The Myth of Republican National Security Prowess

Each election year, Americans are bombarded with Republican claims that the Democrats are weak on defense, and only the GOP can protect America. Historically, however, the Republican Party has been pathetically weak on national security – so bad in fact, we came close to losing more than one war.

After the end of the American Civil War, the Republican Party opposed maintaining an  army of any appreciable strength. As soon as the war ended, the GOP-controlled Congress reduced the U.S. Army to a bare shadow of its wartime strength. They did this despite the fact that a very clear and present danger existed at the country’s southern border. At that point in history, the much larger French Army occupied Mexico. French dictator, Napoleon III, openly harbored  a desire to wrestle control of France’s former Louisiana Territory back from the United States. 

Nevertheless, Republicans repeatedly cut the army’s strength. Throughout the late 1800s, during which the GOP held virtual one-party rule, the American army’s strength dropped to 27,000 regular troops. What troops we did have were poorly trained and poorly armed. While the rest of the world’s armies were adopting modern magazine-fed repeating rifles, the U.S. Army was still armed with archaic single-shot Springfield “Trapdoor” rifles, many of them simply remanufactured from Civil War muzzle loading guns. 

During the Indian Campaigns of that period, many of the Native American tribes were better armed than the average army regiment. Col. George Custer and the men who met their fate with him at the Little Bighorn did so not only because they were outnumbered, but they were out-gunned, too. Armed with their single-shot Springfields, Custer’s men could not match the intensity of fire offered by Sitting Bull’s forces, many of whom were armed with repeating rifles like the Henry, the Spencer, and the Winchester. 

Out Gunned by the Spaniards 

Many of our troops were still armed with Trapdoors during the Spanish American War in 1898. Those who were issued modern Krag-Jorgensen magazine-fed, bolt-action rifles complained that because of the lack of funds for ammunition, the army had  disabled the magazines, requiring soldiers to reload the weapon after each shot. The rifles also still used black power, which revealed the shooter’s position with a massive cloud of smoke. 

The Spanish Army, on the other hand, was armed  with state-of-the-art Mauser repeating rifles and rapid firing Maxim machine guns, both firing smokeless powder. The only rapid fire weapon our troops had were Civil War-vintage Gatling Guns. 

The American Navy didn’t fare much better under Republican rule. In 1881 the London humor magazine Puck described the U.S. Navy as a force of "three mud-scows supplemented by a superannuated canal-boat." It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. 

The GOP-controlled Congress funded a naval shipbuilding program that began in 1890 and continued throughout the end of the century. But the funding they provided for training ship crews was so meager, sailors were rarely able to practice their gunnery. As a result, during the Spanish American War, U.S. naval gunnery was pathetic.  At the Battle of Manila Bay, American ships fired a total of 4,959 shells of various sizes. They scored only 72 hits. At the Naval  Battle of Santiago de Cuba, the U.S. Navy fired 1,300 shells; only 25 found their mark. 

In his memoir of the Spanish American War, Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican himself, condemned his own party’s failure to support the army and navy with adequate funding. In the end, the U.S. won the Spanish American War only by  the courage of its soldiers and sailors, and the fact the Spanish never wanted to fight a war over Cuba in the first place. 

TR tried to improve American military power during his presidency, but his policies were largely reversed by his own party after he left  the White House. 

When a European war broke out in 1914, it was the isolationist Republican Party that led the movement to keep America out of it. It would be up to a peace-loving Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, to see the dangers posed to this country by a collapse of Britain and France and build up our military in preparation to sending them “over there.” Still, America’s military equipment was so limited that the bulk of U.S. troops in WWI were armed with British Enfield rifles, French-made Chauchat machine guns, and French- and British-built aircraft. 

When Republicans again controlled the government in the interwar years, U.S. military strength again shrank and stagnated. Important legislation passed in 1920 established the framework for an improved, professional army. However, because Republicans controlled both houses from 1920 to the early 1930s, lack of appropriate funding prevented the reforms from being fully implemented. The U.S. Army so stagnated that some career officers remained junior officers like lieutenants and captains for nearly their whole careers. 

Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats in Congress began the  rebuilding of the American military in the early 1930s, despite  opposition from isolationist – and in many cases, pro-fascist – Republican legislators. 

Establishment of the Defense Industry 

World War II was followed by years of decline in conventional forces, as the atomic bomb  was considered the weapon of the future.  Outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, however,  brought with it the need for a massive buildup of conventional American forces and equipment. When US manufacturers balked at retooling for war, President Harry Truman made a momentous decision that would impact the U.S. for the rest of history – with passage of the Defense Production Act of 1950,  he created the defense industry. 

Once the defense industry became a permanent form of business in the  United States, the Republican attitude to military spending changed. From that point on, the pro-corporation Republican Party would push as much money as possible to the defense contractors. 

