Leftists are “trying to destroy the American military” and “turn it … into a bunch of pansies.” So warned Senate Foreign Affairs Committee member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Friday, responding to a new, outrageously politically correct U.S. Army recruitment ad. Featuring an animated portrayal of a true story of a “little girl, raised by two moms,” the ad signals how the military has thoroughly transitioned from sexual rectitude to “Don’t ask, don’t tell” to, finally, “Will tell — you better approve.”
The Daily Mail summarizes the story, writing:
Sen. Ted Cruz said a ‘a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea’ as he compared it with Russian video featuring shaven headed soldier
His comment triggered backlash accusing him of trolling his own armed forces
Sen Tammy Duckworth said he shouldn’t suggest the Russian military was better than the one that came to the rescue during Jan. 6 Capitol attack
Cruz reveled in the storm, saying the U.S. military was the greatest in the world but ‘woke media are trying to turn them into pansies’
Senator Cruz’s tweet contrasting our Army ad with the Russians’ is below.
Cruz explained his position on Fox News on Friday, stating:
Look, it’s ridiculous, and the men and women of our military, our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines are the toughest, most ferocious, and effective fighting force on the face of the planet. They are the reason we are free. They are the reason we have our rights. And what we’re seeing is Democratic politicians and these woke lefty bureaucrats and lefty media reporters trying to destroy the American military, trying to turn it into, frankly, a bunch of pansies.
The job of the military is to kill the bad guys. And it is to strike fear in the enemies of America. People sign up to join the military because they want to keep us safe, they don’t want to sit around a circle, emoting and passing daisies back and forth. They want to train to defeat the enemies and protect America. That’s what our military should be doing.
The Democrats and the media, what they’re doing is profoundly dangerous and it’s profoundly disrespectful. Look, I view this ad hand in hand with the recruiting videos for the CIA, which likewise has people, you know, sharing basically with their therapist about their anxiety disorder. I don’t need James Bond or Jason Bourne to have an anxiety disorder. I need him to be able to find out who the terrorists are that want to kill us so that we can kill them before they kill us.
Of course, military top brass defended their marketing approach. “The Army ad is part of a series dubbed ‘The Calling,’ which tells the ‘emotional’ true stories of soldiers in order to ‘shatter’ military stereotypes, Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army Enterprise Marketing, told Newsweek earlier this month,” relates the New York Post.
“‘Research tells us that young people today see the Army as a ‘distant star’ — a place requiring a nearly superhuman level of discipline with little relevance to their daily lives,’ said Fink,” the paper continued.
Sadly, this may in general be true and reflects the moral decay and cultural rot besetting our civilization. Yet does the military really understand its “market”? As one respondent under Cruz’s tweet put it, “This is just going to cause unqualified people to join and not make it through bootcamp at our expense.”
Perhaps even more significantly, with virtually all “products,” your market isn’t everyone but the people who may be interested in what you offer. And is the military’s approach attractive to that subset of young people who’d make the best soldiers? In fact, it seems likely that the approach would actually deter many among that group.
(Moreover, those of a suspicious nature could wonder if this politically correct approach is designed, in part, to create not an effective military but an ideologically compliant one that would enforce a power-mad regime’s unconstitutional will.)
Predictably, Senator Cruz was impugned as a “traitor,” a “coward,” and a Russia-sympathizing propagandist by the social-media mob; in other words, by left-wingers who just last week, it almost seems, would passionately quote the Howard Zinn line “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” It’s funny how this changed just when they attained greater institutional power and became the targets of dissent.
But Cruz sounds a necessary alarm. The saying “More sweat on the practice field, less blood on the battlefield” exists because you must prepare to win.
You must also sense it when you’re preparing to lose.
And then effect a remedy — before it’s too late.
The issue, however, is that the military-rending social engineers think the problem is the remedy. For to devout ideologues detached from reality, misbegotten ideology trumps all — even national security.
We’ve seen this before, too, in what serves as a warning from history. A major reason why relatively small Finland inflicted devastating causalities on the USSR in the two nations’ “Winter War” (1939-1940s) was that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had replaced competent military officers with Communist Party loyalists. It was ideology über alles, resulting in a Soviet-Finnish casualty disparity of, by one estimate, 15 to 1.
So the socialists may be fond of saying that you “have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” But, ironically, the eggs they end up breaking are so often their own.
