"Football spiked: Obama to address nation on Bin Laden anniversary live from Afghanistan."

"The official reason for the trip is to sign the new strategic partnership agreement with Karzai, but of course that doesn’t require his physical presence in Afghanistan. We all know why he’s there and why he chose today to visit. One word: Scoreboard."

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I must be the last blogger in the world to notice that Obama went to Afghanistan. The linked story was posted yesterday at 3:35 pm, just as I was in the final rush preparing my last Conlaw class of the semester. After class, we played with puppies. That took a while. When we got home — because these were not our puppies — we sat around eating and watching a movie — "Bridesmaids" (HBO on Demand) — and got about halfway through before I sensed that the baseball game in San Diego must be on (because Meade was consulting his iPad), and that presented the perfect opportunity to cave in to sleepiness (I'd been up since 5) and appear attractively magnanimous. I switched to the game and switched off my personal consciousness. I really don't monitor the news constantly.

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But, so Obama traveled to Afghanistan to "speak[] to an American television audience on Tuesday night from Bagram Air Base, [and] declare[] that he had traveled here to herald a new era in the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan, 'a future in which war ends, and a new chapter begins.'" The quote is from the first sentence of the article in the very Obama-friendly New York Times, and it's not very flattering, is it? He went all the way to Afghanistan to do a TV show aimed back at us here at home. He went there for a showy backdrop for the show. And he traveled there to "declare[] that he had traveled here to herald a new era." Herald... new era... I hear sarcasm. If the NYT didn't mean sarcasm, then they're so Obama-friendly that they don't hear how PR language like that sounds to a person who is just trying to read what he believes is supposed to be a newspaper.

"My fellow Americans,” he said, speaking against a backdrop of armored military vehicles and an American flag...

The NYT notes the showy backdrop. (By the way, the intro "My fellow Americans" will always, for me, call to mind LBJ.)

... “we’ve traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of new day on the horizon."

Oh, brother. Dark... pre-dawn darkness... light... new day... Not only is light and darkness a hackneyed metaphor, applied clumsily, but it's the very metaphor LBJ used over and over in his effort to manipulate our emotions about the Vietnam war.