{"id":39379,"date":"2012-10-29T00:04:25","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T07:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=39379"},"modified":"2014-12-30T12:03:14","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T19:03:14","slug":"thats-about-right-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2012\/10\/thats-about-right-3.html","title":{"rendered":"That’s about right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A reader comments on the buck-passing paper pusher who let four good people die in Benghazi:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe election has nothing to do with the four brave Americans getting killed and us wanting to find out exactly what happened,\u201d <\/a><\/p>\n

If a Republican said that, it would be the never-to-be-forgotten, always-to-be-repeated fatal meme of his or her candidacy, like George Bush the First\u2019s astonishment at supermarket laser scanners. A telling off-the-cuff example of how isolated the man is from American life and how unaware he is of his duties as President. So much for the Pelvic Allegiance and its dedication to standards.<\/p>\n

But combine that with our Defense Secretary\u2019s remarks: \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on here,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cBut the basic principle here \u2026. is that you don\u2019t deploy forces into harm\u2019s way without knowing what\u2019s going on.\u201d <\/p>\n

The hat-tip to John Paul Jones lets you know that the Defense Secretary is a \u201creal soldier,\u201d just like Harrison Ford in Hunt for Red October. Orders to the U.S.S. Arizona: \u201cDon\u2019t shoot back. We don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on.\u201d New policy for the D.C. Police, \u201cDon\u2019t run into Panetta\u2019s house, we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, \u201cYou don\u2019t act unless you\u2019ve figured out how to make yourself look good from every angle. If some of the little people die in the meantime, that\u2019s not relevant to our entitlement to power.\u201d <\/p>\n

When our Ruling Class is put into stressful situations, they just crumple into little balls of unreliable, self-serving appetite. None of them are leaders. Leadership is acting when you know enough. Why isn\u2019t knowing that American civilians are under attack by enemy forces of known strength and disposition enough? Leadership is placing others\u2019 needs before your own. Why isn\u2019t this election about dead Americans and the ability of our leaders to explain why they died? Leadership is what you do when no one is there to backstop you. <\/p>\n

President Obama has convinced me he is not a leader. Never mind his positions and his policies. The man is not a leader. He may be an adequate apparatchik, the kind of modestly-competent, buttoned-down functionary whose antennae-quivering subservienece makes him a solid Undersecretary of Commerce or Dean of Faculty. But he is not a leader. Neither are any of his crew (except, perhaps, for Hillary Clinton, who has shown backbone and guts on several occasions).<\/p>\n

I wish there were an alternative. The most prominent alleged alternative, however, is a man who, in his own way, is even more spineless. No matter what the President\u2019s failings as a leader are (and they are many), he has never wavered in his allegiance to the ideas that brought him to power (however repugnant and deranged those ideas may be). The other Lizard, however, has repeatedly changed, betrayed, and re-betrayed, commitments that would have been firmly made by any serious person and changed, at most, once in a public life. There\u2019s really no explanation for it except that, \u201cyou don\u2019t deploy your political career into harm\u2019s way without knowing what\u2019s going on,\u201d and, \u201cthis election has nothing to do with Americans benefitting or suffering from any particular thing their government might do.\u201d<\/p>\n

May God help us, for we cannot help ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the tragedies of our time is that we have so many brave, self-sacrifical men and women abroad in harm\u2019s way, at the beck and call of such a revolting, miserable, self-serving class of rulers at home. Watching them be shoveled around like concrete, left to die, buried in landfills, robbed of benefits, subjected to intense family-shattering pressure and treated like garbage by these limo-riding, cocooned class of spoiled dunces makes me ill. After seeing yet again the incredible goodness and courage of people like the Military Council of Catholic Women and the stresses they endure with grace and class, my resolve to oppose these clowns (that includes both incompetent Obama and draft-dodging warmonger Romney) just gets stronger. There\u2019s a reason Ron Paul had the support of so many troops. He doesn\u2019t regard them as cannon fodder.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A reader comments on the buck-passing paper pusher who let four good people die in Benghazi: \u201cThe election has nothing to do with the four brave Americans getting killed and us wanting to find out exactly what happened,\u201d If a Republican said that, it would be the never-to-be-forgotten, always-to-be-repeated fatal meme of his or her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-39379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-our-ruling-class-vs-the-rest-of-us"],"yoast_head":"\nThat's about right<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A reader comments on the buck-passing paper pusher who let four good people die in Benghazi: \u201cThe election has nothing to do with the four brave Americans\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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