But spending on the defense industry doesn’t necessarily equate to making America strong.  Massive defense spending during the Reagan administration did little more than triple our national debt and turn the U.S. from a creditor nation to a debtor nation.  With defense manufacturers overcharging  million of dollars for such follies as “crash-proof” coffee makers and the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense system, there was literally little money left for maintenance. 

As a result, some older Navy ships were unable to leave port due to mechanical breakdowns. Entire squadrons of aircraft reportedly were cannibalized for spare parts. At the time, I served in a Navy reserve ground combat unit that, despite being part of the country’s Rapid Response Force, had no weapons; Reagan had sent them to El Salvador and there was no money to  buy replacements. 

Defense from Terrorists 

In 1999, the Clinton administration received a single warning of a pending Al Qaeda attack on the U.S. President Bill Clinton immediately placed the country’s entire law enforcement apparatus on alert. As a result, the so-called Millennium Plot was thwarted when the intended bomber was caught trying to cross into the U.S. from Canada. 

In 2001, the Bush administration received some 40 separate warnings from American and foreign intelligence agencies that Al Qaeda was planning an imminent attack. George Bush ignored all of them.  On September 11, more than 2,000 Americans paid the price for Bush’s national security incompetence. 

Less than two years later, in March of 2002, Bush told reporters he was no longer concerned with finding the organizer of that attack, Osama Bin Laden. Bush eventually closed down the CIA office dedicated to tracking and capturing or killing Bin Laden. Two useless and unnecessary wars later, the Al Qaeda mastermind was still at large when Bush left office in 2008. 

It would be left to Bush’s Democratic successor, Barack Obama, to reopen the search for Bin Laden and launch the covert operation that finally made him pay for his treachery. 

So much for Republican prowess on national security.

 

Distrust of Corporate Power Is an American Tradition

To hear Republicans, President Barack Obama distrusts American businesses and corporations. This, of course, makes the president an un-American socialist or, worse, a communist. I seriously doubt Obama is anti-corporation, but if it were true, historically he would be in good company.

 Our Founding Fathers were no fans of corporations. The Boston Tea Party, after all, was not a reaction to high taxation, as right-wing myth contends, but to the Tea Act’s nearly tax-free status it gave to the British East India Company, the largest corporation of its time, which threatened to destroy smaller colonial businesses.

  So abhorrent was the idea of large corporate interests to our Founders, that they purposefully left any mention of them out of the Constitution. Yet, even in the earliest days of our nation, many of our Founders were already growing appalled by the growth of corporations.

 "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations,“ wrote Thomas Jefferson, “which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

 Loathsome Bankers

 Financial institutions were particularly loathsome to Jefferson. "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies," he said.
  
 Jefferson’s foresight was eerily precise when he predicted that “the banks, and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

 Wow. It’s like the author of the Declaration of Independence was looking into the future and saw how banks and corporations destroyed the U.S. economy in the 1930s and again in 2007.

 John Adams, Jefferson’s long-time friend and sometime political adversary, was also wary of financial institutions. "Banks,” he said, “have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good."

 Hard to believe Adams was the founder of what is today the Republican Party.

 President Andrew Jackson was well known for his distrust of financial institutions and corporate monopolies. “Unless you become more watchful in your states,” he warned, “and check the spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that … the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.”

 Enemy at the Rear

 As president, Abraham Lincoln had many things on his mind. He was fighting a war to preserve the nation. But Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee weren’t his only concerns.

 “The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity,” he said. “The banking powers are more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe."

 Let’s see, “denounce as public enemies all who question their methods.” Would that be the same as the Republicans calling Obama a socialist, a communist, or a secret radical Muslim?

 As the Civil War drew to a close, Lincoln was eyeing his “greatest foe” as the next major threat to the country.

 "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country,” he said. “As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

 Unfortunately, Lincoln’s fears were well grounded. In the decades following the Civil War, the country saw the growth of the Republican “Gilded Age,” when most of the country’s wealth was held by a handful of so-called “barons,” most of whom acquired that wealth by corrupting government officials.

 Citizens United

 President Teddy Roosevelt came into office at the height of the Gilded Age. From his bully pulpit, he saw the same threat to the country Lincoln did four decades earlier. That pulpit must have been awfully high, because Roosevelt was able to see all the way to 2012.

Like a man prescient of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision giving corporations “citizen hood” and all the free speech money could buy, Teddy warned: "The Constitution does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty Commercial forces which they have called into being."

 Unlike any Republican you’ll hear today, Roosevelt also said, “Laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes. Corporate expenditures for political purposes have supplied one of the principle sources of corruptions in our political affairs."
 Roosevelt, of course, went on to break up the “trusts” – large corporations – to reduce their political power, and gave Americans the “Square Deal, which helped create the middle class in this country.

 TR’s distant cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, took this further, with legislation that controlled how financial institutions and corporations can operate and, of course, the “New Deal,” the greatest expansion of the middle class in U.S. history.

