Premiers To Fear: Obama And Romney Want To Rule the World

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – We have civilian control over military affairs.  That’s supposed to be the American tradition.  In the last 40 years, we really don’t have civilian control, see Vietnam War.  We’re supposed to have civilian control over military affairs.  If the people don’t want to go to war, you don’t go to war.  If the people don’t support a war, you end the war.  This is the way it’s supposed to work.  The military answers to us; we do not answer to the military.  Yes, that means we don’t answer to bureaucrats who report for duty about 50,000 of you listening to me right now every morning at the Pentagon.  You are not our military superiors.  You don’t get to lead us into battle simply because you have a security clearance.  Check out the rest in today’s transcript…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

AG:  Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow were really upset.

Mike:  Why?

AG:  Because they didn’t have an opportunity to really attack Romney on his stance.  They couldn’t attack him for being —

Mike:  Oh, he didn’t warmonger enough last night.

AG:  He was not hawkish enough for them to attack.

Mike:  He ran in the middle right.

AG:  If they were going to attack Romney, they also had to attack Obama because a lot of their stances weren’t all that different.  I thought that was an interesting tact.  With that being said, what MSNBC’s attacks on Romney were based around was the fact that he was kind of flip flopping or bending to popular opinion in terms of foreign policy.  Rachel Maddow in particular said I don’t buy this flip flopping by Romney because it involves 70,000 troops’ lives.  I am fine with people changing their mind, but to do it for political reasoning when people’s lives are on the line, I don’t buy.

Mike:  We have civilian control over military affairs.  That’s supposed to be the American tradition.  In the last 40 years, we really don’t have civilian control, see Vietnam War.  We’re supposed to have civilian control over military affairs.  If the people don’t want to go to war, you don’t go to war.  If the people don’t support a war, you end the war.  This is the way it’s supposed to work.  The military answers to us; we do not answer to the military.  Yes, that means we don’t answer to bureaucrats who report for duty about 50,000 of you listening to me right now every morning at the Pentagon.  You are not our military superiors.  You don’t get to lead us into battle simply because you have a security clearance.

Having said that, Maddow was actually correct, but she’s right for the wrong reason.  If Romney is responding to popular opposition to the warmonger state, then he is doing what he is supposed to do.  He is allowing the civilian to control the military.  If the people are saying, “We don’t want any more wars, dude.  Don’t you lead us into another ground war,” then the people’s representatives who ultimately declare that war are supposed to defer, and certainly the president, who is only supposed to execute the war if the people’s representatives declare it, is supposed to follow suit.  I don’t know what she’s upset about.  That’s the way you want it to happen.

AG:  I agree with that completely.  I guess the confusing part in my mind was she, in one hand, was saying it’s all right for someone to have an evolution of their political ideology or where they stand on policy issues, but at the same time she was then slamming Romney for having, in her mind, a political change of ideas.  I’d say there’s criticism there if Romney wanted to do the opposite and go from a dovish stance to a more hawkish stanch.  In that instance, you’re putting more people’s lives in danger and on the line.  In the idea that he was moving from having more troops stationed overseas to one where bringing them out of harm’s way, that’s a positive.

Mike:  I think it’s a positive.

AG:  You can argue he’s not doing it fast enough or he’s not doing it maybe in the best managed way.  I think that would be a fair criticism and discussion to have.  The idea that you’re going to criticize Romney for moving to a political stance that should, in my mind at least, keep our men and women safer and have less instances of PTSD, less casualties in the field, I think that’s a positive.  For MSNBC’s reaction last night to be one of anger that they couldn’t attack Romney for his stance I thought was very telling.

Chris Matthews then went after the conservative commentator on MSNBC’s roundtable because he thought it was disingenuous of Romney and you can’t, when running for president, have someone that’s flip flopping.  The conservative came back and said I’m not putting a value judgment on what Romney’s doing, but you can see that public sentiment is moving one way and Romney is moving that way as well.  The criticism there of him moving towards where the public opinion lies he thought was false and wrong.  I thought it was an interesting discussion, and one where if John Bolton or any other member of the real neocon wing of the Republican Party was by some chance watching MSNBC last night, I think their reaction would have been very, very interesting.   Tomorrow, Michael Scheuer on at the top of the third hour, will have some interesting insight into that as well.

Mike:  I think that the telling moment is that both sides are upset that their guy apparently didn’t either defend the wars that have already been fought or didn’t forcefully call for more wars to be waged.  We’re at least having a semi, quasi, pseudo debate on the continuance of the warfare state, which is long overdue.  It’s perceived from the ground that we as the United States have some God-given responsibility or God-ordained responsibility and then right to execute all of these things that we heard we’re supposed to execute.  I want to be a Romneybot and come on the air every day and say, “Of course, I agree with all my colleagues.  Of course I have to vote for Mitt Romney.  Of course I have to support him with every fiber of my being.”  Then I hear some of the things I heard last night and I can’t do it.

What is this business about securing civil liberties for women in the Middle East?  Not one solitary Marine ought to ever have to put his life on the line, as Michael Scheuer puts it, so Mrs. Muhammed can vote, or so that Mrs. Muhammed can go off to the nightclub, hook up with some single jihadi stooge, have illicit, outside-of-marriage sex with him, become impregnated and then go off to a Sandra Fluke clinic and have an abortion.  We’re trying to paganize.  All this talk about [mocking] “Making democracy safe.”  That wasn’t the way it was used.  “Instituting civil societies in the Middle East.”  Hello!  This is Afghanistan you’re talking about.  These people have been goat herders since the 3rd century B.C., for crying out loud.  When I hear that, who is telling him to say things like that?  Who does that appeal to?

You could probably find some very uncivil people camped out on the banks of the Amazon River right now.  If you’re looking for a lack of civility, go to South America.  Rumor has it there are still headhunters there.  How many of you are old enough to remember watching episodes of Gilligan’s Island when the castaways would find some totem pole that was a remnant of some islander society that were a bunch of headhunters?  Of course, they lived in great fear of these headhunters because they didn’t want to lose their head.  The Skipper would always say, “Gilligan, those are savages.”  Well, I would suggest to you that if you’re looking for a lack of civility in human affairs, you look no further than that 2,000-mile-long river called the Amazon.

You see my point here?  The idea here that it is the United States’ job – ultimately the American has to support these endeavors with their tax dollars and tax slavery going on into the next generation.  Somehow it is our job to enforce civility?  I guess at the end of our bayonets, which the president informed us last night we don’t have any longer, we’re supposed to make civil society and civilized societies a reality in places where the people don’t want to make it?

There were two parts last night in the chat room I can recall, I actually said to the chatters, “I wish Obama hadn’t said that because I’m going to have to go on the air tomorrow.  If it comes up, I’m going to have to agree with him.”  The first thing he said was earlier in the debate, he said to Governor Romney, and he was actually echoing something that Governor Huntsman had said to Governor Romney in an earlier debate, or maybe to Rick Santorum, and that was, “Governor Romney, the Syrians are the only people that can fix Syria.”

End Mike Church Show Transcript