GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Did Hillary lose by being a warmonger?

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My intuition has long said yes. I mean, Hillary’s support for destroying Libya and Syria and creating aggressive confrontation with Russia is part of why I don’t like her. People who want peace seem to have preferred Trump, in 2016.

Last week, a new study came out which showed that Hillary may have lost PA, MI, WI by being a warmonger.

A new study attributes Donald Trump’s victory last year to communities hit hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters, the authors suggest, saw Trump as an “opportunity to express that anger at both political parties.”…

The study…found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” The statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had suffered “even a modestly lower casualty rate,” all three could have flipped to Hillary Clinton… “Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans seem to notice,” Kriner and Shen write. “This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from combat.”

My evolution on the topic of “war”

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Just speaking for myself. After 9-11, I supported the war in Afghanistan because:

  • Killing al Qaeda terrorists seemed like a good idea, and the Taliban was harboring them.
  • It was only one war.
  • It was legal. (Congress authorized it. As did the United Nations, explicitly.)

A couple years later, I supported the Iraq war because:

  • Killing al Qaeda terrorists seemed like a good idea, and Saddam had begun to harbor some who had just fled from Afghanistan, like Zarqawi.
  • Whether or not Saddam Hussein had ready-to-go WMD, getting him and his thugs off the world stage seemed like a good idea.
  • It was only a second war.
  • It was legal. (Congress authorized it. As did the United Nations, more or less.)

By 2008, both wars seemed almost to be won. Their endings were in sight. But then a strange thing happened.

America elected a feckless socialist (Barack Obama) as President. He promised indeed to end the above two wars. But he didn’t. He messed up our winning positions; meaning the wars dragged on.

Even worse, he started more wars. All were illegal (not authorized beforehand by Congress). All were disastrous.

  • His (and Hillary’s) Libya war destabilized all of northern Africa and eventually drowned Europe in “migrants”.
  • His Ukraine coup (and the war/tensions that followed) was an unprecedented and deliberate rattling of the Russian bear’s cage, re-opening the Cold War that had been won in the 1980s and settled in the 1990s.
  • His Syria war fueled the rise of ISIS in Iraq. (Since ISIS and the Syrian rebels overlap quite a bit, aid to the Syrian rebels quickly becomes ‘de facto’ aid to ISIS.)
  • His Saudi friends’ war in Yemen is no help to anyone.

For the first time in U.S. history, we were at war every single day of someone’s 8-year presidency. And his preferred successor (Hillary Clinton) wanted to extend those wars. The U.S. has “achieved” an Orwellian state of Continuous War. That’s bad.

Ever read Thucydides? Athens – the progressive, open, commercial-democratic society of that era – failed. Basically, she over-extended herself in too many wars. She couldn’t afford them – whether financially, militarily, politically or morally. I don’t think we can, either.

Sometimes it’s better to retreat and retrench, and patriotic to advocate for it. If you catch me striking a different tone on our wars than I did 5-10 years ago, that’s why.

We should shore up our borders and defenses, our infrastructure, our industry, our national finances, our energy independence, and our commitment to liberty, here at home. We can probably still keep our commitments to Europe, Japan, Korea and Israel (which means I’m no isolationist). But, apart from the historical commitments just mentioned, we should accept a multi-polar world order and NOT look for wars to get into.

In my opinion. Please feel free to criticize or to state yours, in the comments.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Legislation Introduced

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Kudos to Rep. Tauscher for introducing this legislation and at least getting the ball rolling.

It is precisely the sort of knife fight no president wants to get into, especially in his first 100 days. But it seems that President Barack Obama is about to get dragged down the same dark alley as Bill Clinton when he was forced to confront the highly charged issue of gays in the military early in his term.

On Monday, buoyed by a stronger Democratic majority in Congress, Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.) will introduce legislation to overturn the ban against homosexuals serving openly in the military, a Tauscher aide said.

Clinton’s handling of the issue was widely condemned, and the entire fiasco became a textbook example of the sort of avoid-at-all-cost political controversy that can seriously undermine a new president. For Clinton, it knocked him off message, sapped him of auathority, damaged his popularity ratings and left him with a reputation for being wishy-washy that stuck.

And it left the military with a policy that no one really likes — the “don’t ask, don’t tell” regulation that allows gays to serve in the military, as long as they don’t flout their homosexuality.

It will be interesting to see how Obama handles this tactically and politically.  There have been very mixed media reports since November on if and when Obama would tackle DADT.

There is a discussion at Pam’s House Blend on this development.   Feel free to join, and bring those folks over here, too!

Maybe I should post a count-up clock on how many days since Inauguration until DADT is repealed?  Does anyone know how to build such a widget?

[RELATED: First DADT litigation faces Obama Justice Department]

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Obama Defies Sgt. Jopek’s Family
In Wearing “Whats-His-Name’s” Bracelet

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If this doesn’t turn the stomach of every voter in America that hasn’t yet been brainwashed by The One or intimidated by the Obama Goons, nothing will.

Soldier’s Family Told Obama Not to Wear Son’s Bracelet – Gateway Pundit

Barack Obama played the “me too” game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son’s name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

How dare Senator Obama use the name of a dead Army soldier, whose name he can’t remember, as a sheer political stunt.  And against the wishes of Sgt. Jopek’s family, nonetheless.  

Senator McCain wears his bracelet in kinship and shared sacrifice with the family of Cpl. Matthew Stanley.

Senator Obama wears his bracelet in an arrogant defiance of what America stands for.  To Obama, the bracelet is yet another prop for his campaign, like the American flag he once did not wear on his lapel.

He makes me sick.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)