Via
WRSA
Every now and then an email comes my way warning about the day when the
government unleashes the military against its own citizens. This day
isn't likely to come because for one thing the current regime is not
particularly fond of the military.
The Obama Administration isn't inflicting massive cuts on the military,
cutting their health care and pushing veteran officers out the door
because it likes the military as an institution. It doesn't. And it
won't until it remakes it into a fully politically correct institution
dedicated to promoting tolerance and fighting global warming. Progress
has been made on that front, the Navy is cutting ships and spending
money on Green Energy. The Marines are celebrating gay marriage. Any day
now the Air Force will be announcing its first wheelchair pilot. But
it's still a poor fit with the culture of the left.
If Obama has to have any kind of military, he prefers the kind where
young men with college degrees sit in a room, push buttons and kill
people thousands of miles away from remotely controlled aircraft. That
kind of military is a closer cultural fit with a campaign that is in
love with technocratic solutions and always looking for shortcuts to
avoid the dangerous and dirty hard work that has to be done. It's also
much less dangerous.
Unleashing the military on a civilian population carries a price. Once
you call out the troops to protect your regime, one of two things
happen. Either the troops don't do it and your government is done. Or
they do it and your regime now lives or dies by the support of the
military. Within the last few years the use of the military in Egypt and
Iran turned generals into the arbiters of political succession. To the
left, the idea of the people they despise deciding who should run the
country and how is their biggest nightmare. It is one reason that we
still have a democracy.