As with everything Obama-related, his promise to abolish Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell turns out to be less than billed during the State of the Union. This report explains:
The Defense Department starts the clock next week on what is expected to be a several-year process in lifting its ban on gays from serving openly in the military. A special investigation into how the ban can be repealed without hurting the morale or readiness of the troops was expected to be announced Tuesday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Given that the one-year, self-imposed deadline for Guantanamo has come and gone, it is quite possible that the abolition of the policy could then very well never occur, with the debate extending long past Obama’s presidency. Surely his base will not be mollified with this sort of fluff, right? Others, however, may be delighted by the lackadaisical pace:
Democrats in Congress are also unlikely to press the issue until after this fall’s midterm elections. This will probably satisfy [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates, who has long suggested that change shouldn’t come too quickly. In a speech last year at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., Gated noted that the 1948 executive order for racial integration took five years to implement. “I’m not saying that’s a model for this, but I’m saying that I believe this is something that needs to be done very, very carefully,” he told the audience.
As J.E. Dyer explained in her thoughtful post, there are serious issues to consider before we allow the military to tolerate openly gay servicemen. And there is reason to wonder why — other than pure domestic politics to assuage the president’s disillusioned netroot fans — we should subject one of the few highly effective public institutions to “an untested, unnecessary, and probably unwise social experiment,” as Bill Kristol puts it.
Aside from the merits of the existing policy and the real cost in time, focus, and morale to change it, this is yet another example of the president’s rhetorical excess, which I suspect will now be seen as flimflam by his base. He promised to end the policy; the reality is that he is setting up an endless bureaucratic process to study it.
Guantanamo is open, the Patriot Act remains in place, ObamaCare is dead, and now Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is likely to be with us for years, perhaps forever. At some point, the president’s fans on the Left will realize they have been had.
I think it may also relate to the traits that have frequently infuriated the self-styled true conservatives. It was someone at the Corner, I wish I could remember the name, who observed that perhaps McCain’s willingness to cross the aisles and compliment members of the opposition originates in a sense that they are his fellow Americans. Whatever they believe or whatever positions they hold, they can never seem like enemies to him in the same way that an enemy in war, or an interrogator in a prison camp, is an enemy. Seemingly excessive scorn for allies who break discipline may also originate in his sense of honor, and, like many who have actually lived a life in the world (in particular the military world, in even greater particular the military world at war), he may have constitutional difficulty acknowledging a cussing-out or a cutting remark among friends as meaningfully hurtful.
Incidentally, there’s one minor bit McCain mentions in passing in the article that caught my eye – he talks about how, during the time he was in Vietnam, young people had become more interested in environmental issues, which he saw as a good thing.
For better or worse, it seems McCain’s environmentalist leanings have been around for a long time – they weren’t adopted, as some self-appointed “true conservatives” often imply, to be fashionable and impress the New York Times or something.
The Left is doing more than trying to discount his POW experience. They’re trying to make it into the “wrong sort of experience.” In the 5/18 issue of NYTimes Mag, the article “The McCain Doctrines” complains that he “spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle… Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.” And really, hating your enemy and not your own government, how gauche is that?
“They’re trying to make it into the “wrong sort of experience.”
The leftists are doing more than mere implying that John McCain was psychologically scarred by his experience. He is supposedly too unstable to be our next Commander-in-Chief and is also inclined towards war mongering. This line of attack will be seem reasonable to hard core Democrats who embrace dishonest pacifism.
This is why Obama’s plan to run on his personal story is so silly. The average American will look at Obama’s background and then look at McCain’s background and not have to think for one second about which is more impressive.
John McCain was born, raised, and trained to be a warrior, which prepared himself to survive his ordeal with honor, and understand human nature in all its cruelty. Reading Robert Kaplan’s book “Warrior Politics” couldn’t be more timely, with confrontations with dictators and tyrants on the horizon. We have been blessed to have men who seem to spring up when most needed to fight, or not, based on wisdom learned the old fashioned way, by learning eternal lessons the hard way. Politics becomes warfare by other means. Courage is mandatory.
