His term is up in January

Oh, Michael Steele. Where do you find whatever it is you're smoking?

Yesterday at a GOP fundraiser in Connecticut, Steele had this to say about the war in Afghanistan: It's "a war of Obama's choosing," and "“This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in,” and, my personal favorite*, "has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?”

That is SO weird. Because I have a pretty clear memory of standing in my parents' kitchen with my mom and my sisters on a Sunday in October just weeks after 9/11, watching President Bush pre-empt the NFL schedule with an Oval Office (if memory serves) address announcing that we were in the process of beginning to bomb the hell out of the Taliban in order to get to Osama bin Laden and the other terrorists who attacked our country. Who knew that Bush was - according to Steele - actually being remote controlled by an obscure state legislator in Illinois?

**PROFANITY ALERT**

Seriously, what the purple fuck is Michael Steele on??? Afghanistan was a war of Obama's choosing? He chose to go to war seven fucking years before he was even fucking elected president? I get that, as GOP party chairman, Steele has to draw bright lines between his party and the president's, even when the actual differences aren't that large. But is a war that arguably has more right-wing than left-wing commitment really the place to do that? What, did he get bored calling Obama a Communist? When Bill fucking Kristol thinks you've gone off the rails, you should probably take a moment to reassess.

**End profanity. It's safe to uncover your children's ears.**

Personally, I have serious questions about what the U.S. could possibly accomplish in Afghanistan at this point, but I believe, unapologetically, that going there after 9/11 was the right thing to do. I wonder what would've happened had we not ignored this particular war for so long, but I also understand that we can't rewrite history, as much as we'd like to. And that's what Steele is doing here.

I have another memory. It's of the first time I drove to the VA cemetary in Salisbury, as I hope to do again Monday. It was Memorial Day in 2006, to visit a friend from high school killed by an IED in March of that year near Asadabad, Afghanistan. He voluntarily switched to another company that was getting ready to deploy, because he wanted to go to Afghanistan. The war was happening then, and American men and women were fighting and dying there. For Michael Steele to gloss over that in a sadly failed attempt to score political points against the president who's just trying to wrap up a war he inherited - that just pisses me off.


*This was my favorite Steele remark because of this (at about the 4.30 mark). There's a lot wrong with the Democratic Party, but to my knowledge our chair has never ripped off a damn movie in a speech.