Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen 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 soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt 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."
āWeāre
going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,ā
said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that
voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool
guy. Iāll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking
about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that
supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed,
she did āhave that person arrested.ā By happy coincidence, his bail
hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he
will have served his purpose. These two videos ā the Islamophobic one
and the Obamosexual one ā bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved
collapse of the presidentās reelection campaign.
Youāll recall that a near-month-long attempt to blame an obscure
YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of
U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with
Joe Bidenās bald assertion that the administration had been going on the
best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed
that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the
Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just
got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question
was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely
innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain
this week after Fox News obtained State Department e-mails revealing
that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half hour after the
assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact
nature of it.
We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request
for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was
denied by Washington. It had planes and special forces less than 500
miles away in southern Italy ā or about the same distance as Washington
to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the
commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and
Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a
rooftop in a benighted jihadist hellhole while Obama retired early to
rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. āWithin minutes of the first
bullet being fired the White House knew these heroes would be
slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,ā said Ty Woodsās
father, Charles. āIn less than an hour, the perimeters could have been
secured and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours
fighting numerically superior forces, my sonās life was sacrificed
because of the White Houseās decision.ā
Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military
operation against an al-Qaeda affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would
have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and
the days thereafter ā that Osama was dead and al-Qaeda was finished. And
so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Chris Stevens were left to
die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as
Secretary Clinton threatened, āhave that person arrested.ā And, in the
weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own
citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state,
complete with the midnight knock on the door from not-so-secret
policemen sent to haul the designated fall-guy into custody.
This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even
democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a
wholly fictional story line, and devoted its full resources to
maintaining it. I understand why Mitt Romney chose not to pursue this
line of argument in the final debate. The voters who will determine this
election are those who voted for Obama four years ago and this time
round either switch to the other fellow or sit on their hands. In
electoral terms, itās probably prudent of Mitt not to rub their faces in
their 2008 votes. Nevertheless, when the president and other prominent
officials stand by as four Americans die and then abuse their sacrifice
as contemptuously as this administration did, decency requires that they
be voted out of office as an act of urgent political hygiene.
At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al. seem
to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the
minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that at the ceremony Joe Biden
strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a āloud and
boisterousā voice, āDid your son always have balls the size of cue
balls?ā One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging
in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man
called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across
the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque
both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a
bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to
the political bigshot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice
president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country.
And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldnāt
even manage that.
But a funny thing happened over the next six weeks: Obamaās own cue
balls shriveled. Biden had offered up a deft campaign slogan
encompassing both domestic and foreign policy: āOsamaās dead and General
Motors is alive.ā But, as the al-Qaeda connections to Benghazi dribbled
out leak by leak, the āOsamaās deadā became a problematic boast and,
left to stand alone, the General Motors line was even less credible.
Avoiding the economy and foreign affairs, Obama fell back on Big Bird,
and binders, and bayonets, just to name the āBās in his bonnet. At the
second presidential debate, he name-checked Planned Parenthood, the
General Motors of the American abortion industry, half a dozen times,
desperate to preserve his so-called gender gap.
Yet oddly enough, the
more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up
Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away.
So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for
him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from
Vladimir Putin of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like
having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it
may well be true.
Both videos ā the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi
pretext ā exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to
conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms.
Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for
office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a
head of stateās most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib
shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the
numbing relentless peer pressure: Cāmon, all the cool kids are doing it;
why be the last hold-out?
If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, itās very
difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has
now adopted Queen Victoriaās supposed wedding advice to her daughter:
āLie back and think of England.ā Lie back and think of America. And then
get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep with a $16 trillion broke
loser twice? National Review
