Posted on 01/28/2012 8:17:09 AM PST by bigbob
President Obama’s State of the Union address was disgusting.
The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory — he killed Osama bin Laden! — and to convince the American people that they should fall in line and march in lockstep.
He said of the military: “At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.”
That is disgusting. What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn’t America any longer. He’s making the case not for American exceptionalism, but for Spartan exceptionalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Nails it.
*bump*
“Spartan America”
The concept of Spartan America lends a new meaning to Down-Lowbama’s phrase “got your back”.
President Obama IS disgusting.
In his speech about cutting the military, Obama savored again quoting President Eisenhower about maintaining balance in and among national programs, while confidently assuming no one remembers the thrust of the Military-Industrial Complex Speech. Eisenhower’s theme warned about maintaining proper balance between the private and public economies.
Eisenhower’s concern would now be the astronomical growth of social programs that remain sacrosanct ever since Johnson introduced Medicare and Medicaid. In contrast Defense has undergone real spending reductions; reductions placing Defense at 19% of the budget now from 47% in 1962. In contrast, HHS and SS have tripled to nearly half today’s budget.
He would be astounded Obama proclaims a receding tide of war. Eisenhower understood Eleanor Roosevelt initiated us into unending international conflicts when proclaiming her Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ronald Reagan gave practical expression to this ideal when defeating the “Evil Empire”, and the last three presidents have prosecuted the GWOT.
Bin Laden’s death or crippling of al-Qaeda hardly constitutes victory. Victory requires seeking out and supporting anonymous, selfless individuals and constituencies willing to endanger their lives and those of their families for durable economic models and representative governments. Such governments bring GWOT victory by frustrating plans, breaking alliances and fracturing terrorist organizations into ever less effective units.
However, Obama can rely upon a morbidly obese Pentagon bureaucracy as exampled by a Navy, which has more Admirals than commissioned ships. Washington will enthusiastically follow Obama to gut the ground forces, which provide an environment where potential leaders can experience deliverance from lives dominated by assassins stalking them and their families.
I suppose I could go with reorganization directed to more trigger pullers and fewer ticket punchers, but I would not favor any reduction in force. Somewhere in an old letter I did, I was able to calculate that if the active forces had incurred only the reductions Bush #1 proposed, our later reliance on reserve and National Guard forces would be about one third of that experienced.
The only way to reduce forces now is to abandon the principle in place since the end of WW II that the military must be able to fight two conventional wars at the same time. The war plan analyses that validate such a future world have got to be Ivy League fantasies.
His ignorance could be interpreted as a human failing, if it were not driven by passionate arrogance.
Bureau of Economic Analysis: Table 3.16 Government Current Expenditures by Function
http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=119&Freq=Year&FirstYear=2009&LastYear=2010
Remarks by the President on the Defense Strategic Review
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/05/remarks-president-defense-strategic-review
Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp
Mr. Goldberg makes some astute observations. But I think he misses the main point.
What Dewey, Carnegie, et al. wanted was not a Spartan America, but a regimented America. (Of course, “regiment” is a martial term.) The government school system they designed was derived from Austrian society, and aimed at creating a regimented society here, in which the common folk could be controlled and directed, trained to unthinkingly follow orders as a regiment marching on the battlefield. Good little citizens and good little industrial laborers, trained in school to study or cease studying, according to the dictates of the bell, and later to live factory-work lives by the bell. Regimented, unnatural, artificial lives, begun in childhood.
(We all like our school athletics programs, with our own colors, uniforms, mascots, bands, fight songs, etc. Ever notice their similarity to the locale-based regiments of Europe during the colonial period?)
Him, and everybody else.
Nothing like praising the troops while cutting 100,000 of them, leaving us weak.
Even Panetta admitted that.
I like the fact that he demeans the military while attempting to glorify himself. I like it because he, and perhaps those who follow him, will eventually be despised by the military. It is always best to despise an enemy. Loving that enemy will, in the end, yield nothing but defeat.
Thanks for your analysis and for sharing that history. I’ve wanted to re-read Eisenhower’s “MIC” speech, and as you say, he and those of his generation would I’m sure be flabbergasted at what has happened in terms of social spending. We’ve got much bigger problems to worry about than an expansion of the military-industrial complex today.
Mark
Seals Team 6 killed Osama Bin Laden. They have been training to do so since 9-11. Barry the Imposter was only turning 40 at that time, & he was not the person who started the ball rolling to kill OBL.
Obama has managed to almost kill the entire USA. He started on that path when he was still using a pacifier!!!
He didn’t pull the trigger or do all the training, either!!!
His touting that ‘he killed OBL’ is just plain disgusting to me.
Obama,like most communists, wants to force the standard of living for Americans to that of North Koreans. Except of course for him and his commie/muslim would-be overlords.
I've frequently quoted Ike's farewell address throughout the whole global warming hoax. The growing "M-I-C" was only one of two trends that disturbed Ike and that he cautioned about in that speech. The other was the growing preeminence of what he dubbed the, "scientific-technological elite." When you re-read that portion of the speech, think about his words in the context of the AGW scaremongers, and you'll realize how incredibly prescient he was.
Thank you.
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