An Obama Contradiction?
I was listening to Obama’s Potomac Primary Night speech he gave in Madison, Wisconsin on Fox News last night. Well, it was on and I was sort of paying attention to it (damn kids and their homework). He caught my attention when he started talking about the Iraq war. I wasn’t sure if I heard him correctly or not so I spent some time hunting down a transcript this morning to confirm.
If we had chosen a different path, the right path, we could have finished the job in Afghanistan, and put more resources into the fight against bin Laden; and instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Baghdad, we could have put that money into our schools and hospitals, our road and bridges – and that’s what the American people need us to do right now.
Emphasis mine.
Then, not 30 seconds later:
We can’t keep spending money that we don’t have in a war that we shouldn’t have fought. We can’t keep mortgaging our children’s future on a mountain of debt. We can’t keep driving a wider and wider gap between the few who are rich and the rest who struggle to keep pace. It’s time to turn the page.
Emphasis mine.
So he makes the point that we should not ‘keep spending money that we don’t have … mortgaging our children’s future on a mountain of debt‘ in Iraq. Fine. That’s not exactly a shocking viewpoint. But then is he also not saying at the same time it’s ok to ‘keep spending money that we don’t have … mortgaging our children’s future on a mountain of debt‘ as long as we ‘put that money into our schools and hospitals, our road and bridges‘? Or maybe I’m just missing something here.
To recap: Spending money we don’t have on Iraq is bad. Spending money we don’t have on ourselves is just fine.
PsychoPhil 
That’s a misleading arguement. Building schools and roads doesn’t take 51% of the national budget and cost 1.22 trillion dollars (as the defense budget will in 2008 alone). The money we give to third party contractors and the money we put into the war effort is nowhere near proportionate to sustaining a decent way of life for children, or for keeping our roads safe, or for providing hospitals for people to go to.
What you might be missing is the fact that $330 million spent every day in Iraq would be very useful to Americans.
What a strange, misleading leap you just made.
As the other commenters have alluded to, we’re talking different orders of magnitude here. Would you not agree that going into debt to improve our infrastructure is a much smarter investment than spending it in Iraq?