by Ben Shapiro
That’s because the left has found a far better use for the military: as tools in their anti-patriotic bullying agenda.
The left has a tremendous advantage when it comes to the military: the military works for the government, and military men and women are bound by law from speaking out as military folks. Required to remain largely silent, expected to stay apolitical, men and women of the military are instead utilized as cannon fodder for the liberal agenda.
The left says that only those who have served in the military can be pro-war. This is the scurrilous so-called chickenhawk argument—you can’t have been a “chicken” (a person who didn’t serve in the military) and be a “hawk” on foreign policy. As Michael Moore put it, a chickenhawk is “[a] person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person’s youth.” The “chickenhawk” argument was picked up by government actors like Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who, campaigning for John Kerry, labeled Vice President Dick Cheney a “chickenhawk.”65 Leftists routinely called President Bush a chickenhawk, even though he served in the Air National Guard, because his daughters didn’t join the military. (Bill Clinton, who actually dodged the draft, was not a chickenhawk, presumably because he is pro-abortion and raised taxes.)
These days, it’s 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney who gets tarred with the “chickenhawk” argument—not President Obama, who has actually ordered troops into action. “Frankly, I’m getting tired of hearing pandering politicians cast about for votes by offering up the lives of other people’s kids in the name of national security,” writes Paul Whitefield of the Los Angeles Times. “Take Romney’s sons: Did he offer them up as cannon fodder?”66
These folks suggest that you can’t be a hawk unless you or your kids are in the military. Then they try to make sure that actual military folks can’t vote (see absentee ballots, Florida).
The assumption behind the chickenhawk argument is simple: the horrors of war are so great that all soldiers and ex-soldiers are secretly pacifists. The only problem with this argument is that it’s dead wrong. Every poll ever taken has shown that men and women of the military are significantly more conservative than the general civilian population. As a civilian, I’d be happy to establish a blanket policy that only military and ex-military men and women get to vote on foreign policy. But the left wouldn’t like the result.
The left knows this, which leads to their second bully tactic against the military: they’re victims. According to the left, even though the men and women of the military are all volunteers, they’re also idiots, suckered into the armed services by promises of glory and grants. Nobody with an education ever goes into the military. Only if you ignore education, as John Kerry put it, do you “get stuck in Iraq.”67 That’s why the left ardently opposes the presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps on high school and college campuses—you never know when those uniformed devils will pounce on an unsuspecting goober and convince him to sign his life away.
The corollary of this argument is that most of these poor goobers are black, Hispanic, and undereducated—or some combination of all the above. In December 2002, gravel-voiced Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) proposed reinstating the draft, since a “disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military, while most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent.” Bob Herbert of the New York Times followed suit, stating that “very few” of the soldiers on the ground in Iraq “are coming from the privileged economic classes.” His point: if rich kids had to fight, there would be no wars.
None of this is true. Soldiers are more educated than the general population—98 percent of those who enlist already have high school diplomas (as opposed to 75 percent of the general population); since 9/11, enlistment has been disproportionate among middle- and upper-class men and women; racially, the military is almost directly proportional to the country (77 percent of Americans are white, and so are 76 percent of its military volunteers). As Tim Kane and James Jay Carafano of the Heritage Foundation write, the left wants to “manufacture the oxymoronic case that volunteers are coerced.”68
The left goes even further than the slur that volunteers are coerced. They aren’t just coerced—they’re nuts. The crazy-vet theme goes all the way back to the Vietnam War, when Hollywood decided that veterans had been victimized by the military-industrial complex. Hollywood “sympathetically” turned them into drooling psychopaths, epitomized by Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, and Bruce Dern in Coming Home.
It’s why the left insisted that Major Nidal Hasan, the Islamist terrorist who stands accused of murdering thirteen people and wounding twenty-nine others at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, was a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder. Sadly, that narrative fell apart when it turned out that Hasan had never deployed to a battle zone. So the left came up with a new idea—he was the victim of “secondary trauma.” The New York Times contended that “repeated stories of battle and loss can leave the most professional therapist numb or angry. . . . That was the world that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, inhabited until Thursday.”69 Forget all that shouting about “Allahu akhbar!” The real problem is that Hasan had to listen to people talk about their deployments.
Hasan, then, was a victim. A victim of the military-industrial complex. A victim of war. Sure, he’d never seen war. But he’d heard all about it. And that was just as good as the real thing.
Not only that—the military, pushed by the Obama administration, promptly declared that Hasan was a victim of both war and xenophobia. In fact, if we had learned anything from a radical Muslim shooting American soldiers, it was that we had to protect radical Muslims in the army. “Our diversity,” said General George Casey, top officer of the U.S. Army, “not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”70
Probably not. Diversity doesn’t bleed out and leave behind widows and orphans.
