Posted by
Deadpan on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 3:31:59 PM
McCain's foreign policy speech will be scoffed at by the self-righteous pacifists who are in the drivers seat of the Democratic Party, but it only shows how deranged they are to seriously claim that Bush, Cheney, McCain or anybody who has seen a real war actually prefers one to peace. Every time this subject comes up, I remember the lines quoted by Patrick Henry, "Gentlemen may cry 'Peace! Peace!' but there is no peace. We tried to stay out of World Wars I and II and in the end they were greater tragedies.
Those who only focus on body-counts and never count the harm done in the world by those whom we oppose are guilty of criminal indifference. Sometimes we can't act where we would like to, but we should be engaged in a world wide offensive for freedom and self-determination through whatever means we can use.
The first thing we need to do is put our own house in order, and quit spending our resources on socialist entitlement programs. Self-reliance is necessary. We need to pay our debts and balance our spending, so that we don't have nations like China holding our bonds. We need to serve notice on Europe and South Korea and Japan whose economies are now rebuilt, that we will expect them to assume the responsibility for their own defense, and our troops will be reduced around the world. We need to apply sound science and cost-benefit analysis to our environmental laws. The reason we're sending untold billions of dollars to OPEC is that we have put most of our own resources off limits, often for the most ludicrous of reasons.
We need to demand that our children be taught basic skills and knowledge of unhyphenated history of the world, of our European traditions and of this nation. They need to know how government works, because it is theirs to choose. They need to understand why America is special in the world for positive as well as negative reasons. They need to be taught the meaning of our national creed, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, together with critical thinking skills to enable them to see through the fallacies that are beamed at them every minute of every day, through news media, advertising and politics. We need to teach them self-reliance and the duties of citizenship. We need to offer them the truly great art, music and literature of the past so that they can appreciate what is being produced in their own time.
Lastly, we need to understand that freedom is not a gift of history, but rather the exception. Whenever there is weakness, tyrants and warlords will seek to exploit it. Read Herodotus. We need to know how to defend ourselves both at home and through military action. I would love to see a renewal of the obligation to serve either in the active military or the National Guard. War is not something to seek for, but it must never be something we fear so much that we allow our freedoms, our homes and our families to be endangered.