Joe Biden Transforms the Pentagon From a Strong Horse to a Weak Woke Horse, Just When It Counts Most...

Back in 2003 a Muslim woman sued the Florida DMV because she wanted her driver’s license photo to be taken while she was wearing a niqab, or veil, which would have covered her entire face other than her eyes.  I remember thinking how absurd such a request was.  Not that the veil was absurd, but rather the idea of taking a picture specifically intended to identify someone with all of their identifying features covered. The request obviated the basic reason of why the picture was being taken in the first place. 

A year later, again out of Florida, the North Miami police department dropped its requirement that police officers know how to swim.  Apparently because they were having a hard time finding qualified black applicants who could swim, rather than teach otherwise qualified black applicants to swim, the police did away with the requirement.

The purpose of the DMV issuing drivers’ licenses is to make it possible to identify someone by looking at them and the purpose of a police force is to protect and defend the people within a particular jurisdiction, and in cities surrounded by water that might require swimming.  Anything that defeats the very purpose of an organization is probably a bad idea from the perspective of accomplishing that organization’s mission.   

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s Pentagon.  Building on Barack Obama’s turning NASA into a Muslim outreach program, Joe Biden has decided to turn the Pentagon into a monument to wokeness.  While the Pentagon has been moving in the woke direction for years (as demonstrated by a deadly political correctness, the repeal of DADT, women in combat and picking up the tab for sex change operations) Joe Biden has turned the military into a full fledged social program.

So how can Joe Biden beat Obama’s deadly despicable modifications to the Rules of Engagement?  How about pregnant women in military cockpits?  Yes, you read that right.  Joe Biden has the American military “Designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits and updating requirements for their hairstyles… It will take an intensity of purpose and mission to really change the culture and habits that cause women to leave the military.” 

If the legion of stumbles Joe Biden has already made in his short time in office haven’t convinced you of such, that sentiment alone should demonstrate clearly that he is not a serious man.

The role of the military is to protect and defend the nation and its allies as well as enforce treaties the United States has entered into, whether that’s ensuring safe passage of shipping in domestic and international waters or making preemptive strikes against terrorists planning on striking American or allied targets.  All of those things and more involve training to kill, and possibly actually killing enemies.  Military is deadly business as large numbers of lives are at stake.  Not only are there hundreds of thousands of Americans under arms who actively or potentially put their lives in danger to protect the nation on a daily basis, but there are millions of people at home and abroad whose lives are impacted by the success or failure or American military operations.

And so, in this universe where the Chinese are willing to operate the open secret of concentration camps filled with their own citizens, are claiming sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea, are building outposts around the world, cornering the market on strategically critical rare earth minerals and turbo charging the world’s largest military, Joe Biden wants to make sure pregnant pilots have uniforms that fit.  In a world where nuclear weapons are in more, and more unstable hands than ever before, where bioweapons like the Coronavirus can kill millions and terrorism can strike anywhere anytime, one of Joe Biden’s first acts was to lift the ban on transgender enlistments.  Joe Biden is an unserious man who has no place as Commander in Chief and in any rational world he wouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of the nuclear football.  But there he is sitting in the White House – sadly as the result of Democrat fraud – and turning our military into a woke petri dish.

And there’s a reason he can do it…  Most people think of the military as jets in dogfights, solders storming a den of bad guys or ships bombing a coastline.  It is all of those things and more, but the reality is the military spends an overwhelming majority of its time preparing, planning and training rather than actually fighting… which is why leftists think they can turn it into a series of social experiments.  It’s easy to measure quotas and enforce the latest politically correct policies when no one is actually shooting at or trying to kill you. Importantly, that work is where troops learn the skills necessary to survive actual combat and lay the groundwork for success in actual war.  But to the left in America doesn’t care about that. They’re more interested in the optics of diversity and inclusiveness than they are in mission success and are willing to sacrifice the latter for the former. And to the degree the military focuses on those social issues, counts pigments or genders or tries to manipulate political allegiances, the less effective the training is and at the end of the day, the less capable the military is to accomplish its primary mission.  

Osama Bid Laden said:  "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Joe Biden is signaling to the world the American military is anything but a strong horse and he’s leaving no ambiguity about it.  The world sees this, our allies see this, and most importantly our enemies see this.  People around the world recognize that the United States has been the vanguard of freedom for a century and ushered in a period of economic prosperity unprecedented in human history.  But at the same time, most rational people recognize that nothing good lasts forever.  If the United States is literally telling the world that our military is focused on maternity flight suits and trans enlistments while the borg of China is expanding and strengthening its military and economic reach to unprecedented levels, we shouldn’t be surprised to see American influence deflate like a week old balloon animal as allies and friends turn their allegiances toward the strong horse.  When the left’s dream of diminished American influence comes to pass the irony will be that the tag on the boot standing on their necks will read “Made in woke America”. 

