Grade Obama A+ For Honoring Troops, F For War Policy, AWOL On The Economy

(Photo courtesy MSNBC/ Jim Young/Reuters)

Let’s see if I got President Obama’s speech Tuesday night right:

We spent a trillion borrowed and printed dollars and 6,000 American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan on wars we could not afford based on an American economy he cannot fix.

What the president failed to say was that the big winner in this war of lies was a shift in the Middle East balance of power in favor of Iran soon to be armed with nuclear arsenals he doesn’t know how to stop.

At least the troops who fought our battles and their families who equally suffered were duly honored.

Republican House minority leader John Boehner finally got something right:

“(Iran) is the true source of instability in the region, and we must not naively assume a nuclear-armed Iran would be containable.”

In Obama’s speech, he equally offended Republicans by not giving President Bush credit for brokering the withdrawal of 110,000 combat troops and Democrats by not eviscerating Bush for getting us into the nightmare.

It’s time to turn the page, Obama said.

Well, Mr. President, look what you are leaving behind:

A $53 billion nation building project with scant hopes of quid pro quo as outlined here by David Brooks of the New York Times;

The 100,000 estimated Iraqis killed during eight years of war notwithstanding, several more thousands who worked for the U.S. forces and now abandoned fear for their lives. This, according to Iraqi Saurabh Sanghvi, a third-year law student at Yale, and a student director of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, writing an op-ed article in the New York Times;

And, in Afghanistan we are dealing with a government so corrupt, soon there will not be an honest man still standing.

I heard the speech and read the advanced text. Obama teased us early with a specific reference to rebuild our economy.

Towards the end of the speech he finally outlined these broad outlines which, upon reflection, were code words meaning nothing we haven’t already heard:

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jump-start industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.

Trestles: A Bridge To Surfing Nirvana Succumbs To The Sands Of Time

(John Gastaldo file photo photo courtesy Union-Tribune)

Bridges have always struck mankind as engineering marvels since the days of the Roman aqueduct. Most of us have a love affair with bridges from our childhood whether it be the Brooklyn Bridge for Jewish and Italian immigrants writing about it in the 1950s to the days I spent in Oregon where the magnificent span of a Depression-era bridge arches over the Rogue River in Gold Beach. Every time the History Channel reruns its Modern Marvels segment on bridges, I enjoy watching.

The bridge of my childhood days was ugly, creosoted interconnected timbers simple known as the Trestles. To millions of Southern Californians youths growing up, it was the bridge to nirvana. Walking under that carpenter’s madhouse supporting trains that crossed between San Diego and Los Angeles was the gateway to the coast’s best surfing waves known as San Onofre.

It was such a surfing mecca the Beach Boys and other popular musicians of the day wrote lyrics about it.

I remember the Trestles as an escape from Marine sentries guarding their “private” property as we trespassed with our surfboards in a trek oftentimes more physically enduring than the surf had to offer.

To reach San Onofre, you had to park on Camp Pendleton Marine Corps land and scale rocks and boulders, broken glass, and whatever flotsam man discarded. The reward was on the ocean side of the Trestles — flat sandy beach, gorgeous rolling waves that feathered for eternities, and a close up and personal view of Los Coronados islands to the south and beautiful Catalina Island to the northeast.

I was what they called 86ed by Marine sentries many times and rejectedly returned to my beat up old ’56 Chevy. Their enforcement efforts were totally determined by how many complaints the base commandant received. Other times we could brave the paths for months and never see a Marine.

I’m told this cat and mouse game ended when San Onofre became a state beach and the California Coastal Commission guaranteed unobstructed access. I don’t know because I haven’t been back since my first years in college.

But the Trestles forever are fixed in my mind, probably more than the fantastic surfing.

What triggered these memories is a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune that the Trestles are being torn down and replaced by a concrete bridge. The old girl was costing $250,000 annually to maintain.

About 45 trains a day cross the aging structure spanning the San Mateo Creek estuary, including Amtrak, Metrolink and the commercial freight line BNSF, the paper tells us.

Man, how times have changed. The $12 million project will take two years to construct from federal money in the Obama stimulus package, creating 150 jobs.

Furthermore, there will be a timeout between February and September 2011 during the nesting season of the California Gnatcatcher and the Least Bell’s Vireo birds.

We surfers were the wrong species to deserve such respect.