The Democrat’s “War on the Military and Veterans”
in News, Opinion / by TSater / on May 21, 2014 at 9:05 am /
http://i2.wp.com/madworldnews.com/wp...size=660%2C253
This is the perfect time to ask the question; “Why do Democrats hate the military and veterans?” May is “Military Appreciation Month.” Memorial Day is Monday, May 26th. Saturday, May 17th, was “Armed Forces Day.” On that day, President Obama “tweeted;”“No one should face violence or discrimination—no matter who they are or whom they love,” in honor of “International Day against Homophobia or Transphobia.”
Millions of Americans show their love, respect and appreciation of the military, every day, in many ways, but one segment of the population doesn’t seem to share that sentiment, except on Veterans Day and Memorial Day “photo ops;” Democrats.
John Kennedy was the last war hero who held high office and was admired by a broad spectrum of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans. In 1963, Cliff Robertson played JFK in the movie; “PT109.” He was everybody’s hero. In those days, Hollywood churned out one heroic war movie after the other. The year before, the epic film “The Longest Day” chronicled the heroism of our fighting men on D-Day.
By 1967, the war in Vietnam was taking its toll. America started to change the way it looked at war and our warriors. On June 26th, 1968, Roger Ebert issued his review of John Wayne’s film; “The Green Beret.” It said, in part;“It is not a simple war. We all know it is not simple. Perhaps we could have believed this film in 1962 or 1963, when most of us didn’t much care what was happening in Vietnam. But we cannot believe it today. Not after television has brought the reality of the war to us. Not after the Fulbright hearings and the congressional debates and the primaries. Not after 23,000 Americans have been killed.”
When the review came out, I had been in Vietnam for three months, manning automatic weapons on an Armored Troop Carrier, in the Mekong Delta.
The real turning point in the way Democrats look at the military and veterans may have come with John Kerry’s testimony before the senate Foreign Relations Committee, on April 22, 1971. Kerry testified;“I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” group was largely composed of phony veterans who had never been to Vietnam, or had not been in combat. Kerry didn’t care. He was building his political career. The honor and reputation of everyone else who served in Vietnam was just collateral damage. He loved that he had the same initials as John F. Kennedy. He had been in combat, in the Navy, like JFK. But that’s where the similarity ended. Vietnam didn’t end with the enemy surrendering on a battleship. John Kerry built his political career on the graves of the men who fought and died in Vietnam and on the pain of the men who came home, whose honor was forever tarnished and discredited by him.
Like Korea, Vietnam was an “undeclared” war, began by John Kennedy and escalated under Lyndon B. Johnson. Contemplate for a moment, what would have been said if George W. Bush presided over a war in which 58,000 Americans had died. The liberal media couldn’t blame John Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson. They are still revered icons in the Democrat Party. Vietnam veterans, however, were an easy target.
Hollywood is a cultural fortress of the Democrat Party. It has not been kind to the Vietnam veteran, with few exceptions. Films such as “Deer Hunter,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Casualties of War,” “Distant Thunder,” “The Boys In Company C,” “Coming Home,” “A Rumor of War” and “Born On The Fourth of July,” all show those who fought the war as emotionally unstable wrecks, many lacking any moral compass. It’s a far cry from the depictions of the American fighting man during films of earlier decades.
Having somebody else to blame for Vietnam, other than the Democrats in power was just the first of several reasons why Democrats hate the military and veterans, but it started a trend that continues to this day. Democrats haven’t accepted the blame for anything, for five years.
The second reason relates to the liberal psyche, brilliantly displayed in the 1992 film; “A Few Good Men.” In the movie, arch villain, Marine “Col. Jessep” (Jack Nicholson), ordered “Santiago,” a problem marine to be beaten in a “Code Red.” Santiago died from the beating. When Col. Jessep admits that he ordered it, he said;“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
While Col. Jessep was genuinely a bad guy, he nailed the way Democrats view the military and veterans. Liberal Democrats see themselves as superior to those “on the wall.” They see the military as a necessary evil, much like junk yard dogs, “grotesque and incomprehensible.” In their minds, those in the military are “baby killers” who “kill civilians for sport,” “in cold blood.” Liberals can tell themselves that if they were in Haditha, they would politely go door to door and ask the homeowner if any al Qaeda terrorists lived there. They can tell themselves that if they were in the crucible of war, surrounded by smoke, explosions, screams and blood, they would never succumb to fear, panic, or anger. They would never make a mistake. That mindset elevates them, in their minds, to intelligent, morally and spiritually superior men and women who can go to parties and talk about saving the earth, or spreading their wealth, not that they would actually do either one.
