Want to know why politicians never solve problems. Come election time they run away from the tough positions because they are so afraid of not getting votes. Today Newt Gingrich lost all credibility when he too decided the big problems are too hard:

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, told students and faculty at the University of South Dakota Monday that the United States should pull out of Iraq and leave a small force there, just as it did post-war in Korea and Germany.

“It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003,” Gingrich said during a question-and-answer session at the school. “We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it.”

These spineless pols are more than happy to send good people to sacrifice life and limwhen the opinion polls point one direction, but then they are willing to throw all those sacrifices in the trash the minute the going gets tough and votes are at risk. What disgusts me is when a pol can’t fathom losing an election when others are losing their lives. Gringrich just lost any chance of a political come back with this backtrack. I can’t see how this man could ever face a person in uniform again, or the family of someone who died in Iraq.

It seems clear that our current political leadership on both sides is too long in the teeth and too fixated on winning elections to ever conceive of actually making a difference in this country’s future – which is tied to the future of the world.