Posted on 10/23/2012 10:32:12 AM PDT by pabianice
During the October 22 third presidential debate, the Ol’ Snarly Obama came out to play. Clearly angry at Romney’s having passed him in national voter polls, Obama was spoiling for a fight. Romney simply infuriated Obama further by acting calm, knowledgeable, and presidential to Obama’s junior high school bully.
At what was arguably the debate’s most watchable moment, Obama ridiculed Romney’s noting that the US Navy, under Obama and Harry Reid, is headed for third-world status with the smallest number of ships since 1917. Obama sneered that in today’s military, ‘we don’t have many horses or bayonets, either. We have ships called aircraft carriers that planes can land on. We have ships called nuclear submarines that run under the water’ (this accompanied with a three-year-old’s handee of a sub submerging below the debate desk). Obama’s snarky argument was that the great superiority of today’s weapons platforms over those of the past made a large Navy not only no longer needed but fiscally irresponsible as well. In other words, he believes the utterly disproven “quality time” argument of 80’s guilty parents.
Remember Quality Time? Upwardly-mobile young parents of the 80s and 90s argued that the fact that they spent almost no time with their own kids was not important as long as they spent an hour or so a day doing “quality time” stuff with the kids who barely knew them. Listening to opera together. Tossing a ball in the back yard before dinner. Mountains of politically-correct indoctrination video cassettes. Going shopping together. Actually eating together at least once a day. The idea was to stuff twelve hours of real interaction with their kids into 90 minutes at the end of the day. The result has long been in. Talk to 20- and 30-year-olds today and the thing they regret most about their childhood was having been abandoned by their parents when the kids were little. “Quality Time” as a substitute for real time is and was just bullshit.
Which brings us back to Obama’s Navy. Obama has long made it clear he dislikes our military and the feeling is returned in spades by our soldiers who favor Romney 76-24. Yet last night Obama argued that the size of our military is unimportant as long as the “quality” is high enough. Thus, one Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser is allegedly superior to a squadron of old Korean War destroyers. One Nimitz-class carrier battle group is somehow superior to the three US carriers and 35 escorts that defeated the Japanese fleet at Midway. That one ship – called “a Nuclear Submarine that goes under the water” (as opposed, presumably, to nuclear submarines that do not go under the water) is superior to a squadron of Cold War subs that passively jumped all over their Soviet counterparts for 35 years. That 50 or 60 P-8 ASW airplanes will do the job of 456 P-3 airplanes doing anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare. That ending the Navy’s mine countermeasures ships to save money will not impact our ability to do coastal warfare. Utter nonsense. Dangerous nonsense.
After four years in office Obama has become ever more sullen, more under the influence of anti-Americanism, and more dangerous to national security, if that’s possible. He increasingly endangers our soldiers and sailors every day. He -- of no quality himself -- is clearly unfit for command.
Yes, the Navy’s problems are different now. China has the DF-21 “D” version now, open reports saying capabile of destroying high-value naval targets like carriers and significant members of their battle groups.
Mobile launched, exoatmospheric missiles finding their targe at high QEs. Damned difficult to detect, damned difficult to defend against. My guess is that a TBM-class radar and and accompanying mult-phased (atmospheric) missile system would have to defend for it. It has upped the carrier game. They call it the carrier killer.
” One Nimitz-class carrier battle group is somehow superior to the three US carriers and 35 escorts that defeated the Japanese fleet at Midway”
This would likely be true — if only all enemy navies were still equipped with WWII ships.
I just thought, being the president, with the privileged inside knowledge of all the threats against this nation, against our people, he WOULD HAVE changed accordingly.
I had thought he's probably just like Clinton, all that rhetoric just to gain power, and enjoy the perks.
Four years, it is clear Obama wants to BRING THE NATION DOWN. And to SPREAD CHAOS as far wide as possible.
While Hussein was showing off his military “brilliance” I was wondering just how many officers, particularly in the Navy, support this clown and how far they’ll let him go. They do owe allegiance to The Country and The Constitution, not 0bama.
When Obama said we had ships that could “go underwater” I thought he was working that for our entire navy.
Dead, you kill me.
:)
The Chinese are working that.
The Chinese are working that.
Our country is “under-water” thanks to barry obama.
We American deserve a better response from the President to MR. We deserve an intelligent response to cutting a trillion dollars from defense. If truly the only response that the President has is childish then we know that the the trillion dollar cut truly places our great nation in greater risk.
Mr. Obama’s fundamental premise makes no sense, unless he assumes that our Navy somehow has acquired a Starship type shielding device making them totally unsinkable. A smaller Navy means that for every ship sunk a higher percentage of our total Navy is eliminated. A larger Navy means we have a stronger Navy not only qualitatively but quantitavely.
In 1917 there were at least two or three other navies in the world larger than the U.S. Navy, and several more that were within spitting distance of challenging it. The current navy has more aircraft carriers, more guided missile cruisers, more guided missile destroyers, more ballistic missile subs, more amphibious ships, more nuclear attack subs, and more auxilliary ships than the rest of the world's navy's combined. Where is that 'third world status'?
I spent that kind of “quality time” with my daughter in the 80s. What a disaster! She lived with the ex and we really didn’t know each other. Today she is a homeschooling mom of 4 and we know each other much more.
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