The third reason is simple, cynical politics. Veterans and the military are great props, used to leverage power, push an agenda, or raise taxes. Democrats can salute the flag and lay a wreath as a kind of “performance art!” They can even put on a flag lapel pin, as candidate Barack Obama did, in 2007, after he castigated it as a substitute for “true patriotism.”
Democrats don’t focus on the military or veterans as a voting bloc. They don’t fit the Democrats demographic strategy. They are expendable in the voting booth, as well as the battle field. Oh, there are Democrats in the military and Democrat veterans, but they are largely part of the Democrat base.
Again, every Democrat doesn’t hate the military, but it does seem as though everybody that hates the military is a Democrat. Just take a look at twenty-six comments by high level Democrats and liberal media, concerning our military.1) Sen. Dick Durbin (D), Illinois, read an e-mail from an FBI agent, on the floor of the Senate, in June, 2005, describing the conditions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After reading the e-mail Sen. Durbin said, “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”
2) Rep. Pete Stark (D) Calif. “You don’t have money to fund the war or children, but you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we could get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”
3) Seymour Hersh; “In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you, there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”
4) Ted Rall, Far left columnist and cartoonist; “Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.”
5) Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) said that eight Marines in Haditha, Iraq, “killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” before the Marines cases were heard. Ultimately, all charges were dropped except for one in which Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich plead guilty to dereliction of duty, ending prosecution of the 2005 incident.
6) David M. Kennedy, New York Times; “The United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today’s volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits….”
7) During an interview with People Magazine, Michelle Obama confided that Jane Fonda is one of her role models, saying; “There’s Jane Fonda, a beautiful, engaged, politically savvy, sharp woman.” Jane Fonda is reviled by Vietnam veterans for her anti-war campaign against U.S. troops in Vietnam. She posed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, as though she were looking for an American plane to shoot down. The photo was published worldwide and gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
8) Stephen King; “I don’t want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don’t, then you’ve got, the Army, Iraq, I don’t know, something like that. It’s, it’s not as bright. So, that’s my little commercial for that.”
9) Senator Barack Obama (D) said in 2007, that the U.S. has “gotta get the job done” in Afghanistan which “requires us to have enough troops that we’re not just air raiding villages and killing civilians which is causing enormous problems there. It means that we have enough civilian support, agricultural specialists, people who are engineers, people who are building schools and so forth to help the Afghani government do a better job of delivering on behalf of its people.”
10) On July 31st, 2007, Congressman James Clyburn, the House Democratic whip, said that good news on the Iraq war “would be a problem for us” Democrats.
11) Michael Moore; “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.”
12) In John Kerry’s book; “Tour of Duty,” on page 211, Kerry said of Cobra gunship pilots; “Yet Kerry found himself troubled by the realization that some of these wild boys could kill innocent people from a distance and not be bothered by it. He was no pacifist – far from it- and understood that “accidental atrocities” were a part of war. But it disturbed him that even a few trigger happy American yahoos considered killing Vietnamese civilians a sport.”
13) Barack Obama, in “Dreams from My Father,” berated “the powerful” for their “dull complacency and … steady, unthinking application of force, of … more sophisticated military hardware.”
14) Freelance author Justin Doolittle, in Salon; “Stop Thanking the Troops for Me: No, They Don’t ‘Protect Our Freedoms!’” “We need not thank the troops for every breath we take. When we do, we reduce our entire existence as free people to something that only exists at the whim of the U.S. military, and suffocate critical thought about the military and what it’s actually doing in the world.”
15) Kathleen Belew, New York Times; “In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a nine-page report detailing the threat of domestic terrorism by the white power movement. This short document outlined no specific threats, but rather a set of historical factors that had predicted white-supremacist activity in the past — like economic pressure, opposition to immigration and gun-control legislation — and a new factor, the election of a black president. The report singled out one factor that has fueled every surge in Ku Klux Klan membership in American history, from the 1860s to the present: war. The return of veterans from combat appears to correlate more closely with Klan membership than any other historical factor. “Military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists carrying out violent attacks,” the report warned. The agency was “concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.”
16) Terry Moran, Liberal ABC reporter; “There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it’s very dangerous. That’s different from the media doing its job of challenging the exercise of power without fear or favor.”
17) In 2006, John Kerry seemed to forget America no longer has a draft, when he said; “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
18) MoveOn.Org; “General Petraeus or General Betray Us? …Today, before Congress and the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.”
