10 posts tagged “america”

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This article was written in February 2007. It is still relevant today. I'll not add any words, Mitch Lewis has worded it perfectly. Here is also another post confirming this same thought.
American Infidel

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This picture from today’s Kansas City Star echoes – in Marine fashion – a sentiment that I often hear from Soldiers: America isn’t at war; the Army is.

Politicians and pundits don’t always understand what Soldiers mean by that. It isn’t about a draft or who is serving in uniform or taxes or material sacrifices at home. It isn’t even about differing opinions about the way ahead. What most Soldiers mean is that the people seem to have lost heart.

Soldiers live by the warrior ethos:

• I will always place the mission first.
• I will never accept defeat.
• I will never quit.
• I will never leave a fallen comrade behind.

These are the values they live by. Time and time again, they throw themselves into the breach to accomplish what needs to be done. Soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors are enduring extreme hardship and danger to accomplish the mission they’ve been given in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pundits tell us that Americans are weary of the war. They are tired of it. They want it to go away. Many waiting friends and families endure the anxiety and heartache of deployments. Some receive terrible news of loved ones wounded or killed in action. For many Americans, however, the greatest hardship is seeing and reading bad news from Iraq in the media. I won’t downplay the significance of even this latter form of hardship. In today’s constantly connected world, news stories and images can and do create real traumatic stress.

Unfortunately, making decisions out of stress, discomfort or anxiety is a horrible idea. Soldiers and Marines quickly learn that paralysis and fear never get you out of a jam or accomplish what needs to be done. Success requires keeping your head in the game and your eyes focused on the goal, even when everything is going to hell around you. Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it is the ability to think and act despite your fear.

Service members do understand that there are differences of opinion about the way ahead in this conflict, both in Iraq and in the wider defense against extremist groups that attack us. Ask a dozen Soldiers for their opinions, and you’ll get at least a half-dozen different ideas. That’s true for any group of Soldiers, from privates to generals.

Military people have learned how to deal with different points of view. Military staffs begin planning by analyzing the mission they’ve been given and identifying and analyzing possible courses of action. In the end, the commander can decide to execute only one course. During the planning process, staff members can – and should - argue vigorously for their points of view. Once the commander decides, however, all Soldiers throw themselves into making the decision work. Certainly, you monitor the progress of your operation and make adjustments to both means and ends when necessary. No plan is perfect, but a barely sufficient plan vigorously executed now is much better than a perfect plan executed half-heartedly or in the distant future.

During my first assignment in the Army I worked in a Basic Training battalion at Fort Leonard Wood. There, I learned the phrase “suck it up and drive on.” That’s what Drill Sergeants said when issues of mental or physical discomfort (not injury) got in the way of Soldiers completing their tasks. Soldiers learned that the mission was more important than their comfort and that courage was more important than fear.

We cannot make decisions about this war based on fatigue, anxiety or self-interest. The stakes are too high for that. If the news is disturbing, don’t look at it until you can read it with your head instead of your gut. Eventually, find the courage to read beyond the “if it bleeds it leads” headlines. Choose to base your thinking on your intellect and will instead of on your weariness or fear. Choose to look beyond your own needs to the needs our nation and our world. As a nation, choose whatever strategy or course of action you think best achieves the greatest good and the members of the armed forces will execute it.

Be courageous; the members of the armed forces that serve you are more courageous still. You cannot ask too much from them. They will march through hell if you are behind them.

Uncle Jeremiah
Barack Obama and his cookie-cutter race huckster.

By Mark Steyn

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright thinks that, given their treatment by white America, black Americans have no reason to sing “God Bless America.” “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America,” he told his congregation. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.”

