Sigh, remember the good old days when the GOP had people like Barry Goldwater?
Yeah, I would get furious with him, I disagreed with him on a lot of issues, but in the end, when you get right down to it, I recognized that he was a man of integrity and honor, and that he loved his country and the American people.
If we can ever get back to something like that, in BOTH parties, we will be on the right path again.
Yes, as someone who identifies as being on the Left, I would bitch and moan about the Republicans but at some level I would recognize that at the very least, they are here to keep the Left honest.
And vice versa, of course.
Oh, I was duped enough even under the Bush years. I am the epitome of the average military guy's susceptibility to institution:
1) In the 1990s, I didn't like
Clinton because "he didn't serve" and because he lowered the standards of moral conduct for a President with his adultery. Because he chose not to enlist after he graduated college (Draft Orders were no longer issued), he was "less-than." The propaganda pushed the notion that he was the first, despite him actually being the thirteenth. I couldn't tell you much of anything else. I was just supposed to not like him, didn't care to discover anything other than what I was observing in my tiny world, and the right-wing propaganda against him complimented the military mindset on adultery being a chargeable offense and that the Commander-in-Chief should at least have served.
2) In the 2000s, I supported
Bush because, again, the right-wing propaganda complimented the military mindset. He was Air National Guard for a moment, thus that satisfied the Commander-in-Chief ideal, despite Gore actually volunteering to go to Vietnam. But he was one of those mysterious Democrat things, so... I did know enough about Iraq to know that the search for WMD, within the military, was more of a dismissive issue, this is why so many of us didn't care. We wore our NBC suits for weeks, but when we were ordered to drop them, right before going into Baghdad, we rolled our eyes. The issue for the military was about unfinished business; and the NeoCon agenda to push democracy in the region fit with America's morality and long-term security. I railed and railed against liberals for their lack of vision and support, right here on this site (if you remember, I was
GySgt back then).
But the
Obama years really produced Republicans and conservatives for what they, apparently, really are. They began making no sense at all, but the idea that they supported McCain at least aligned them closer to the military than the Democrats. But from 2008 on, with the Tea Party radicalism and Sarah Palin's very ignorant existence, they seemed to simply need to hate Obama for no reason at all. The man hadn't even entered the White House that January yet and McConnell, Boehner, and Ryan all rallied the Republicans and conservatives around the idea the they were simply going to obstruct absolutely everything. This was despite two ongoing wars that they cheered the military into and an economic crisis that they greatly created. Their irrational and fabricated hatred grew so enormous that a man like
Donald Trump was actually presented as a godsend to them.
I retired in October 2012, by by then I had developed a more balanced mindset. Not only was NeoCon leadership clearly wrong (because their agenda was too shallow), but Trickle-Down economics had clearly been proven a con game. But even then I needed more educated focus to make sense of my own past. "Why" kept creeping into my world-view ideas and this "why" began in 1993 in Somalia when I needed to make sense to what I had seen in the environment. Throughout my career, Republicans and conservatives simply pushed negative ideas of Islam and American freedom as the end-all, be-all of my existence. This never made sense. But from retirement, I went to university, finished my Bachelors and achieved my Master's. I had long been a reader anyway, but with the intense focus on primary source material evidence and about 150 books later (still reading), I made sense of my own history, in which propaganda used to provide. For example:
- Why did you go to Somalia? Um..cuz democracy and liberty and Muslims are evil? Um...orders?
- Why did you go to Iraq? Um...cuz democracy and liberty and Muslims are evil? Um...orders?
All the Presidents above deserve their criticism, but the routine criticism that they receive is usually media-led and trivial. I think my anger towards conservatives stems from the fact that they used me and my kind to work their own ignorant agendas. But their love affair for Donald Trump proved how little the military mattered to them and pulled everything into focus for me.
