The circular firing squad that is the current Democrat party is a delightful spectacle. Their two presidential candidates are locked in a death struggle which reveals their shortcomings with every salvo of negative ads. Senator Clinton, showing utter disregard for the long-term effects on her party, will not relinquish her quest for the oval office. In the process, she is the only major political figure with the courage to excoriate Senator Obama for his associations and beliefs. Obama, weighed down with his racist minister, his terrorist pal, and his disdain for the working people that his party is supposed to care about, loses momentum by the hour. If he does indeed secure the Democrat nomination, he will be diminished and flawed.

The campaign has claimed two more casualties. The Democrats, due to an unfortunate run of bad presidential candidates, have two living ex-presidents. Both have been thoroughly discredited in this mean season. Bill Clinton, ostensibly to support his wife, but more credibly to insert himself into the news cycle, has stumbled from racist comments that insured Hillary would get almost no black votes to off-the-cuff remarks that draw attention to his wife’s age, judgment and fanciful biography. Jimmy Carter, in defiance of directives from the State Department, met with, honored and openly supported the terrorist group Hamas in a trip to the Middle East. The Democrats’ two elder statesmen, who should be leading lights of the party, and whose endorsements would ordinarily carry great significance, have managed only to embarrass themselves and antagonize their party.

More encouraging, there is no end in sight. As the primary season winds to a close, no clear winner is evident, and it looks increasingly likely that the Democrats won’t have a nominee until the convention in Denver. Already, radical left groups like "Recreate 68" are planning vigorous, violent protests if their candidate is not chosen as the nominee, reminiscent of similar actions during the riotous Chicago Democrat convention in 1968.

The family feuding is not limited to the Democrats. The GOP also believes infighting is in. John McCain has seen fit strongly to criticize a North Carolina GOP ad that links two Democrat gubernatorial candidates, Richard Moore and Bev Perdue, to Barack Obama and Reverend Wright. Moore and Perdue have both endorsed Obama. To her credit, North Carolina GOP state chairman, Linda Daves, has resisted withdrawing or apologizing for the ad. If John McCain wants to rise above the fray and run a Dudley-Do-Right campaign, that’s his business. But he’s out of line when he tells a state party how to run its own campaigns. His links to local and state Republicans across the country are tenuous, and his credentials with conservatives are meager. Having offered little to conservatives, McCain’s unsolicited advice about how to run a state campaign is both unappreciated and counterproductive. McCain will need conservatives to turn out for him, and criticizing their efforts to forge a successful campaign is no way to win friends and influence voters.

Highlighting another reason for young people to carefully choose their institutions of higher education, US News and World Report notes the scarcity of military history on college campuses ("Why Don’t More Colleges Teach Military History?" by Justin Ewers, posted at usnews.com on 3 April 2008). The number of colleges that offer military history courses is extremely low, and the subject is growing more rare as time goes on.

Colleges and universities have adopted a take-no-prisoners approach to eradicating military history–in fact any military presence–from their campuses since the late 1960's. The few exceptions include the service academies, and prominent schools in the Midwest and South such as Purdue, Kansas State and Southern Mississippi. But in most institutions, military history is treated with the same disdain that is usually reserved for Christians and global warming skeptics.

The scarcity of military history courses is no accident or coincidence. The liberal agenda of academia will not admit that war and military affairs have any effect on history, when, in fact, they are prime movers in the progress of mankind. Most colleges have waged a steady campaign to evict recruiters, ROTC programs, and other military displays from campuses. Meanwhile, terrorist sponsor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is welcomed as a speaker at Columbia University, and anti-military rallies are regular events on campuses from coast to coast.

If military topics are treated on college campuses at all, they are usually part of agenda-driven courses, concentrating on American abuses of military power, American wartime propaganda, or spurious parallels between American military failures and the current conflict. The courses in which the military is studied at most campuses always have an anti-military point of view, and are never taught by anyone with military experience, even though career military officers earn advanced degrees at a rate competitive with that of civilians in comparable leadership positions in private industry.

A college student would be hard pressed to find a course that credits the Royal Navy for suppressing piracy, establishing safe world trade, and guaranteeing the rule of law throughout the world for at least two centuries. Countless college courses will warn of the evils of the military-industrial complex, but few will credit the arsenal of democracy for supplying the tools that defeated the Axis enemy in World War II. Moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union is a matter of faith in most college courses, but the fall of the Soviet Union is never attributed to the rearming of America under Ronald Reagan. It would take a very diligent student indeed to find a college course that recognizes the American military as the greatest force for defending freedom in the world’s history.

The military has contributed to great advances in medicine (British army doctor Ronald Ross won a Nobel Prize when he discovered that mosquitoes were agents for the spread of malaria), transportation (military needs inspired networks from Roman roads to the American highway system), and social change (Truman’s executive order to integrate the military in 1948 set the example for and preceded by decades the integration of American civilian society).