19) In 2008, Sen. Jay Rockefeller said of John McCain; “McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”
20) Barack Obama campaign pledge; “I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems. I will institute an independent Defense Priorities Board to ensure that the Quadrennial Defense Review is not used to justify unnecessary defense spending … I will set a goal for a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal: I will not develop nuclear weapons.”
21) The Pittsburgh Organizing Group; “On Wednesday, March 19, POG will be holding a torch-lit march to a modern day castle of abominations—our local military recruiting station. If the station remains open, we intend to evict it and everything inside of it, occupy the location, and transform it into something useful for the community. We’ll also be bringing a movable cage in which to confine military recruiters until they no longer pose a danger to our friends and neighbors.”
22) On May 27th, 2012, Chris Hayes, of MSNBC, said he was “uncomfortable” with referring to “war dead” as “heroes.” Hayes stated; “I feel comfortable, ah, uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.”
23) Rep. Charlie Rangel (D), NY; “If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.”
24) John Daly, Warren County Community College adjunct English professor “Real freedom will come when [U.S.] soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors.”
25) A week after September 11th 2001, Bill Maher, the far left HBO host who donated one million dollars to Barack Obama, said; “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
26) David Broder, liberal columnist; “One of the losers in the weekend oratorical marathon was retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who repeatedly invoked the West Point motto of ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’ forgetting that few in this particular audience (at the Democratic National Committee) have much experience with, or sympathy for, the military.”
Of course, we know that on Memorial Day, President Obama, or one of his stand-ins will lay a wreath at the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier. He will say the right words. He may even look the part of a “Commander In Chief,” but let’s look the actions of Barack Obama and other Democrats.
I. In 1971, John Kerry met with North Vietnamese Communists, in Paris. Any negotiation between a private U.S. citizen and a foreign power is illegal. It violates the Logan Act of 1798. A Ho Chi Minh City museum that honors Vietnam War protesters features a photo of Sen. Kerry being greeted by the general secretary of the Communist Party, Comrade Do Muoi.
II. On August 29, 1993, Gen. William Garrison led a task force of 440 elite Delta Force troops, into Mogadishu. Their mission was to capture Mohammed Farah Aidid, the leader of a warring clan in Somalia. President Clinton’s Def. Secretary, Les Aspin denied a request for armored reinforcements made by Gen. Montgomery. This denial no doubt contributed to the loss of eighteen brave American as well as eighty-four American soldiers wounded in action, when they were ambushed by Aidid’s forces.
III. Leading up to the 2012 election, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to express concern over delays in ballots reaching military voters overseas. They were concerned that the ballots would not reach service members until after the election. Their letter said in part; “We write to express concerns over another serious failure by the Department of Defense (DoD) to safeguard the voting rights of our overseas military service members, which we believe could result in the imminent disenfranchisement of thousands.”
IV. Barack Obama has conducted a purge of military officers unparalleled in America’s history, including General David Petraeus, General John Allen, General Stanley McChrystal, Gen. David McKiernan, General Carter Ham, and Admiral David Gaouette. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, recipient of the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, as well as other top retired officers say President Obama is destroying the morale of the U.S. military. According to Brady, “There is no doubt he (Obama) is intent on emasculating the military and will fire anyone who disagrees with him” over such issues as “homosexuals, women in foxholes, the Obama sequester.”
V. On October 14, 2013, WND reported; “In what has been described as “an astonishing attack on religious freedom,” Catholics at a Navy base were banned from attending worship services because of the partial shutdown of the federal government. In response, the Thomas More Law Center announced it has filed a lawsuit over the orders at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia. The legal team said a Catholic priest who serves the community on the military base “has been prohibited from even volunteering to celebrate Holy Mass without pay and was told that if he violated that order, he could be subject to arrest.”
VI. The Washington Times has reported, “A Navy F-18 fighter pilot and former Top Gun instructor is publicly warning admirals that retention is beginning to suffer from the military’s relentless social conditioning programs. Cmdr. Guy Snodgrass said sailors are becoming fed-up with the constant emphasis on social issues — an apparent reference to gays in the military, women in combat and ending sexual harassment.”
VII. Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund posted a video on its website, raising the alarm over President Barack Obama’s careless disclosure of special operation’s role in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound and its capabilities and tactics. Former military and intelligence officers accuse Obama of seeking political gain by disclosing successful secret operations. In the video, Benjamin Smith, a former Navy SEAL, said; “As a citizen, it is my civic duty to tell the president to stop leaking information to the enemy. It will get Americans killed.” Scott Taylor, another former Navy SEAL said; “If you disclose how we got there, how we took down the building, what we did, how many people were there, that it’s going to hinder future operations, and certainly hurt the success of those future operations.”