Despite killing Bin Laden, Obama is still anti-American

The day before Bin Laden was killed I did a small presentation at an Americans for Prosperity event in Jasper, GA. The highlight of the event was the keynote speech by Dinesh D’Souza. The thrust of his argument, taken from his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”, is essentially that while most traditional Democrats seek to effect redistribution within America, Obama, pursuing the anti-colonialist agenda of his father, seeks to have the United States diminished among the countries of the world. Companion to that weakening of the United States internationally is the weakening of the country economically. One example D’Souza discussed was Obama cheering oil exploration internationally while simultaneously making it more difficult and more expensive for companies to explore & drill domestically.

The hypothesis D’Souza was proffering seemed particularly congruous when explaining Obama’s baffling movements (or lack thereof…) in the Middle East. Egypt was headed by arguably one of the most pro-American leaders (in a relative sense) in the Arab world, so Mubarak had to go. In Libya, Gaddafi had ostensibly stopped funding terrorists, paid compensation to the families of the Lockerbie bombing and gave evidence against AQ Khan. At a minimum he was not causing significant trouble for the United States, therefore he too had to go, and American firepower was sent to help… albeit under a Canadian commander. In Iran on the other hand, a country shepherded by a lunatic bent on getting a nuclear weapon who openly taunts the United States while funding terrorists across the region, participants in the Green Revolution barely received a nod from President Obama. Similarly, Syria, headed by a regime with a long history of supporting terrorism and massacring its own people, gets a new US Ambassador under President Obama. When Assad unleashes snipers to kill hundreds of protesters in the streets, hardly a whimper out of the Obama Administration.

I couldn’t help but recognize that D’Souza’s narrative seemed to fit perfectly with the quandary that Barack Obama presents. The quandary I’m referring to presents itself when one is asked the question: “Do you think Barack Obama is anti-American?” The facts might suggest that the answer yes, but the fundamental notion that American’s had willingly elected someone who is anti-American to lead the nation seems inconceivable. Nonetheless, despite the seeming incomprehensibility of the idea, and despite doing what was required in Abbottabad, that seems to be where we find ourselves.

How this happened is not as difficult as it might initially seem. As Bruce Bawer suggests, in reference to the Three Cups of Tea story, sometimes people want to be fooled. Sometimes in politics it’s not even necessary to fool people to get them to drive off a cliff. When 50% of the population pays no income taxes and Barack Obama talked about increasing taxes on "millionaires" to support more social programs for that same 50%... it doesn’t take much fooling. When environmentalists, for whom economics and real world failures are of no consequence, heard Obama laud “Green Jobs” and pillory oil companies and the coal industry, there was not a lot of fooling necessary. When idealistic young students, protected from the grown up world and relaxing on their bucolic college campuses heard Obama talk about getting their fair share and creating good jobs for everyone, once again fooling them was not even necessary. Add that to a black population that votes 90% Democrat, government unions that can exceed even that 90% and a pliant media that was derelict in it’s fundamental duty and there was not a great deal of fooling necessary for Barack Obama to win in 2008.

These demographics and mindsets have not shifted. Indeed, in some cases they have gotten worse as there are now more people receiving government checks than at any point in our history. For conservatives, libertarians, Republicans and anyone else who wants the United States to continue to be the beacon of freedom and the economic engine for the world, this presents a significant challenge. D’Souza is right when he states that 2012 will be all about Obama. The challenge however is twofold. On the one hand the GOP must field a credible candidate. While I like Sarah Palin, I don't know if she has a plan for winning the messaging war she will no doubt find herself in. There are of course others, from Pawlenty to Bachman to Cain. Any one would be a far superior President than Barack Obama.

Regardless of who the candidate is, the more consequential challenge rests with actually making the election about Obama. John McCain refused to address much of Obama’s background nor would he allow anyone on his staff do so. That was the fatal error for his campaign. In 2012 the GOP cannot allow that dereliction of duty to recur. In order to win against the tide that will be pushing for four more years of "Hope and Change", the GOP must recognize that it’s in a cage match to the death. It must highlight every single aspect of the Obama presidency that demonstrates his desire to destroy what has made this country great. The most difficult part of that will be the education of voters on exactly what Obama's doing, what are the consequences of those actions, and why they are bad for America. It’s easy for the President to talk about growing jobs and investing in America, but explaining how virtually everything his administration does has just the opposite effect is a more complex discussion. It’s easy for the President to talk about rebuilding alliances around the world but demonstrating the reality that his policies are in fact harming our international relationships is not exactly sound bite material. The President saying that he respects the Constitution takes no effort at all but demonstrating how his policies eviscerate it can’t be done simply or quickly.

At the end of the day D'Souza is right, 2012 is indeed all about Obama. Regardless of who the GOP nominates, the only way victory will come is if the party figures out how to reach out to voters and clearly articulate how Barack Obama is doing exactly what he told us he was going to do “Fundamentally transforming the United States of America” and how that is a very bad thing. The examples of such are legion from Green Jobs Czar Van Jones to the incoherence in the Middle East to GM to ObamaCare to the FCC, the EPA, the NLRB and many more. In this environment, if the GOP can’t figure out how to connect with enough American voters to forcefully retire Obama, then perhaps the GOP needs to be retired.