What’s the point of the “soldiers are victims” slur? It means that good-hearted Americans, if they truly love the troops, will keep them out of harm’s way. In the leftist view, there are only three types of soldiers: antiwar soldiers, who have learned the brutality of battle and embraced pacifism (Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July); pro-war soldiers, who are barbarians looking to “get some” (Matt Dillon in Platoon); and ignorant soldiers, who are just too dumb to get anything (everybody in Apocalypse Now except Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando). The soldiers who want to do their job and go home? They don’t exist. They didn’t choose freely to be there. It’s our job to ensure that they are never asked to fire their weapons. And if we do ask them to go into battle, we have somehow befouled our own patriotism.
Hence the left’s paternalistic view of soldiers as inanimate objects to be waved in the faces of nonliberals. President Obama does this routinely. He sees the soldiers as “photo ops” and that means he can use them for his own ends.
And he uses them and throws them away like Kleenex.
On Memorial Day, during that Vietnam War speech in which he ripped the left’s prior treatment of Vietnam vets, he subtly ripped President Bush and implied that many Americans are too cavalier about the deaths of soldiers—an absolutely scurrilous suggestion. And he used his favorite line: “[L]et us never use patriotism as a political sword. Patriots can support a war; patriots can oppose a war. And whatever our view, let us always stand united in support of our troops, who we placed in harm’s way.”71
Nice words. But Obama’s support for the troops was a cynical campaign ploy, as he made clear just a month earlier when he flew to Afghanistan to claim credit for the Osama bin Laden kill. Sure, he praised the troops—he’s an exploiter, not an idiot. And exploit he
did. With the troops coming home, the only way to make their sacrifice worthwhile, said Obama, was to embrace his domestic agenda. “We must redouble our efforts to build a nation worthy of their sacrifice,” he said. “As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home, it is time to renew America.”72 In case you missed it, Obama spelled out the message more clearly in his weekly YouTube address: “[A]fter more than a decade of war, it is time to focus on nation building here at home. As a new greatest generation returns from overseas, we must ask ourselves, what kind of country will they come back to? Will it be a country where a shrinking number of Americans do really well while a growing number barely get by? Or will it be a country where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules—a country with opportunity worthy of the troops who protect us?” Obama explicitly called for more spending on “clean energy,” on “education and medical research,” and on “newer, faster transportation and communications networks.”73
So, we should never exploit patriotism to pursue a political goal—like, say, defeating communism or Nazism or radical Islam. But we should exploit patriotism to pursue high-speed rail.
Imagine if George W. Bush had said something similar: “Well, folks, we need to build a nation worthy of our troops by enshrining my new tax rates and minimizing burdensome environmental overregulation.” Do you think the left might have suggested that such a tactic was a disgrace to the troops?
Using the troops as political cannon fodder is bullying. And that’s what Obama and his ilk do daily.
What’s more, they don’t care about the military unless they’re using it for political cannon fodder. The left routinely seeks to cut military funding. When Democrats negotiated a deficit reduction plan with Republicans, their default position was military cuts before domestic cuts. Liberals constantly leap on incidents like Abu Ghraib or marines urinating on terrorist corpses in Afghanistan as evidence that our troops are out of control. They live for moments when they can channel their hippy parents’ outrage over My Lai. They long desperately for the moral clarity of Casualties of War and sob in confusion over the ambiguities in We Were Soldiers. When Scott Thomas Beauchamp wrote long diaries about his time in Iraq for the New Republic, suggesting that Americans were engaging in war crimes, the magazine couldn’t wait to print it—without any evidence.
The left truly bullies the military when it gets the chance by reining them in.
They are always on the lookout for signs of overweening nationalism among the troops. When American soldiers took Baghdad, tore down a massive statue of Saddam Hussein, and draped an American flag over its face, liberals—and the supposed conservative castrati—were aghast. It didn’t matter that the flag itself had been carried all the way over from the Pentagon, where it had been hanging on September 11. “That should have been the Iraqi flag,” said a miffed announcer on Al Arabiya.74 “The flag incidents reinforced Arab fears that occupation is the hidden motive behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq,” tut-tutted the Chicago Tribune. The Army quickly ordered that nobody display the U.S. flag on cars, buildings, statues, or virtually anything else. The order: “[D]isplaying the American flag counters the perception that we are liberators and allows enemy and other bad actors to use the images of our flags prominently displayed to reinforce their message that the U.S. is here to oppress the Iraqis.”75 Wouldn’t want to offend the natives for whom American soldiers had just bled and died, would we?
