Not Something to Toy With

This is a national defense and foreign policy blog. That's my interest. That's what I blog about.

Oh, I delve into home stuff and satire, on occasion--for better or worse. Your call.

And I address global warming, the economy, and press bias, with the justification that these have foreign policy and defense connections on occasion. And sometimes politics--although I really am trying to avoid sliding into domestic politics--if only because press bias touches on that so much, and so much seems at stake for our economy and defense. But I don't intend to address domestic subjects even when I touch on domestic politics.

And hey, it is my blog, after all.

Still, this is a defense and foreign policy blog. The debate over going to war with Saddam's Iraq and the failure of the media to address it without apparent bias was what go me going.

Jay Nordlinger at National Review Online has been printing emails about what made someone conservative--if they hadn't been before. Here's what got me voting Republican at the federal level (and almost always at the state and local level):



I haven't seen that since 1972. I remembered it spot on--including the "16 to 6" remark about McGovern's defense plans. I know this was just an interpretation of how McGovern's promise to cut defense spending by 37% would have been implemented. But it got the point across accurately even if the examples weren't precisely what would have happened. And McGovern has gotten worse since then. McGovern served his country in World War II. I thank him for that. But had he won in 1972, he would have more than made up for that contribution. He tried awfully hard as it was, from the side lines.

That was 1972. I was ten. I was already very interested in military history and the military. I had started playing war games that summer (naval miniatures by Alnavco--although I couldn't afford the ships so used their catalog to make clay scale ships to use with their rules). I had followed the Vietnam War. I would have even if my brother hadn't been sent there. The idea that one party would gut our national defenses was horrifying to me. When the mock election came along in school, I voted for Nixon. As an aside, I took the pro-choice side in the school mock election debates. In my Catholic grade school. Not that I was pro-choice, mind you. But I thought that the opposing view deserved an airing, even if I was very uncomfortable making the arguments I researched. So there, I was perfectly prepared to be a nonpartisan research analyst in the state legislature. But I digress (as I can).

Because of the defense issue in the 1972 election, I'll never look back at the Democratic Party. I just don't trust them on defense. Had I grown up twenty years earlier, I might have been a Democrat, with a different Democratic Party around. Who knows? But a party weak on defense that actually salutes the Occupy Wall Street scum is one that simply cannot speak in my name.

If President Obama and his leftist allies in Congress succeed in gutting our defense, I wonder how many future Republican voters will be created? Shoot, the way he's talking, President Obama's Secretary of Defense might be one of them.