Like many, I have been struck by the images contained in Ken Burns' The War. But I am most disturbed by the contrasts found in our pursuit of a multi-theatre war to victory then and the defeatism and rancor rampant in our current simpering left, as we try pursue a far less globally destructive but just as vitally important a conflict against a similarly determined fascist foe today.
In early 1945, our troops began to liberate elements of the concentration camp system, horrible places like Dachau and Mauthausen, where unburied bodies numbered in the tens of thousands and the crematoria were still warm, and where we were met by its survivors, who put up posters welcoming our boys to those dreadful compounds.
Today we have an openly anti-Semitic, former US president, Jimmy Carter, who travels the world denouncing America and Israel at every available turn, while publicly praising the sworn enemies of true democracy and freedom, while eagerly rubbing elbows with the likes of murderers like Yasser Arafat and the boyos from the Assad family.
American POWs, survivors of the horrific Japanese camp system in the Phillippines, China, and in Japan, were greeted by huge flags hung from the Golden Gate Bridge as they returned to the US after years of abhorrent captivity, and as they left the ships they often kissed the ground in San Francisco and Oakland.
Today, American servicemen, United States Marines, have been denied entry into the Oakland airport terminal out of "security" concerns by the local "liberal" government.
During World War II, Alameda was one of our largest naval bases and the ships involved in the famous Doolittle Raid, including the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, departed with its cargo of B-25 bombers from this base.
Today, San Francisco bans Junior ROTC and refused to accept the battleship USS Iowa as a historic museum dedicated to our fighting men and women, whose deaths provided the progressive bay area governments' ability to thumb their noses at our military today.
We worked with our allies, including Soviet Russia, to insure a final victory, remaining true to the cause, despite valid concerns about a post-war Eastern Europe under Soviet occupation while understanding that a world under Nazism was a far greater danger to our survival.
Recently a Democrat controlled congressional panel passed one more resolution condemning the Turkish government, one of our staunchest progressive Muslim allies in the war on terror, for their massacre of the Armenians some hundred years ago, in order to further hobble the war against those who still murder our innocents and our servicemen.
The Turks, in righteous indignation at this most unkind of cuts during the war on terror, have withdrawn their ambassador.
During World War II, General Douglas MacArthur had black troops to fight in direct combat roles in the Southwest Pacific, unlike their use in the European theatre as engineers, truck drivers, or as stewards in the US Navy.
Today, the Democrat Party is still fighting on the static old static class warfare front and whose tactics are never repudiated by the major Democrat presidential players.
During The War we fought against Hitler and the Big Lie, which reached unheard of heights under the aegis of Joseph Goebbels, who both exclaimed that if it was big enough and told often enough that folks would come to believe it.
Today, US Senators Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Hillary Clinton, and the failed general and nonsensical talk show visitor, Wes Clark, among other notable Democrats and turncoat Republicans, contrived their own Big Lie about Rush Limbaugh and his "phony soldiers" remark. Sadly, he spoke about an actual phony soldier, Jesse Macbeth, while these intemperate, vituperative, and prevaricating hucksters concocted a lie from whole cloth about his supposed denigration of real soldiers who had served in Iraq.
Today's Democrats have set themselves on a path where bad news for America, the continuing deaths of our citizens and soldiers, and the hobbling of righteous wars against those who kill and maim us, and the continuing diminution of our current president, is good news for them.
America, in its hubris, is falling apart and we have long passed the time when the center had any final chance of holding.
Yes, we have come a long way from the courage necessary to win World War II against two of the most vicious international enemies we have ever faced.
Today, against barbaric Muslim extremists who are plotting to kill us all, the Democrats are using every possible means to bring our country defeat.
I weep for the passage of time and for all the lives lost at Guadalcanal, the Hurtgen Forest, Iwo Jima, Monte Cassino, Saipan, Okinawa, St. Lo, and in all those thousand little places that will forever be America; places where the Democrats are erasing our memories of victory and substituting an acceptance of defeat and cowardice.
They are purposefully forgetting that their ability to throw our nation way was given to them by the thousands of our boys who rest in the Punch Bowl and at Arlington, on hundreds of Pacific islands, and in the small town cemeteries where my parents, both WWII veterans, lie today.