Our universities elbow each other aside with claims of being the breeding grounds of tomorrow’s leaders. But leadership finds its purest embodiment in uniform. The study of military history is nothing if not the detailed examination of leadership under pressure. From the loftiest admiral to the grimiest squad leader, the experience of war reveals the character necessary to inspire and lead people in great endeavors. Look at our presidential candidates in recent years. Every race since World War II has been between veterans, some with distinguished combat records. The only exceptions are Thomas E. Dewey (defeated by Harry S. Truman), Adlai Stevenson (defeated by Dwight Eisenhower twice) who worked as a civilian for Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox during World War II, and Bill Clinton (a two-term president), who was never in military service. Of the current presidential contenders, John McCain is a Vietnam veteran, Hillary Clinton claims solidarity with the military to the point of manufacturing courage-under-fire memories, and Barack Obama has only the most tenuous grasp of military matters. Also running this November in Congressional districts across the country will be seventeen veterans of the current conflict.

Wars and the military people who wage them change the fates of nations, decide the future of mankind, and identify the leaders of our future. Colleges and universities which ignore or denigrate military history are denying their students a fundamental understanding of how the world works. Graduates ignorant of military history will be hobbled by cavernous voids in their understanding of history, politics, and geography. They will lack insight into the human character–its dark traits of cowardice, aggression, and cruelty, and its higher attributes of courage, sacrifice and honor.

Justin Ewers points out in his article that while college courses in military history are on the decline, the market for military history books, tours, lectures, videos and simulation games continues to grow. The free market is a more reliable indicator of public interest than the insulated views and limited choices offered by academics. But the free market also applies to higher education. Because of the sacrifices of our military, every Americans is free to attend the college of his or her choice. Let us urge college-bound young people to choose a college which studies, reveres, and honors that sacrifice.

To add insult to injury, the gang crime syndicates are, by and large, guided and directed from within the American prison system. Supposedly, that is where gang members and criminal illegal aliens are sent to be punished, not to prosper.

The war on terror is presenting us with yet another startling fact which discloses the depth and breadth of the gang problem. An estimated 2% of U.S. armed forces are now recognized as gangbangers.  They have joined up with a singular purpose: to “learn how to use military tactics and learn how to kill. …They are using their overseas deployments to spread tentacles around the globe.” The loosening of enlistment standards can very well be the “cause and effect” of the presence of gang members in the military.

We are not saying that each and every illegal immigrant is a gang member. There are several of them who are shining and exemplary lights in that they have elected to serve their adopted country by joining our Armed Forces to earn early citizenship, knowing there is the distinct possibility their American dream might be cut short. We salute those individuals and are forever grateful for their courage and sacrifice.

The mainstream media, however, has lulled us with carefully selected words and images into believing that the loss of a U.S. soldier, while tragic, is more significant than innocent children killed from gunfire, either from rival gangs firing at each other, or at the innocents themselves. The liberal media have used, and continue to use, the deaths of soldiers to distract from the problems they have perpetrated on society through which gangs and illegal immigrants have been given free rein.

Political lip service about factual gang statistics and the unconscionable granting of sanctuary city status (particularly by some of our most immigrant-heavy cities, like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco), must be checked, and sooner rather than later. However, by denying the existence of gang activity, the community is doing the gangs a favor - they are allowing the gangs to develop, grow stronger in numbers and develop a power base. That power base is increasing via illegal alien membership, and as previously set forth, turning into our most deplorable U.S. export.

The question is — what do we do about it? Cities and states chronically shift the blame to the federal government. When the federal government proposes new legislation or tries to impose existing federal law, the same cities and states reject those proposals and legislation out of hand.  A case in point is the continued stupidity of Special Order 40, which unfortunately also “protects” criminal illegal aliens, giving them a powerful incentive to flaunt U.S. law.

Citizens are just as liable for the increase of gang activity. Whether it is ignorance, apathy or both, they sit out their voting privilege election after election, thereby fully and forever guaranteeing the status quo by re-electing incompetent politicians. The solution must be mandatory or incentivized voting to weed out those who seek to perpetuate this national disgrace. The second and no less important aspect is the acceptance of responsibility and blame by Americans that represent the market for illegal drugs — the primary source of gang income. With tongue in cheek, we say: grow your own grass and cut out the middleman.

We can sit back quietly and be an indirect part of the disintegration of our society, or we can wait for the less desirable alternative – a police state to restore normalcy – whatever “normalcy” might mean in the future.

As a reminder, if our children could dodge bullets the way liberal politicians dodge truth and their own cowardice to take that quantum leap to fix this mess, the miles-long list of teenagers, youngsters, toddlers and babies killed by gangs would still be alive today.

