Rumsfeld Sees US Decline As Obama Weakens Military

by JASmius

Pretty much a statement of the obvious, leavened by a smidgeon too much optimism - especially for a heretofore "realist":

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld condemned President Barack Obama for showing such "weakness" that American adversaries are growing bolder by the day.

Rumsfeld, author of the new book "Rumsfeld's Rules," told John Bachman on Newsmax TV's "America's Forum" that the United States is not spending enough money on the military.

"The greatest security threat [to America] is the fact that the United States is behaving in a way that is sending a signal of future weakness," he said. "In the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson administrations, we were spending 10 percent of gross domestic product on defense. Today, we're spending less than 4 percent and the entitlements have ballooned."

"There's no way we can keep on spending trillions of dollars we don't have. So that vacuum we're creating is going to be filled, and it'll be filled by countries that don't have our values and clearly are adverse to our interests."

If only it were a matter of Pentagon spending levels.  But as we saw earlier today, it's gone far, far beyond that.  The rank & file of all five branches of the armed forces have not just been neutered, but infiltrated by Obamunists who are, to borrow Big Dog's phrase, "adverse to our interests".  It's Alinskyist SOP: be patient; don't rage against bourgeois societal institutions from without, but subvert and take them over gradually.  The old "frog in the pot" metaphor.  The military being the last such bastion of constitutionalism and genuine patriotism, it's breathtaking the rapidity with which it has succumbed to the advances of the Left over the past five years, even with a communist dictator as commander-in-chief.

This is where I consider Secretary Rumsfeld to be more than a little starry eyed:

Rumsfeld said the United States can bounce back and become a world leader once again.

"We do not need to go into decline," he said. "I expect that what we'll see is self-correction taking place because we ought not to leave a vacuum that is filled by people that  fundamentally don't have our values and are against our interests."

One teeny-tiny problem with that "It's always darkest before the sunrise" thinking: the America of 2014 is not the America of 1980.  The electorate today is far more ignorant and corrupt and, to the degree that it is ideologically inclined, far more to the Left than the electorate that turned to Ronald Reagan to save the country as our embassies were being overrun and the Red Army was on the march across the globe.  Put another way, 1980-vintage voters were still capable of learning from their mistakes; 2012 proved demonstrably that today's American voter is not.

One other thing to consider is that the country had Ronald Reagan waiting in the wings to rise to his moment of destiny and save the country for another generation.  Now I know the old adage that "At what point did Ronald Reagan become Ronald Reagan"; moments of destiny can have that affect.  But that's typically the case with people who were largely unknown before that point; everybody pretty much knew who Ronald Reagan was and what he stood for.  He was, in many ways, the American Churchill, a voice in the wilderness for many years while his country lost its way who answered the call when his country came to its senses.  All props and respect to my 2016 candidate, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, but who is the Ronald Reagan of today?  And could even Ronald Reagan have turned around what America has been reduced and transmogrified into by Barack Hussein Obama [hmm-hmm-hmm]?  I dearly hope and pray we can get Governor Walker elected to find out, but I'm not confident of even that much.

Bottom line is, America's engineered decline is history far more likely to repeat itself than an in-the-nick-of-time correction.  That's the true, overarching lesson of World War I.