He’s just soooooo thoughtful.

On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.

How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.

The economic cost was troubling him as well after he received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan.

The human toll and the economic toll in war time are an oil and water mix. If you are going to piss and moan about the economic burden, don’t commit any troops. This applies to an inherited mess too.

It’s more than galling that a president who has no problem hemorrhaging money to achieve his psycho-left domestic goals suddenly becomes frugal when considering the support of combatants in the field.

The New York Times devotes all of its energy to make President Obama seem cloaked in Ivy League brilliance as he takes time out from writing his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to construct a plan for the Afghanistan portion of this war.

Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.

“I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.

When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war. By moving the bell curve to the left, Mr. Obama decided to send 30,000 troops mostly in the next six months and then begin pulling them out a year after that, betting that a quick jolt of extra forces could knock the enemy back on its heels enough for the Afghans to take over the fight.

The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House — intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar in Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner.”

Good Lord, get a room.

We’re committing less troops than were requested to escalate things so we can get out of there quicker?

WTF?!?!?

Harry Truman is the only U.S. president to ever have conceived of an “escalate and evacuate” strategy that meant anything. What President Obama proposes is nothing more than a bit of grandstanding for a specified period of time until we bail. After that, the enemy who knew when it had to be strong can return and have its way.

The disconnect between what this president does and what the press sees is stunning.

Here is an example of just how deep and thoughtful things are over at Team Lightbringer.

The MSM is committed to making sure that everyone knows Barack Obama is SO much smarter than George W. Bush. Or any other president, for that matter.

Barack Obama, however, wants to keep making decisions that prove otherwise.