Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Massacre leaves liberals in tears by John Podhoretz
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Slaughter. It was a slaughter. Mitt Romney put on the most
commanding presidential debate performance of the insta-commentary era.
One could literally watch, on Facebook and Twitter, hundreds of people
on both sides of the political divide react in real time as the debate
went on. Their reactions were identical, though their moods were
not: As Romney dominated exchange after exchange with a surprisingly
effective combination of pointed personal touches and remarkable factual
preparation, conservatives and Republicans grew more and more jubilant
while liberals and Democrats grew more and more alarmed. The conservative response could be boiled down to: “Who is this guy? Where have they been hiding him?Meanwhile,
the president was so off his game that he failed even to create an
“aww” moment at the very start, when he noted that last night was his
20th wedding anniversary. And he went downhill from there.
He
chose to turn the very first topic, creating jobsin a slowing economy,
into a disquisition on the need for a better education system. And with
the exception of an effective hit at Romney on Medicare funding more
than an hour in, he rambled, was unclear and seemed at times to lose his
own point. At the end of the debate, the highly excitable
pseudo-conservative-turned-hot-leftist Obama fancier Andrew Sullivan
spoke for many on his side when he was reduced to heartbroken profanity
on Twitter: “How is Obama’s closing so f--king sad, confused, lame? He
choked. He lost. He may even have lost election tonight.” Forget
the substance, even though this was a pretty substantive debate with
wonky disputes on the mechanics of financial regulation and the
restructuring of health-care payments. Presidential debates are about
the impressions they create in the minds of viewers and listeners and
the big moments they sometimes feature. There was no big moment,
and that was by design. Indeed, the Romney campaign apparently engaged
in a bit of amusing misdirection when someone told The New York Times
that Mitt was preparing “zingers.” That may have led the Obama people to
think Romney would be aiming low and that they should rise above his
cheap tactics. Instead, Romney finally showed the quality for
which the people who worked with and for him in business have long
praised him: his astonishing command of detail. There were glimmers of
it in the 20 debates in which he participated with his Republican rivals
in 2011 and early 2012, but nothing like his stunt last night. He
not only had 10,000 factoids, numbers, details and bits and pieces of
policy in his head, he was able to summon them up, recombine them,
improvise with them and take advantage of that knowledge in relentlessly
rebutting every jab the president threw at him. Obama seemed
entirely unprepared for the Romney onslaught, and retreated into
comforting soundbites from ineffective past speeches — about how his
grandmother needed Medicare, and how Abraham Lincoln liked to build
infrastructure just like Obama does. Now, other incumbent
presidents have had this kind of trouble before in the first debates of
their re-election campaigns. Ronald Reagan in 1984 was so bumbling and
lost, people began to wonder if he had lost it. In 2004, John Kerry
mopped the floor with George W. Bush. This is clearly one of the
problems of living inside the White House bubble. No one argues with
presidents or forces them to defend their positions, and their
disputation muscles begin to atrophy. Their challengers, by
contrast, are hardened and sharpened by the realities of running for
office — having just been through debate after debate after debate,
rally after rally after rally, and the need for press attention rather than the avoidance of it. In other words, Romney demonstrated last night that the ridiculous Republican primary season actually did him a world of good. And
he did himself a universe of good. In the first flash poll, done by
CBS, he was not only judged the winner by a margin of 56-32, but even
more striking, the number of those who said they thought Romney cared
about them doubled, from 30 percent to 60 percent. But as the
examples of Mondale and Kerry demonstrate, one good debate performance
does not an incumbent slayer make. There’s more to do and more to come. New York Post.jpodhoretz@gmail.com