Telling that McCain hasn’t talked about this part of his life. We will need credible surrogates to tell the country if he won’t do it himself. Modesty can be a failing in heros.
Churchill and Marsall and Petraeus come to mind, as do Patton and Grant. No utopian illusions. No wishful magical thinking. No appeasement with psychopaths.
The contrast with Obama couldn’t be more dramatic. Can anyone tell us what Barry Obama has done for his country, or prepared him to lead and decide?
Hero or not, a President needs domestic political LEVERAGE. (Where have I heard that word before?) Where is Maverick going to get his?
A reluctance to talk about one’s war days is something that most war veterans share to some extent. My uncle was deafened in the trenches in WWI, and that is all I know about his war days. My wife’s uncle served in the South Pacific in WWII, part of the time as a remittance man. That’s all I know about his time in the war. I’ve heard more stories from my contemporaries who served in Vietnam, but a lot of the details about being a doorgunner or combat engineer in Vietnam didn’t come out.
Yet a great many veterans of one war or another will be voting in the election in November. I hope that they’ll at least be discussing with their friends and acquaintances the necessity of electing a President who believes in and loves his country and who knows how to deal with its enemies.
Honor is something you get from your family and your military commanders. I will not give in. I will never surrender. I will never speak ill of my country, betray my oaths and my comrades. I will suffer and die before I will be seen to bargain for my life by betraying what I care about.
Principle is something that has nothing to do with you, personally. Excessive taxation is wrong, government owes it to taxpayers to take as little as possible of their money, because it’s THEIR money that they worked to earn. Excessive taxation, a casual disregard for the work the taxpayers did to earn that money, is against the principles of ownership and fiduciary responsibility. Sure, keep the Bush tax cuts and wipe out earmarks, but then tax energy and raise costs of everything forty to fifty percent. Makes no sense.
Honor. Principle.
McCain has way more of the first than the second.
He claims to be against excessive government spending then speaks for the largest tax hike in world history for GLOBAL WARMING. He claims to be a Reagan footsoldier and then robs the people of the right to free speech in the public square at election time with his campaign finance ‘reform’. He wants to defend his country but works hard to legalize the invasion of over 20 million people just in the last twenty years, people who import their culture and reject ours, and become leeches of our public services, straining them to the point that serving CITIZENS becomes impossible. (Yes, I know not all are like this, but how many millions does it take before you’d call this a problem? In McCain’s world, it can be a hundred million, two hundred million. Where do we draw the line? If there even IS a line?) And during all these processes, he manages to disparage both my intellect and my motivation over and over and over again. I’m an idiot and I’m cruel, in McCain’s world.
I admire John McCain and have no doubt that he has more personal courage and determination now at his age than I do twenty five years his junior. I know myself and I know I am a far weaker man than he was and is.
But I also know what is right and what is wrong. McCain seems easily convinced of fairly new ‘principles’ and admits little knowledge (or concern) in some key areas. He has a steel spine, but a soft HEAD.
Just when the whole world is becoming more aware that the numbers don’t add up, the current trend is cooling, the sun remains “Ice-Age” quiet for an uncomfortably long time now, and over 30,000 scientists have signed a skeptics petition proving there is no CONSENSUS in the scientific community over this scam, McCain suddenly, late in life, becomes an anthropogenic global warming BELIEVER.
God help us if he ever really gets signed into law anything like the bills they are currently considering. The suffering is coming, for sure, but not from excess heat.
It will be from excess taxation, excess oppression, excess loss of liberty, excess totalitarianism by those in charge of ‘saving the planet’. Which is fine if you’re one of the jet-set Gore types, but the rest of us aren’t looking forward to our tents and bicycles.
“Second, this is someone who has a fundamental understanding of totalitarian evil based on personal experience”
McCain-Feingold.
’nuff said?