Why the military supports John McCain and...
The Democrats say they support the military but the military doesn't support their policies. Early military results are overwhelmingly pro-McCain. Yes, the guys and gals with their butts on the line want to finish the job in Iraq and want John McCain as Commander-In-Chief!
Greyhawk writes:
"Surprise — at least one poll shows a huge McCain lead: “[Senator John] McCain, R-Ariz., handily defeated Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., 68 percent to 23 percent in a voluntary survey of 4,293 active-duty, National Guard, and reserve subscribers and former subscribers to Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times, and Air Force Times.” Or perhaps not so surprising: there’s a history involved here.
In 1864 the nation was nearing the end of the Civil War — but some wanted it ended sooner than others. Democrats offered a platform declaring that it was “the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which . . . the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, . . . justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” In short: end the war now.
Their candidate was General (still on active duty throughout the presidential campaign) George McClellan. He assured voters that restoration of the Union was a worthwhile endeavor, but hinted that other goals had since corrupted the purpose of the war he himself had once waged and nearly lost. “The Union is the one condition of peace,” McClellan wrote. “We ask no more.” He likewise pledged to restore America’s standing in the eyes of the world — in his words, “resume our commanding position among the nations of the earth.”
And along with all that, Democrats supported the troops:
Resolved, that the sympathy of the Democratic Party is heartily and earnestly extended to the soldiery of our army and sailors of our navy, who are and have been in the field and on the sea under the flag of our country, and, in the events of its attaining power, they will receive all the care, protection, and regard that the brave soldiers and sailors of the republic have so nobly earned.
Which was a good thing because America was trying something brand new that year: “absentee voting” — intended to ensure that those troops would be able to cast their ballots, too. But while Republicans claimed that voting was “a right vested in the individual which could adequately be exercised through written media, regardless of location,” Democrats countered that votes must be cast in person: “Like marriages and wills, votes required competent witnesses, defined by the Democrats as fellow citizens with shared concerns and responsibilities. Army officers appointed by the federal government could not fill this role. These conservative Democratic views of the mid-19th century seem alien to our thinking today, as absentee voting has since become a firmly established practice.”
So as Sherman marched on Atlanta a different sort of war was waged in the North:
Wisconsin was the first to permit their soldiers to vote in the field through absentee ballots. California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania all followed suit. However, Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey, which all had Democratic-controlled state legislatures, did not pass legislation allowing soldiers to vote in the field.
But Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ensured the troops were given absentee ballots or granted leave to vote in person, and Lincoln himself asked General Sherman to allow Indiana soldiers to return home to vote. Lincoln was reelected with 55 percent of the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide, and while not decisive in the election, he received over 70 percent of the military vote."
Read the rest of the article here... Note that there is an attempt being made to keep military ballots from counting in the election this year, at least in Virginia! By Democrats, of course.
Speaking of talking softly and carrying a big stick (a concept Obama fails to grasp)...
Michael Yon gives some background to the strike on Syria:
"Late Sunday, U.S. Special Forces struck positions across the Syrian-Iraq border, inside of Syria, apparently killing nine people, most of whom were non-Syrian Arab fighters on their way into Iraq. Of course there is a great cry rising from the Syrians today.
For years, tons of explosives and a long line of foreign terrorists have streamed across the Syrian border into Anbar Province and Nineveh Province in Iraq. I must have spent a total of about nine months in Nineveh, about eight of which were in the capital of Mosul, and another month in Anbar.
Foreign terrorists were caught or killed on a regular basis, and they all had the same story: they came from an alphabet soup of Arab countries — Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, to name a handful. They had come through Syria. I remember the day the Libyan was captured in 2005: Iraqis were trying to force him to wear a suicide vest to attack police in Mosul. I remember the night, a raid that I did not go on, when the Tunisians were captured in 2005, resulting in hand-to-hand combat that did not go well for the Tunisians. The owner of the safe house was captured with a diary listing dates and effects for years of attacks; that diary actually matched up perfectly with SIGACT reports of the same incidents. The Tunisians were captured with all sorts of documentation, as I recall, that chronicled their long journey by all modes of transport to get through to Syria and across into Mosul.
It is extremely safe to say that many hundreds, indeed thousands, of Iraqis have been killed by the handiwork of foreign fighters. Untold tons of munitions have flowed across the border over time. Those arms are a lifeline to the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Anbar has gone mostly quiet and Special Forces and conventional forces have been making progress up there in Nineveh, but Mosul is the last serious redoubt of al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as other insurgent groups. (Diyala still has some problems.) In 2007 and early 2008 when I was last there, explosives were coming in through Syria. In fact, the last combat mission I did in Iraq this year was with a Special Forces team that specifically was searching for weapons coming in through Syria."
Read the rest here...
Note how he ends the article - "Still, now comes the political posturing. The Iraqi government has condemned the action and is claiming that they didn’t authorize the U.S. attack. Of course Syria is doing the same. That’s okay. This is one way we give the new Iraqi government cover to do what has to be done. We can take the blame; they have to coexist with their neighbors. So we are a convenient public bad guy for both sides. But there is little doubt that Iraqis are taking some comfort that the “bad guy” is not respecting a border that is violated repeatedly by Syria. Syria has played a dangerous game, with few consequences until yesterday. If Syria wants its border to be respected, it will have to respect the border with Iraq."
In real geopolitics, you can bomb Syria and you can bomb Pakistan. You can allow Pakistan and Iraq and Syria to all throw up their hands in alarm for general consumption. Behind the scenes, diplomates and world leaders know what is up. John McCain understands this, while Obama has made it crystal clear that he does not!
