Why Obama didn’t join the military
Barack Obama has said he considered joining the United States military when he left school but decided not to because the Vietnam war was over and “we weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point”.
“And I actually always thought of the military as an ennobling and, you know, honourable option. But keep in mind that I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue.”
Phew!
All male American citizens are legally required to register for Selective Service within 30 days of their 18th birthday.
Mrs Palin’s eldest son Track, 19, is due to leave for Iraq on Thursday, the seventh anniversary of the September 11th attacks on America and exactly a year after he joined the US Army as an infantryman.
John McCain’s youngest son Jimmy, also 19, is a lance-corporal in the US marine corps who served in Ramadi, deep in Iraq’s Sunni triangle, last year. His other son Jack, 21, is currently training to be an officer at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Beau Biden, 39, elder son of Senator Joe Biden, Mr Obama’s running mate, is scheduled to go to Iraq early next year. Beau Biden is attorney general of Delaware and a captain in the legal corps of the US Army’s National Guard. [snip]
Biden’s job is to prosecute any trooper that locks and loads before coming under automatic weapons fire.
Voters often fault Democratic candidates on issues of patriotism and support for the military. Bill Clinton was vilified by Republicans as a Vietnam draft dodger, though he defeated two Second World War veterans, President George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Senator Bob Dole in 1996.
But Al Gore, a US Army journalist in Vietnam, (Gore served in the Conex Corp) and John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran who won a Silver Star while serving in patrol craft on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, both lost to George W. Bush, who avoided active service in Vietnam by joining the Texas Air National Guard.
Mr Obama is more vulnerable than most Democrats on the patriotism issue because of his exotic life story, his past radical associations, his previous refusal to wear an American flag pin - though he has since relented and is now seldom seen without one - and inaccurate smears that he is a Muslim. [snip]
(Obama speaking to Stephanopoulos) “Let’s not play games,” he said. “What I was suggesting — you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you’re absolutely right that that has not come.”
The Illinois senator’s maternal grandfather Stanley Dunham served in the US Army in Europe during the Second World War.
His maternal great uncle Charlie Payne helped liberate Ohrdruf, a part of the Buchenwald concentration camp network - though he was criticised for misstating this on the campaign trail as an uncle who liberated Auschwitz. [snip]
Note to Obama, this stuff doesn’t rub off, you got to do it yourself.
But these military connections pale in comparison with Mr McCain’s fabled biography as the son and grandson of admirals who spent more than five years in the Hanoi Hilton prison after his jet was shot down over Vietnam.
Mr McCain took as his Republican convention theme the slogan “Country First” and both Mrs Palin and Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York, mocked Mr Obama’s time as a “community organiser” in Chicago when he was in his twenties.
Hillary Clinton, who Mr Obama defeated in the Democratic primaries, was ridiculed in 1994 for stating that she tried to join the US marines in 1975, the year she married, but was rejected because she was too old and had poor eyesight. Her husband Bill said this year that she had tried to join the US Army.[snip]
Probably she did, in what country?
”Understand what I did as a community organiser. When I got out of a college as a young person, 24, 25 years old, I moved to Chicago and worked with churches, who were dealing with steel plants that had closed in their neighbourhoods, to set up job training programmes for the unemployed and after-school programmes for youth.”
He also tried to “deal with asbestos in homes with poor people - community service work - which John McCain has been talking about, putting country first and extolling the virtues of national service”.
According to Obama, he had to make a steep dive in, level out and zig-zag to the buildings while receiving fire from asbestos junkies in an armed ‘hood. “They had everything but tanks.” “This is why I believe in the 2nd Amendment but only if no one has guns.”
The only salvation for these people is Elijah Muhammad in the guise of BLT.
All make sense doesn’t it? Reading the entire article just roils the mud.
Archived in: 2008 Election, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Biden, Democrats, George Bush, John Kerry, John McCain, McCain, Obama, Republicans, Sarah PalinSeptember 7, 2008 at 7:14 pm | Trackback
14 comments
We’re to believe that, had we still been engaged in Vietnam, or some other hot conflict, a Harvard educated lawyer with political ambitions would sign up for hard duty?
While I respect John McCain’s military service, in McCain’s day ALL men HAD to go into the military. Many guys went ahead and enlisted, because they knew they were going to get drafted anyway. Enlisting was a way to have some say about what branch of the service they could get into.
But would McCain have enlisted if there was no draft? No one knows that.
McCain’s being in the military was a legal requirement of his generation, and to suggest he would have enlisted without a draft is only a guess.
Considering how wild and selfish McCain was in his youth (his own words), I doubt he would have enlisted without a draft.
JT:
Wrong.
The only legal requirement for males in McCain’s day and mine (I’m ten years young) was to register for Selective Service. Very few of them were drafted prior to the Tonkin Gulf incident, and many of those who were drafted could enlist for more time and enact a wish list.
The late 1940’s, all of the ’50’s and the first half of the 1960’s saw a decline in enlistees, and a cultural shift away from military service.
McCain was against the career grain with his choices; not just another go-along.
Obama would have joined the Reserve in the Ground Observer Corp.
He could have joined, Grenada came up on the scope, followed by Lebanon, Nicaragua, El Salvadore. There were plenty of ops going on in Africa to provide some bumps and bruises.
The sum of it is Obama has what Palin has has between her legs and Palin has a pair. Just whom does he think he’s BS’ing?
“McCain’s being in the military was a legal requirement of his generation, and to suggest he would have enlisted without a draft is only a guess.”
That’s the difference between guessing and knowing why anyone would volunteer for military duty. The mothers of Marines I call personal friends could give him an authoritative earful of answers if he had the sincere courage to ask them.
Barack Hussein Obama has a Muslim father. What does Islamic law say about whether or not Obama is a Muslim?
My father was a Canadian, xman. I say “eh?’ all the time . Good point.
“Muslimness” as it were is inherited through the father, thus Barry is to be considered a Muslim, despite his weak statements to the contrary.
Obama is this nation’s biggest fraud–he’s a puppet of the leftist elites. His Freudian slip about being a Muslim speaks volumes. Of course he’s a Muslim at heart! How could a person of religious faith ever slip up in that way? Wow!
Steve:
I don’t think that Barry is necessarily a “person of faith”, even if that faith is that professed by the Arabian murderer-thief and child-molester Muhammad (Unless he’s practicing taqqyya, which his slip up might be indicating). I think that his faith is mostly centered in his collosal ego, and mostly secular, if anything.
I do think he has a very soft spot for the ’slamics and would give them the store, along with the nation and our people, if given a chance, all in the interests of peace, of course.
Thanks, Steven, but forget it. You’re not smart enough to pass as the weirdo you’re impersonating.
Let me see people asking whether McCain would have joined the service if the Vietnam War was no draft. McCain went into the Naval Academy in 1954. The war was not going on in Vietnam until 1959. After graduating he was obligated to enter service. He followed tradition of his family and their service to the country as do most families with a history of fighting for freedom do. The tradition of fighting that offers people giving the lame responses the opportunity to give those repsones with freedom.
What draft, that response became a bit convoluted.
What Draft:
Are you Asian? A serious question, not disrespectful.