VIII. On August 6, 2011, the same “SEAL Team VI” that killed Osama bin Laden was on their way to assist a mission in Wardak Province, Afghanistan. The CH-47D Chinook helicopter they were riding in was shot down by an RPG fired by Taliban approaching their landing zone in Tangi Valley. All 38 American and Afghan service members aboard perished, including 17 Navy SEALS, 5 Navy Special Operations support personnel, 3 Air Force Special Tactics Airmen and the five-man Chinook crew, marking the largest loss of life in America’s 11 years of military operations in Afghanistan. Twenty of the twenty-two SEALs and SEAL support were from SEAL Team VI. Billy Vaughn, the father of one of the SEALs killed in the Chinook attack, Special Operations Chief Aaron Vaughn, said, “How the Obama administration has decided to conduct this war is nothing short of criminal. When the administration leaked the identity of the SEALs after the bin Laden raid, a target was put on their back. By increasing the reliance on special operators in prosecuting the war, but not giving them the top line equipment and personnel to support them, this administration bears responsibility for the events of that fateful night.. And the rules of engagement that let my son’s killers walk away unscratched is a betrayal of our commitment to our warriors in the field.”
IX. During the “sequestration” battle, last fall, Barack Obama and his administration took the petty and spiteful step of closing parks and memorials, most notably, the WWII Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial and the Korean War memorial, on the National Mall. It did so as part of the painfully transparent “Washington Monument” ploy. Although it was done under the guise of budget cuts, it actually required higher spending for barricades and overtime pay.
X. On February 13th, 2014, Col. Allen West reported; “In the first seven-plus years of war in Afghanistan (October 2001 – December 2008) we lost 630 U.S. soldiers. In early 2009, the Obama administration authorized the implementation of the COIN (Counter-Insurgent) strategy, more focused on “winning hearts and minds” than winning a war, and over the next five years, the U.S. death toll nearly tripled. Seventy-three percent of all U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have taken place since 2009. In the first seven plus years of war in Afghanistan, 2,638 U.S. soldiers were wounded in action. In the next forty-five months (2009 – 2012) an additional 15,036 suffered the same fate.”
XI. Democrats are quick to point to casualties under President George W. Bush. Under Democrat presidents during WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, America suffered over 700,000 casualties.
XII. President Obama and Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense, are slashing the military to below levels not seen since before World War II.
XIII. As the facts on the Benghazi scandal come to light, it is clear that there was wanton disregard for the lives of the Americans who died there. There was cynical political calculation. There was cowardice. There was deceit. There was an unprecedented rejection of the historical American military ethos of “leave no man behind.” It is clear that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton put their political ambitions, their fund raising and a good night’s sleep ahead of the lives of four Americans.
XIV. In November of 2013, “Military.com” reported; “Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Tuesday that troops and their families will be asked to sacrifice on pay and benefits to preserve readiness in an era of tighter budgets. Hagel listed politically-charged changes to compensation and personnel policy as one of his top six priorities in reforming the military following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the department gears up to meet new challenges. “This may be the most difficult” to achieve among his six priorities, Hagel said of proposals to trim pay increases, overhaul TRICARE and review retirement benefits while adapting to cuts in personnel. “Without serious attempts to achieve significant savings in this area, which consumes roughly half of the DoD budget and is increasing every year, we risk becoming an unbalanced force,”
XV. As Russia exhibits threatening moves towards the Ukraine, the Middle East is in turmoil, China is threatening Vietnam and our southern border is being overrun, our Sec. of State, John Kerry is focused on stopping “Global Warming,” rather than stopping “Global Warring.”
XVI. Today, the Veterans Administration scandal is coming to light, with dozens of veterans dying while waiting for care at VA hospitals. As with four prior scandals, President Obama has stated that he first heard of the problem from the media, even though he complained of the “deplorable conditions” of the VA healthcare under President Bush.
A review of these words and actions by Democrats provides ample evidence of a clear and undeniable animosity of the military. It would be unrealistic to expect them to change something so engrained in their nature. It would be nice if they would be honest and admit they find the military and veterans existence, “grotesque and incomprehensible.” The truth would set them free! They can do it. Barack Obama has been clear in his low opinion of Republicans, “Tea Partiers,” conservatives, and people who “cling to their guns and religion.” After all, this is the party that booed God at its 2012 convention! Admitting their loathing of the military and veterans should be a piece of cake!
http://madworldnews.com/democrats-wa...tary-veterans/
