I just thought this was amusing:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, told a group of key lawmakers on Thursday that President Obama is engaged in a “thoughtful process” of deciding on his request for additional troops in the region.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), in a telephone interview from Afghanistan, said that McChrystal declined to criticize Obama’s nearly three-month review of the general’s request to send up to 40,000 more troops to the war-torn nation. Instead, McChrystal — whose opinion many Republicans have treated as sacrosanct — told the group that U.S. forces could still achieve the goal of routing the Taliban.

“He believed that the mission was accomplishable,” Price said after meeting the general and other top U.S. officials in Kabul. Some of the lawmakers pressed McChrystal on Obama’s lengthy decision-making, but the general described it as a “thoughtful process and wouldn’t go any further,” Price said. “I was a little surprised he didn’t voice frustration with the delay.”

It’s inconceivable to conservative slaves to authority and cheerleaders of hegemonic power that anyone – especially someone in the military – could disagree with their deeply held belief that refusing to immediately snap to attention and hand over all resources to the commanders without thinking. McChrystal is supposed to believe that Obama is a terrorist-loving mole inside the government dithering America to defeat and stabbing the troops in the back, after all. A general who respects a deliberative process? Does not compute!

McChrystal, by all accounts, got most of what he wanted, so he has no reason to criticize the process. That also hasn’t occurred to this conservative.

I’m not too keen on the result of the decision-making process by Obama, but unlike the default “the commander is always right” process that characterized the Bush years, at least there was discussion, which may have yielded at least an understanding of the need for an exit strategy. The world of Tom Price is a world where no decision is made with any pesky “assessments” or “cost-benefit analyses” or anything other than the word “yes, sir.” He’s literally surprised that someone values thinking.