If you prefer George McClellan and Jimmy Carter to Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, you will vote for Obama over McCain. God help us all!
Greyhawk writes:
"Surprise — at least one poll shows a huge McCain lead: “[Senator John] McCain, R-Ariz., handily defeated Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., 68 percent to 23 percent in a voluntary survey of 4,293 active-duty, National Guard, and reserve subscribers and former subscribers to Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times, and Air Force Times.” Or perhaps not so surprising: there’s a history involved here.
In 1864 the nation was nearing the end of the Civil War — but some wanted it ended sooner than others. Democrats offered a platform declaring that it was “the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which . . . the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, . . . justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” In short: end the war now.
Their candidate was General (still on active duty throughout the presidential campaign) George McClellan. He assured voters that restoration of the Union was a worthwhile endeavor, but hinted that other goals had since corrupted the purpose of the war he himself had once waged and nearly lost. “The Union is the one condition of peace,” McClellan wrote. “We ask no more.” He likewise pledged to restore America’s standing in the eyes of the world — in his words, “resume our commanding position among the nations of the earth.”
And along with all that, Democrats supported the troops:
Resolved, that the sympathy of the Democratic Party is heartily and earnestly extended to the soldiery of our army and sailors of our navy, who are and have been in the field and on the sea under the flag of our country, and, in the events of its attaining power, they will receive all the care, protection, and regard that the brave soldiers and sailors of the republic have so nobly earned.
Which was a good thing because America was trying something brand new that year: “absentee voting” — intended to ensure that those troops would be able to cast their ballots, too. But while Republicans claimed that voting was “a right vested in the individual which could adequately be exercised through written media, regardless of location,” Democrats countered that votes must be cast in person: “Like marriages and wills, votes required competent witnesses, defined by the Democrats as fellow citizens with shared concerns and responsibilities. Army officers appointed by the federal government could not fill this role. These conservative Democratic views of the mid-19th century seem alien to our thinking today, as absentee voting has since become a firmly established practice.”
So as Sherman marched on Atlanta a different sort of war was waged in the North:
Wisconsin was the first to permit their soldiers to vote in the field through absentee ballots. California, Connecticut, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania all followed suit. However, Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey, which all had Democratic-controlled state legislatures, did not pass legislation allowing soldiers to vote in the field.
But Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ensured the troops were given absentee ballots or granted leave to vote in person, and Lincoln himself asked General Sherman to allow Indiana soldiers to return home to vote. Lincoln was reelected with 55 percent of the popular vote and an Electoral College landslide, and while not decisive in the election, he received over 70 percent of the military vote."
Read the rest of the article here... Note that there is an attempt being made to keep military ballots from counting in the election this year, at least in Virginia! By Democrats, of course.
Speaking of talking softly and carrying a big stick (a concept Obama fails to grasp)...
Michael Yon gives some background to the strike on Syria:
"Late Sunday, U.S. Special Forces struck positions across the Syrian-Iraq border, inside of Syria, apparently killing nine people, most of whom were non-Syrian Arab fighters on their way into Iraq. Of course there is a great cry rising from the Syrians today.
For years, tons of explosives and a long line of foreign terrorists have streamed across the Syrian border into Anbar Province and Nineveh Province in Iraq. I must have spent a total of about nine months in Nineveh, about eight of which were in the capital of Mosul, and another month in Anbar.
Foreign terrorists were caught or killed on a regular basis, and they all had the same story: they came from an alphabet soup of Arab countries — Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, to name a handful. They had come through Syria. I remember the day the Libyan was captured in 2005: Iraqis were trying to force him to wear a suicide vest to attack police in Mosul. I remember the night, a raid that I did not go on, when the Tunisians were captured in 2005, resulting in hand-to-hand combat that did not go well for the Tunisians. The owner of the safe house was captured with a diary listing dates and effects for years of attacks; that diary actually matched up perfectly with SIGACT reports of the same incidents. The Tunisians were captured with all sorts of documentation, as I recall, that chronicled their long journey by all modes of transport to get through to Syria and across into Mosul.
It is extremely safe to say that many hundreds, indeed thousands, of Iraqis have been killed by the handiwork of foreign fighters. Untold tons of munitions have flowed across the border over time. Those arms are a lifeline to the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Anbar has gone mostly quiet and Special Forces and conventional forces have been making progress up there in Nineveh, but Mosul is the last serious redoubt of al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as other insurgent groups. (Diyala still has some problems.) In 2007 and early 2008 when I was last there, explosives were coming in through Syria. In fact, the last combat mission I did in Iraq this year was with a Special Forces team that specifically was searching for weapons coming in through Syria."
Read the rest here...
Note how he ends the article - "Still, now comes the political posturing. The Iraqi government has condemned the action and is claiming that they didn’t authorize the U.S. attack. Of course Syria is doing the same. That’s okay. This is one way we give the new Iraqi government cover to do what has to be done. We can take the blame; they have to coexist with their neighbors. So we are a convenient public bad guy for both sides. But there is little doubt that Iraqis are taking some comfort that the “bad guy” is not respecting a border that is violated repeatedly by Syria. Syria has played a dangerous game, with few consequences until yesterday. If Syria wants its border to be respected, it will have to respect the border with Iraq."
In real geopolitics, you can bomb Syria and you can bomb Pakistan. You can allow Pakistan and Iraq and Syria to all throw up their hands in alarm for general consumption. Behind the scenes, diplomates and world leaders know what is up. John McCain understands this, while Obama has made it crystal clear that he does not!
If you prefer George McClellan and Jimmy Carter to Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, you will vote for Obama over McCain. God help us all!