I’m not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vaudeville of rival politicians insisting this or that candidate disassociate himself from remarks by some fellow he had a 30-second grip’n’greet with a decade ago. But Jeremiah Wright is not exactly peripheral to Barack Obama’s life. He married the Obamas and baptized their children. Those of us who made the mistake of buying the senator’s last book, The Audacity of Hope, and assumed the title was an ingeniously parodic distillation of the great sonorous banality of an entire genre of blandly uplifting political writing discovered circa page 127 that in fact the phrase comes from one of the Reverend Wright’s sermons. Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama’s pastor for 20 years — in other words, pretty much the senator’s entire adult life. Did Obama consider God Damn America as a title for his book but it didn’t focus-group so well?

Ah, well, no, the senator told ABC News. The Reverend Wright is like “an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.” So did he agree with goofy old Uncle Jeremiah on September 16th 2001? That Sunday morning, Uncle told his congregation that the United States brought the death and destruction of 9/11 on itself. “We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” said the Reverend Wright. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards.”

Is that one of those “things I don’t always agree with”? Well, Senator Obama isn’t saying, responding merely that he wasn’t in church that morning. Okay, fair enough, but what would he have done had he happened to have shown up on September 16th? Cried “Shame on you!” and stormed out? Or, if that’s a little dramatic, whispered to Michelle that he didn’t want their daughters hearing this kind of drivel while rescue workers were still sifting through the rubble and risen from his pew in a dignified manner and led his family to the exit? Or would he have just sat there with an inscrutable look on his face as those around him nodded?

All Senator Obama will say is that “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” And in that he may be correct. There are many preachers who would be happy to tell their congregations “God damn America.” But Barack Obama is not supposed to be the candidate of the America-damners: He’s not the Reverend Al Sharpton or the Reverend Jesse Jackson or the rest of the racial-grievance mongers. Obama is meant to be the man who transcends the divisions of race, the candidate who doesn’t damn America but “heals” it — if you believe, as many Democrats do, that America needs healing.

Yet since his early twenties he’s sat week after week listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race huckster.

What is Barack Obama for? It’s not his “policies,” such as they are. Rather, Senator Obama embodies an idea: He’s a symbol of redemption and renewal, and a lot of other airy-fairy abstractions that don’t boil down to much except making upscale white liberals feel good about themselves and get even more of a frisson out of white liberal guilt than they usually do. I assume that’s what Geraldine Ferraro was getting at when she said Obama wouldn’t be where he was today (i.e., leading the race for the Democratic nomination) if he was white. For her infelicity, the first woman on a presidential ticket got bounced from the Clinton campaign and denounced by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann for her “insidious racism” indistinguishable from “the vocabulary of David Duke.”

Oh, for cryin’ out loud. Enjoyable as it is to watch previously expert wielders of identity-politics hand-grenades blow their own fingers off, if Geraldine Ferraro’s an “insidious racist,” who isn’t?

The song the Reverend Wright won’t sing is by Irving Berlin, a contemporary of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, all the sophisticated rhymesters. But only Berlin could have written without embarrassment “God Bless America.” He said it directly, unaffectedly, unashamedly — in seven words:

   God Bless America
    Land that I love.

The Reverend Wright can’t say those words. His shtick is:

I understand the Ellis Island experience of Russian Jews was denied to blacks. But not to Obama. His experience surely isn’t so different to Berlin’s — except that Barack got to go to Harvard. Obama’s father was a Kenyan, he spent his childhood in Indonesia, and he ought to thank his lucky stars that he’s running for office in Washington rather than Nairobi or Jakarta. Instead, his whiney wife Michelle says that her husband’s election as president would be the first reason to have “pride” in America, and complains that this country is “downright mean” and that she’s having difficulty finding money for their daughters’ piano lessons and summer camp. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Obama earn $480,000 a year (not including book royalties from The Audacity of Hype), but they’re whining about how tough they have it to couples who earn 48 grand — or less. Yes, we can. But not on a lousy half-million bucks a year.

God Bless America
Land that I love.

Take it away, Michelle.

© 2008 Mark Steyn

Cartoons By Michael Ramirez