So I wonder how TR would respond to see his former party, the GOP, running a corporate multi-millionaire as their 2012 presidential nominee? Or if he knew that corporate interests like the Koch brothers or the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council were financing Republican candidates and writing their policies and legislation? Would he agree with current members of the Republican Party that President Obama is too distrusted of Big Business?

 Let’s let TR speak for himself: "… [T]o befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."

Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching on to Theocracy

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” 

 Sinclair Lewis, American Writer (1885-1951)

Many years ago, when I was young police reporter, a cop friend of mine told me: “Never trust a man who wears his patriotism or his religion on his sleeve,” he said. “They’re hiding something.”

I took that advice to heart, and found it never to be wrong. The self-righteous hypocrisy of today’s flag-waving, Bible-thumping right-wing only reinforces my belief in my friend’s advice. All that preaching and pontificating is hiding something, something dark and terrible, something they don’t want you to know.

We’ve seen it before. In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the first religious broadcasters, used his cloak of religion to preach an anti-Semitic and pro-fascist theology. Coughlin closely associated himself with the Christian Front, one of many “cross and flag” organizations that wrapped their theology of anti-communism, anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism in the American flag and the Bible. We’d all be seig-heiling today if this country knelt before Coughlin’s alter.

Rick Santorum, running for the Republican presidential nomination, is doing his best to fit into Coughlin’s cassock. His recent rant that President Barrack Obama follows a “phony theology,” not only echoes Father Coughlin’s dogma but also that of the “birthers” bigotry. Moreover, his recently uncovered 2008 speech in which he claimed Satan was attacking the United States shrieks the same rhetoric espoused by Al Qaida and the Taliban.  

Disgraced House Speaker and outed philanderer Newt Gingrich has been marching down that same path of self-righteousness, using his born-again Catholic conversion to claim President Obama is waging a war on religion. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, wears his Mormon religion like his sacred underwear. He doesn’t show it, but you know it’s there.

When attacking the president’s religion or what they perceive as his anti-religion policies is not enough, the candidates and their cohorts attack each other’s religion. In his 2008 speech, Santorum, a Catholic, said Protestantism is “gone from the world of Christianity.” On the other hand, right-wing Protestant evangelicals call Catholicism a cult. Neither side has much nice to say about Mormons ... or Jews. 

 Is this where we’re going in this country? Are the Catholics and Protestants and Mormons and whoever else going to line up against each other like the Sunnis and Shiites of the Muslim religion? Is that what we want in this country—sectarian warfare? 

These Taliban Christians who blot the airways with their venal pontification are obsessed with sin, both doing it and being forgiven for it. Their idea of Christianity is simply accepting Jesus Christ as your savior and your sins will be absolved. They don’t see the fault of that philosophy; that if all you need for salvation is to “accept” Christ, you can do anything you want—steal, murder, pillage, it will all be forgiven.

Because Santorum has accepted Christ into his heart, is he to be forgiven for being a corporate shill when he was senator and afterward? God may have forgiven Gingrich for his past indiscretions as a wife-cheater and corrupt politician, but what about his more recent sins as a lobbyist for corrupt corporations and as a race-baiter in the primaries?

Should Romney be forgiven for his vulture capitalism, wantonly destroying American companies and the lives of their laid-off workers, all in search of profit? Are the Virginia state legislators who voted to punish women seeking an abortion by forcibly raping them with sonogram probes to be forgiven? 

Christ’s gospel was all about a loving and forgiving God. He preached love, forgiveness, tolerance and charity. He trod a path others were suppose the follow—helping the poor, the sick, the downtrodden—things the right-wing seems to consider un-American. Preaching a self-righteous gospel of hate, greed and intolerance doesn’t make you a Christian. If anything, it makes you an Anti-Christ. 

Our Founding Fathers were very bright. Far from a group of “white Christian men” who founded this country for “white Christian men,” as the right-wing contends, our Founding Fathers were a diverse collection of nationalities, races and religions—Protestants, Catholics and, yes, Jews. Most, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, were deists, believing in a Supreme Being, admiring Jesus Christ as a philosopher, but wary of the church’s influence. 

Our Founding Fathers were wary because the age of theocratic monarchies was not ancient history to them as it is to us. They lived it as subjects of King George III. When they declared independence for England, they were declaring independence from a theocracy in which the king derived his right to rule from God and the church. 

It was with this in mind that they wrote the First Amendment. It not only promised Americans the right to believe as they wished, it was also a promise to keep religion out of government, to keep religion from being a requisite for patriotism. They knew a government ruled by any one religion would lead to intolerance, and intolerance would lead to suppression, and suppression would lead to some form of authoritarian government. They were right.

My cop friend understood that. So did Sinclair Lewis. I sincerely hope American voters do as well.