Senator Barack Obama has tried to bolster his peacemaker’s image by castigating Senator John McCain for favoring a "hundred years of war in Iraq." This was an intentional distortion of McCain’s commitment to keeping American forces in Iraq indefinitely, to bolster an emerging democracy, just as American troops have remained in Europe, Japan and South Korea, long after the fighting ended. McCain was not calling for a century of war, but Obama has consistently called for an immediate end to the conflict (though he is vague about when that could take place).

It is clear that Americans are divided about the war, but there is certainly no debate that there is a war, that Americans are engaged in it, and that once said must prevail. It is equally clear that Senator McCain is determined that the United States commit itself to attaining victory, and that Senator Obama intends the opposite.

Senator McCain demonstrated his commitment without qualification, time limits or political cost. He proved this by supporting the war effort even when almost every Democrat and many Republicans in Congress were losing faith and vacillating. Conversely, Senator Obama has been against the war from the beginning, and has called for bringing the troops home as soon as possible, regardless of the effect of withdrawal on the outcome of the war.

Senator Obama’s supporters see his consistent opposition to the war as proof of his sound judgment. But whether the war in Iraq is worthwhile or not, there can be no argument that pulling our troops out means that the enemy will prevail. Additionally, knowing that the policy of the Democrat candidate for the presidency is immediate withdrawal cannot help but encourage the enemy to keep fighting, at least until November, when he stands to be aided greatly by an American government that will no longer be committed to victory.

That same enemy would be devastated if, in November, the newly elected President of the United States has an open-ended commitment to support the democracy of Iraq, fight terrorism throughout the Middle East, and attack Islamic jihadists wherever they congregate. The enemy will know that he will get no help from the White House, that he faces an indefatigable opponent who will not quit.

The enemy pays very close attention to our politics. In recent conflicts, American casualties rapidly influence American public opinion. Public opinion exerted pressure on our political leaders to withdraw our forces from Somalia after the harrowing battle in Mogadishu in 1993, from Lebanon after the attack on the Beirut Marine barracks in 1984, and most famously from Vietnam in 1973 after a long and divisive conflict. The enemy thus considers American public opinion an important, if not preeminent, front in any war, and devotes tremendous resources to shape it.

It is noteworthy that in none of the above conflicts were American forces defeated militarily. In Mogadishu, American losses amounted to eighteen dead and dozens more wounded in a battle in which American troops were surrounded by vastly superior enemy forces, none of them wearing uniforms, mixed with a civilian population that was supportive of the enemy, and conducted under rules of engagement that prevented the application of overwhelming force that could have prevented many of our casualties. Estimated losses to the enemy were 500 dead and over 1000 wounded.

The attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 was a terrorist attack against a peacekeeping force which was strictly prohibited from operating on a combat footing. According to US District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who ruled on the case in 2003, the Marines "were more restricted in their use of force than an ordinary U. S. Citizen walking down a street in Washington, D. C." The death toll amounted to 241 Americans, including 220 Marines.

The Vietnam war was a loss for Americans, but our military was never defeated in the field. Even in the most desperate battles, American forces prevailed. The Marines, though surrounded and heavily outnumbered, were never overrun at Khe Sanh. The Tet Offensive was a surprise to the American military, but one which they rapidly recovered from to deliver a defeat so decisive that it eliminated the Viet Cong as an effective combat force. The junior officers of that war became the leaders of the Gulf War–Generals Powell, Schwartzkopf, Horner and others.

Despite an enemy who was militarily no match for the United States, in each of those cases, we failed because our political leaders found withdrawal preferable to sustaining more casualties and more public disapproval. The enemy knew the will of our political leaders was our weak spot, and brought to bear on that target the unconventional weapons of American media and public opinion.

Now we have a presidential candidate who promises withdrawal, buoyed by anti-war media and activists. If Senator Obama wins in November, the enemy knows that our forces will be weakened, our troops brought home, the battle won without any further effort. They know they cannot achieve this result militarily. As in all wars, American tactics and technology improve over time. We have learned our enemy’s weaknesses and how to exploit them. Our military is experienced and professional, a force without equal. Our enemy’s only hope is that our commander in chief will call off this highly effective force before it reaches victory.

 John McCain has many faults, but on the war he has been resolute. He is committed to the defense of democracy and freedom no matter how much or how long it takes. His stance echoes one established by a previous president, one who pledged the United States to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty." As a young naval officer, John McCain was inspired by and committed himself to President Kennedy’s inaugural pledge, and paid dearly for it.

But an even greater price will be paid by the Democrat party for abandoning those principles, and supporting candidates who no longer know the value or meaning of victory.

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