Latimer on Law & Politics

KUMBAYA!

KUMBAYA!

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

            In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

                       - President Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Address, Jan. 1961

                                                    Someone,s laughing, lord, kumbaya
                                                    Someone,s laughing, lord, kumbaya
                                                    Someone,s laughing, lord, kumbaya
                                                    Oh lord, kumbaya

                                           - "Kumbaya," American folk spiritual, ca. 1930s

             In the last prior post I recited several pearls of wisdom about the proper use of power in world politics taken from the several public speeches by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  I "plagiarized" them actually, because I quoted them without attribution.  I omitted attribution purposely, however, not to claim the ideas as original to me which I did not do, but simply to make a larger point about how far to the extreme right today's GOP has strayed from the constitutional ideals Ike bravely defended in W.W. II, and then courageously upheld while serving in the White House.

             As expected, certain people who chime in on this site from the far, far wingnut extreme of the political spectrum, took the bait hook, line and sinker.  Thus we heard from one of them:

 If you want to live in a warm and fuzzy Kumbayah type of world then we have common ground. If you are naïve enough to believe we can "compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose" then we are "open to debate."  

Well, like I said, that statement about composing difference not with arms but with intellect and decent purpose  was Ike's, not mine.  So what we are seeing with the post-Reagan, right wing GOP is a rejection of Eisenhower's "naïve" beliefs about the use of American power and influence.

           Moreover, all of the Eisenhower quotes I recited in the prior post are clearly much closer to the principles on which President Obama has based his foreign policy than the fear mongering shibboleths that defined the Bush administration.  For example:

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without;

 Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed;

In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims;

 This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect;

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace;

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security;

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it; and, yes,

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

The fact is that those are the same principles which underlay Obama's Cairo Speech, e.g. America is not at war with Islam, and America is not engaged in Afghanistan to impose any kind of regime change but simply to neutralize al Qaeda and it's enablers as a real, hostile threat to our own security.

            These are principles which most of the free world outside the airless, toxic confines of the American right wing "think tanks" both appreciate for their own conduct of affairs, viz. the European Union, and welcomed hearing from an American president so much that they awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize just for advocating them. 

            No. Obama hasn't done all that much in his brief ten months as Commander in Chief to reverse the eight year debacle of Bush's tenure as the "Decider," but the Nobel is a clear message that the rest of the free world anxiously expects, and demands that Obama follow up on his principled words with equally principled actions. 

            Ike surely would tell those still carping from the extreme right that such principled actions are far less "naïve" than their simple-minded belief that American troops could invade a politically, ethnically and religiously fractured nation like Iraq and create a "democracy" that would welcome the invasion force with open arms and then roll over for the American petroleum industry like a puppy dog.  That wasn't merely naïve, it was stupid as events have proven.

            Saddam, was a brutal dictator who stifled all political dissent.  But he posed no real threat to American security, was both socially and religiously tolerant and stood as a viable obstacle to the expansion of Iranian influence in the mid-East. Thanks to Bush's "pre-emptive non-agression," however, Saddam's been replaced by a religiously and socially intolerant theocracy which, in principle, conforms more closely to Iran's religious, political and regional agenda than with American interests.  Those Bush clowns didn't even get the sweetheart oil deal for Exxon-Mobil that was the real purpose of invading Iraq in the first place.

            But, hey, what did a guy like Eisenhower know about world affairs, spouting off all those "naïve" ideas about resolving differences, "not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."  He only led the Allied troops to victory over the forces of world fascism during W.W. II, while Ronnie Reagan was slogging in the trenches, along with that other right-wing "hero" John Wayne, on the back lots of Warner Bros. in Hollywood. 

            How can Ike's "naive" belief  in the limited efficacy of war in international relations even begin to compare with Bush's wisdom in the ways of war, based on defending the friendly skies over Texas as an ANG pilot while thousands of other young men were being killed in the jungles of Viet Nam.  How can Ike's "naïve" beliefs about war and peace stand up against the hard-nosed sagacity of Richard Cheney who, while eligible to fight in the war of his generation -a war he fully "supported,"  just didn't support it enough to actually fight in it because he had "other priorities" like making a fortune in the petroleum services biz.

            Like I've been saying all along, today's right wing GOP is both intellectually and morally bankrupt, and it's a far cry from Eisenhower's Republican Party.  Ike, like General Powell today, wouldn't have a place in today's GOP as defined by the likes of Cheney, Limbaugh and Palin and, unlike Powell, he really wouldn't want to either.  This point is amply supported, too, by the wingnut response to the last post I quoted, taking issue with Eisenhower's statements as being "naïve," and in keeping with the warm and fuzzy "Kumbayah type of world." 

            That's what I mean by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of today's "conservative" Republican Party.   It seems that today's GOP elephant doesn't even have a long memory and is clueless as to the principles that  guided the last honest, conservative Republican president, and the last truly great man to occupy the White House as well, the one who said:

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Today's GOP is driven by the economic elite in the arms industry and petroleum industry, i.e. the "military industrial complex" that Ike warned about in his 1961 farewell address, a confluence of wealth and militarism that promotes war in order to enrich itself, in an unholy alliance with the religious right which makes up the GOP's political clout.

            The religious right is even scarier than the military industrialists, however.  A significant number of them vote Republican because they want war in the mid-East, in "Babylon," to bring about the biblical prophesy of Armageddon after which the Israelites will be killed and all those good SBC "Christians" will be raptured into Heaven.   

            It is here, if anywhere, that Ike was naively optimistic, not about external threats like Russia or Iran, but about the looming internal threat to both our precious democratic, constitutional freedom and world peace, as when he said that the people want peace, and "there is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs."  Here, the GOP today panders to the religious right, and so many of them do not want peace, but instead seek glory through battle, not by expropriating other peoples' oil reserves in this world like the industrialists, but by killing them in order to secure a place in their lily white skinned, anthropocentric "Heaven" and, to them, that's worth all the blood it takes.

            The really funny thing, though, is that I posted the very same Eisenhower quotes back in March under the title "Pearls of Wisdom."  As with this last post, I quoted them without attribution, on purpose,  and I got the same kind of response, with one wingnut who called himself Snakedog vehemently attacking me as a "liberal" based on my belief in Ike's principles. As with the present post, I called him out as arguing with Ike, not me, and he hasn't posted anything here since then. 

            Well, like the song says, "Someone's laughing, Lord," and that someone is me about the response I expected and got to the last post about casting pearls before swine.    But I'm sure Ike would be crying if he saw what's happened to American society today thanks to the Republican Party's pandering to the religious right, and he certainly wouldn't vote Republican.

            Kumbaya!