President Barack Obama used his Veterans Day graveside speech at Arlington Cemetery to portray accomplished veterans as the pitiable beneficiaries of progressives’ generosity.
“We make sure we have the best-led, best-trained, best-equipped military in the world,” he declared while standing in the “sacred space” of Arlington’s graves.
”We have to devote just as much energy and passion to making sure we have the best-cared for, best-treated, best-respected veterans in the world,” he added, suggesting that the nation’s many veterans — nearly all of whom are above-average IQ — need a massive, government-run program to provide them with health, jobs and respect amid the stalled economy and high unemployment.
Obama even used the speech to urge passage of a U.S.-designed disabilities treaty, tout his Obamacare network, and remind listeners of his 2008 election.
The 2013 veteran’s day came on the 95th anniversary of World War I’s mismanaged armistice. The war deeply damaged Europe, created the Soviet Union, and led to World War II, the development of nuclear weapons and the Cold War.
However, Obama’s speech reflected his immediate political priorities and progressive world-view, which includes Senate approval for a new U.N. treaty.
“We’re going to keep demanding that the rights and dignity of every veteran are upheld, including by pushing for the [U.N.‘s] Disabilities Treaty so that our disabled veterans enjoy the same opportunities to travel and work and study around the world as everybody else,” he declared.
Obama showcased two veterans and one serving Marine — a woman who served in Iraq, a World War II veteran and a Marine Corps officer — but only sketched the world-changing accomplishments of the U.S. military.
“They put their lives on the line… so that the rest of us might live in a country and a world that is safer, freer, and more just. This is the gift they’ve given us. This is the debt that we owe them,” he said in a brief section at the beginning of his speech.
But he repeatedly portrayed the U.S. military as sacrificial pawns for national progress, not as tough heroes whose accomplishments outshine those of famous Ivy League graduates or Chicago community organizers.
“From their sacrifice we emerged the strongest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world,” he said. “On tour after tour after tour, in Iraq and Afghanistan, this generation — the 9/11 Generation — has met every mission we have asked of them,” he said, without describing the missions.
In fact, he downplayed the skilled use of violence and intimidation by which the U.S. military accomplishes its missions. “Combat” was mentioned, but only when describing the services of an African-American woman soldier, Jacare Hogan.
Obama spent 75 words to describe the accomplishments of the nation’s oldest living veteran, Richard Overton, as merely being there.
“He was there at Pearl Harbor, when the battleships were still smoldering. He was there at Okinawa. He was there at Iwo Jima, where he said, ‘I only got out of there by the grace of God.’”
He didn’t sketch the identity and goals of the nation’s enemies.
“America was attacked on that clear September morning,” he said in a passive-voice mention of the Muslim attackers who cited Islamic teachings to justify the mass murder of 3,000 people, most of them Americans, in 2001.
Al Qaeda got one mention — “the core of al Qaeda is on the path to defeat” — but the president declined to mention the rapid spread of Islamist forces throughout Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Chad and Iraq since his determined retreat from semi-peaceful Iraq in 2010
Instead, Obama used the ceremony to play up progressives’ political priorities, such as government-run health-care and diversity-increasing regulations.
For example, Obama spent 295 words describing Overton’s post-war life, and made sure to mention that he was a government employee. “Richard headed home to Texas to a nation bitterly divided by race… he worked for four governors,” Obama said.
Obama even inserted himself and the Democrats’ political agenda into Overton’s life. In 2013, Obama said, Overton “visited the memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr… he wept. And the crowd that gathered around him wept, too, to see one of the oldest living veterans of World War II bear witness to a day — to the progress of a nation — he thought might never come,” he said.
Obama did not mention his decision in October to post National Park Service pickets to block veterans’ access to the World War II monuments.
Throughout his speech, Obama repeatedly offered welfare and government aid to veterans, not a free-market economy where accomplished veterans can chart courses for themselves and their families.
“‘Helping the troops,’ [Hogan] says, ‘is what I’m all about,’” Obama said of Jacare Hogan’s job description in the military. “My fellow Americans, that’s what we should be all about,” Obama added.
However, since Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the economy has grown slower than the nation’s working-age population. “A slew of veterans job programs and efforts in recent years have helped, the national unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans was 10.1 percent in September, higher than the overall jobless rate of 7.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” according to a Gannett report Monday.
Even as he touted his support for returning soldiers, Obama is also backing an unpopular Senate immigration bill that would provide 30 million green cards to immigrants over the next 10 years. The Senate bill would also create a pool of roughly 1.5 million university-trained foreign guest-workers. Overall, the bill would bring in three immigrants and one guest-worker for every four Americans who turn 21, or two immigrants each year for every uniformed serviceman or woman.
Since 2000, the number of Americans with jobs has declined, despite their growing numbers.
The influx of workers would reduce wages and reduce demand for U.S.-made workplace automation technology, such as robot cow-milkers, according to a June report by the Congressional Budget Office.
In his speech, Obama repeated a progressive stereotype that many veterans are mentally damaged by the tough task of killing their country’s enemies.
“We’re going to keep improving veterans’ health care, including mental health care so you can stay strong…. We’re making sure that veterans not covered by the [Veterans Administration] can secure quality, affordable health insurance,” he said in a plug for his troubled Obamacare network.
Obama’s mental-health claims are a throwback to liberals’ post-Vietnam practice of claiming that many veterans were homeless and crazy.
Obama did not mention his administration’s new proposal to cut the military’s healthcare service, dubbed Tricare, and also to cut other spending from the military. The cuts are being developed by Obama’s deputies at the Pentagon, which is seeing its budget cut following massive post-2009 increases in domestic programs.
“This is how we’ll be judged.” Obama concluded his veterans’ day speech amid the graves of warriors who won World War I, World War II, the Cold War and many other clashes and campaigns. “Not just by how well we care for our troops in battle, but how we treat them when they come home — and by the America we build together; by what we do with the security and peace that they have helped grant us; by the progress that allows citizens from Richard Overton to Jacare Hogan to play their part in the American story.”