no WMDs, no looming mushroom clouds. The war went on for more than seven years,  killed thousands of Americans and Iraquis, and cost a trillion dollars.

Think about that, all those zeros. That money would have been better spent at home. Millions of Americans are still out of work, millions of homeowners have lost their homes or face foreclosure, the cost of health care is still prohibitive,  roads and bridges are crumbling, college is so costly it lies beyond the reach of many in the middle class. With what Iraq cost us, we could have extended Medicare to everyone, so that we had true universal health care. We now know that Paul Wolfowitz’s pronouncement that the war wouldn’t cost us a penny was a big fat lie.

What bothered me most about Obama’s speech was what he didn’t say. The Bush administration, through their fancy manipulation of law through the likes of  John Yoo and Attorney Generals Ashcroft and Gonzalez,  made it okay to torture Gitmo detainees. It gave rendition flights and the shredding of the constitution the green light.  As Rachel Maddow said this evening, Obama is a “forward-looking kind of guy, but….”

It’s a very big but. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Yoo, Gonzalez, the whole slick lot of them, will never be tried for war crimes. If one administration is allowed to slide because we must “look forward,” then somewhere up the line in history, another administration will believe they can get away with it.

And yet, I have slept better since Obama got into office. During the Bush years, I often woke in the middle of the night, panicked that we were sliding into a dictatorship or worse. Even though Obama has kept some of Bush’s policies, even though Gitmo hasn’t been shut down, even though we’re now escalating a war in Afghanistan, even though Obama seems much too concerned about being bipartisan, I no longer feel panicked. At his core,  Obama strikes me as genuine, intelligent, a man whose heart is in the right place. But unless things turn around in this country well before 2012, I don’t know if any of it is enough to get him re-elected. He inherited 8 years of Bush policies. The odds were stacked against him from his first day in office.

The alternatives – a tea party president, a Republican who seeks to privatize Social Security, Medicare, education, police and fire departments, or (I shudder to even write this) someone like Glenn Beck or Sara Palin at the helm  – is too horrific to contemplate. But the possibility can’t be dismissed. The paradigm shift is underway. And like anything that is dying, the old paradigm struggles for its existence. It gasps, writhes, and shakes its long, malformed and arthritic finger at the newest enemy to rally the base – gays, Muslims, blacks, the poor, the disenfranchised.The old paradigm looks to Ronald Reagan for answers, the guy who deregulated everything. The new paradigm hopes for peace, community, tolerance, harmony, true equality.

We live in interesting times. My hope is that we all live to see the dream a reality.