But the truly serious bullying of the military comes in the form of civilian-issued rules of engagement. The rules of engagement are simply not built for actual combat situations. They are written by those who are afraid that American soldiers will turn baby-killers the moment they’re let off the leash. Cultural sensitivity takes precedence over preserving the lives of our soldiers. Army Staff Sergeant David Bellavia writes about his tour in Iraq in 2004—and his stories leave you with your jaw on the floor. In one village, the sheikhs suggested that for cultural reasons Americans could not enter the area in vehicles or tanks. “Our platoons basically said, ‘Yes,’ ” said Bellavia. “We were sent to fight al-Qaeda and in that situation we were forced to fight on al-Qaeda’s terms.”76 The first Battle of Fallujah was stopped just short of its goal—defanging Muqtada al-Sadr, then the leader of the Shiite insurgency—because American brass didn’t want Americans entering a mosque.
In 2010, General Stanley A. McChrystal laid down the so-called Karzai 12 rules of engagement in Afghanistan. “It’s a framework to ensure cultural sensitivity in planning and executive operations,” explained Captain Casey Thoreen. Meanwhile, Americans were dying.77
Is some of this a strategic decision designed to win hearts and minds? Certainly. But some of it is sheer absurdist leftism that has infiltrated the hearts and minds of the military leadership. According to the Military Times, “A certain group of Marines in Afghanistan were asked by their leaders to avoid farting audibly around their Afghan partners because they are offended by flatulence.”78 Seriously. Farting.
CONCLUSION
“If fascism ever comes to America,” leftists misattribute Sinclair Lewis as stating, “it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” Actually, when fascism tried to come to America, it was the left that wrapped itself in a flag to promote it. Today’s conservatives wrap themselves in the flag to fight dictatorial regimes across the globe and overreaching government at home. Those who uphold the flag typically uphold American values.
A recent Harvard study showed that July Fourth celebrations tend to make children more Republican. “The political right has been more successful in appropriating American patriotism and its symbols during the 20th century,” wrote the researchers. “Survey evidence also confirms that Republicans consider themselves more patriotic than Democrats. According to this interpretation, there is a political congruence between the patriotism promoted on Fourth of July and the values associated with the Republican party.” One sunny July Fourth celebration prior to reaching age eighteen, says the study, will increase the likelihood of voting Republican by 2 percent, and 4 percent over the course of their young adulthood.79
No wonder. Ask the average leftist in an honest moment whether they’d be more comfortable wearing an American flag T-shirt in multicultural company or an Obama T-shirt, and they’ll tell you the truth: the red, white, and blue O takes precedence over the flag our fathers fought for. The problem is that the left has translated that discomfort to a broad swath of Americans, who now feel a vague sense of unease—the feeling that they’re being somewhat rude—if they stand up for American exceptionalism. They’ve been bullied. And deep down, they know it.
In 1968, in response to the actions of groups like SDS and the Weathermen, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act. Then, in 1988, a communist burned a flag at the Republican National Convention. When he was arrested, he sued; the Supreme Court of the United States, by a vote of 5–4, overturned two centuries of American law and announced that the First Amendment was designed to protect flag-burning. “It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy.80
The flag may protect those who hold it in contempt. But those who hold it in contempt have bullied Americans into believing that only Americans’ silence to anti-patriotism makes them patriots. They have bullied Americans into accepting the false and pernicious notion that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, and that nationalistic pride is jingoistic nonsense. The only cure for traditional patriotism, the left insists, is a new kind of patriotism—one that rejects America as an exceptional nation, and instead embraces her as one nation among equals.
That is the left’s anti-patriotic message. It cuts the heart from American assertiveness, gladdening dictators and dooming millions across the globe to darkness. And at home, it dooms us to gradual abandonment of the very values that make us great. After all, if we can be bullied into silence, who will be left to fight for founding principle
s?
3.
RACE BULLIES
On March 23, 2012, President Obama announced that Americans had to do some “soul searching.” The reason? A seventeen-year-old young man named Trayvon Martin had been shot and killed in Sanford, Florida.
Now, what separated young Trayvon from all of his teenage peers shot across the country? What made him special, worthy of presidential comment? Was he an honor student? Was he a potential president of a Fortune 500 company? Was he on the fast track to curing cancer?
Probably not. Shortly before his death, Trayvon had been suspended from school for ten days for carrying around a Baggie with pot residue. He’d been suspended two other times, once for missing school, and a second time for tagging “WTF” on a hallway locker; a security guard searched his backpack and found women’s rings, earrings, and a screwdriver. Authorities described the screwdriver as a “burglary tool.”1 He wore a grille in his mouth. He was tattooed. He dressed like a punk.
His Twitter feed was filled with misogynistic, drug-loving garbage. Reading the tweets makes you weep for America and her education system. His Twitter handle? @NO_LIMIT_NIGGA. There are precisely zero members of the Mensa Society with similar Twitter handles. He particularly enjoyed retweeting sexist comments from his friends:
“RT@x_highlyfavored:f— a bitch. any bitch. who you want? take yo pick, but you have gone have to take yo time.”
“RT @Mitchell_Garcia: I’ll slap a girl if she said suck my toes wtf, she must be giving some great dome for some s— like that u u u.”