STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

The Rites of Spring in America!

At a time when we look forward to the natural pleasures of springtime, we, Americans, are encountering a slight blip in our well-intended, salubrious future. Let us begin this “Rites of Spring” on a minor note [flat]. POTUS Obama and his combat-allergic Sec. of Defense, Ashton Carter, have just selected the new Vice Chief of Naval Operation, who is by law, second in command to the Chief of Naval Operations [CNO]. Her name is Admiral Michelle Howard, a lovely African-American woman who has been in command of only one NON-CAPITAL ship, the USS Rushmore [LSD-47].

Clearly her route to the exalted position of deputy CNO has been replete with political cronyism, affirmative action, and a complete disregard for competency/achievement. 

Over the past seven years, Obama has relieved over 250 highly qualified/combat-tested senior military officers in all the services. The real issue begs the ubiquitous question of what is really more important: the ability to analyze and implement a war? Or, make certain that those who really don’t know how to fight a war include individuals with varying sexual preferences be it—being a man, a woman, a transgender, gay, lesbian, or LGBT?

What we have here, is an inverse meritocracy of incompetency.

The answer really depends not on me but on those other senior military officials who have apparently attained an awe-inspiring moribund state of silence and compliance. Next, I will go from a minor key to a diminished key in our overture of the Rites of Spring. How does the esteemed Republican Party that gave us such illustrious names as Gen. Eisenhower, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Gen. Jerry Boykin, Gen. Mike Flynn allow themselves to torpedo the people’s choice of Donald Trump as the next presidential nominee?

Are they so self-hating and so borderline in their disposition that they will destroy their own viability as the alternative party to a crooked Billary, and an avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders? Then, we arrive at that gnawing problem that has resisted any rational answer from the present executive branch. When will they, as the representatives of the people, indict/convict an obviously guilty Hillary Clinton?

Does a former ‘honey-trapped’ DCI, ex Gen. David Petreaus, have to remain the only example of legal accountability from this Obama administration? The last point on my Rites of Spring concerns a simple question of how long must we really remain in Afghanistan, when many, if not most of the indigenous troops whom we have trained, are defecting in droves back to the Taliban?
I don’t expect an answer because most of our federal employees are busy protecting their respective pensions.What we really need is a complete Spring Cleaning all of our salient, dysfunctional civilian/military institutions.Yet that will have to wait for Trump.

 I will end with words from Stephen Crane, the brilliant writer of the civil war novel, The Red Badge of Courage:

“Tradition, thou art for suckling children

  Thou are the enlivening milk for babes,

But no meat for men is thee.”