What kind of leader wants a military more loyal to himself than to the rule of law?
And why?
These are two questions to ponder when considering the strange happenings in the armed forces since Barack Obama took office.
Let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you were a hard-left-wing commander in chief who wanted the military firmly in your corner. You’d certainly note that our armed forces have been a bastion of conservatism and Christian faith, and you’d know that its members generally weren’t very fond of you. So how would you go about changing this?
Some years ago I met a very young, all-American looking white fellow who had just exited the military. His reason was that he hadn’t been advanced the way he believed he should have been, and he wasn’t going to remain in the armed forces if it provided no future. Now, one interpretation here is that he was a millennial with an inflated opinion of himself (he didn’t strike me that way, though). Yet there is another interpretation.
The Obama administration has given affirmative action in the military a dose of steroids, promoting minorities and women — and, I believe, gays and lesbians — at the expense of white men. By the way, is this yet another reason why Obama wanted homosexuals to be able to serve openly? After all, you can’t target them for special treatment if you don’t know who they are.
But the point is this: If I were that hypothetical hard-left-wing leader, I’d know that one way to change the military’s political climate is the same way you do it in the nation at large.
Demographic manipulation.
White men generally vote Republican, white military men even more so, and white military men who are practicing Christians, well, that’s a recipe for a left-behind Left. Minorities, women, atheists, and the LGBT crowd, however, are reliable liberal constituencies. So what would I do if I were that hard leftist?
I’d create a military climate friendly toward groups that are my constituencies and hostile toward those that aren’t.
And I’d do more than subordinate white men to other groups in the promotion process. I’d clamp down on Christian expression — which had often been robust in the military — and punish servicemen who transgressed against my separation-of-church-and-everything policy. I’d let the world know that as far as homosexuality goes, the armed services are open for monkey business. I’d also force military personnel to be politically correct not just about sexuality, but also Islam, so that they were confronted with the choice of saying things they don’t believe or career damage. After all, good people might rather leave the service than live a lie. And I’d issue instructional materials characterizing traditionalists as a threat, so that the low-information servicemen may believe it and the more savvy would feel further alienated.
The goal here is to create a situation in which traditionalists will be encouraged to leave the military or not enlist in the first place. Of course, this method can’t bleed out all the red-blooded, but it can shift the balance. It can ensure a few things:
• The number of leftist fellow travelers in the armed forces will be as great as possible.
• As many of the rest as possible will be apolitical, mind-numbed types who wouldn’t question unconstitutional orders.
• The remaining traditionalists would be outnumbered by the first two groups and in a don’t ask-don’t tell predicament. And having been denied promotions, they’d have little institutional power.
At the same time that I was transforming the body, I’d also have to gain control of the head. To this end I would look to replace as many generals as possible with those I believed would do my bidding. For once I owned the military head, body and soul, I could really dream that impossible dream.
Anyway, that’s what I would do were I that hypothetical hard-left-wing leader.
Incidentally, they’re all things Barack Obama has already done.
As for the generals, note that the two-star general who oversaw our arsenal of intercontinental missiles, Major General Michael Carey, was just fired, becoming “the latest in a string of recent high-profile firings of top U.S. generals,” as Reuters puts it. Talk-show-host Michael Savage discussed this on his Friday program and was very suspicious about the Air Force’s reluctance to provide a reason for canning the man who oversaw our nuclear weapons — the service only said that the general was terminated for undisclosed “personal misbehavior.” As for me, I’ll just repeat my opening questions:
What kind of leader wants a military more loyal to himself than to the rule of law?
And why?
Whatever your conclusions, there is of course a mundane explanation for all of this. Leftists truly believe in their insane diversity dogma and quite reflexively try to socially re-engineer whatever they can sink their claws into, be they universities, neighborhoods, businesses or even the entities charged with protecting their compassionate selves. And in this age of increasing corruption and decadence, it wouldn’t be surprising to find generals transgressing against military code. Yet given that Barack Obama is a shadowy figure with a penchant for hiding his past (college records, etc.); that he has had avowed communists in his administration (Van Jones, Anita Dunn); that he seemed to belong to Chicago’s socialist New Party in the 1990s; and that, according to former Occidental College acquaintance and ex-Marxist John Drew, Obama was a flat-out “Marxist Leninist” who believed in old-style communist revolution, well, one’s imagination can conjure up some interesting scenarios.
The only question is, is it at all possible that Obama’s imagination conjures up the same ones?
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
