I finally found the button that lets me talk back and, Medium, I wish you would make it flippin obvious.

Re the matter at hand, how does one get to be Speaker of the House or Majority Leader in the Senate? You "protect your members" from "having to take hard votes." This would be why President Obama spent at least six years begging for an AUMF--"authorization for use of military force"--to no avail.

Since he saw imminent peril to our troops, his response was to keep flogging his military lawyers to stretch the 9-11 AUMF. Had he withdrawn the troops from positions that needed defense, he would be pilloried as "the president who lost (fill in the blank)."

We never really had Vietnam, did we, but LBJ was afraid of being the POTUS who lost it?

So Obama believed that every time a goat died from a bomb costing tens of thousands of dollars, the bomber was on defense and it looked to our machines to be a very dangerous goat.

I like a steaming plate of cabrito as much as the next guy, but it seems to me it's not too much to ask to debate and take a hard vote on using military force once a year.