The Council has spoken

The regular face-to-face meeting of the Watchers Council did not take place this week due to heightened security measures. It seems that some of the Council's operatives were able to capture a highly placed member of the DNC and transport him/her to one of our secure holding facilities. After waterboarding the prisoner revealed that the location of this weeks council meeting had been obtained by the DNC and that plans were underway to have the Democrat party's allies in al Qaedi or Hamas stage a raid in order to eliminate the Council once and for all.

Each Council member was transported to one of the Council's secure underground centers and a virtual meeting was held using the Council's dedicated satellite communications system. The results were that the winning council post was Memorial Day by Done With Mirrors. Here is a sample:

These are people to remember. They are the honorable dead of a new war. Not all of them are soldiers, but the new war sweeps up more than soldiers in its causes. And all believed in something. They believed in it enough to get up and do something about it, at peril of their lives. Whether it was themselves, their comrades, duty, their mission, their nation, the people of the world, the people of Iraq, the people of America -- or even peace. They went to the war to do something about it.

I believe none of them wanted to die. Probably until the moment the darkness whelmed them they were trying to live, to somehow make it. But all had been close enough to Fate by then to know her faceless, pitiless stare. There came a time to choose -- it came many times for some of them -- and they chose the brave thing over the easy one.

The winning non-Council entry was John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account by US News and World Report. Here is a sample:

Of the many personal accounts coming to light about the almost unbelievably cruel treatment accorded American prisoners of war in Vietnam, none is more dramatic than that of Lieut. Commander John S. McCain III—Navy flier, son of the admiral who commanded the war in the Pacific, and a prisoner who came in "for special attention" during 5½ years of captivity in North Vietnam.

Now that all acknowledged prisoners are back and a self-imposed seal of silence is off, Commander McCain is free to answer the questions many Americans have asked:

What was it really like? How prolonged were the tortures and brutality? How did the captured U.S. airmen bear up under the mistreatment—and years spent in solitary? How did they preserve their sanity? Did visiting "peace groups" really add to their troubles? How can this country's military men be conditioned to face such treatment in the future without crumbling?

There is no question that John McCain showed great physical courage in the face of his North Vietnamese captors. It is simply a shame that he has been unable to show matching political courage in the face of the mainstream media and the Democrat party.

In the history of the United States there are three presidents who gained the office chiefly on the strength of their military accomplishments. George Washington, Ulysses S Grant and Dwight D Eisenhower. Each of these men served this nation with honor and distinction during its three times of greatest peril, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II.

In each case a grateful nation rewarded the military leadership of these men by granting them the highest civilian office in the land and in each case the performance of the men was to one degree or another disappointing.

In the case of Eisenhower he was a moderate to liberal Republican who was selected by what we would today call the "country club" wing of the Republican party to beat off a challenge by the genuinely conservative Robert Taft. The 1952 election presented an historical opportunity to repeal virtually the entire "New Deal", especially the Social Security Ponzi scheme which will bankrupt the nation before the year 2050. Rather than do this Eisenhower upheld the New Deal and expanded Social Security and thereby set the stage for the further expansion of the federal government under the Johnson administration. Thus the rise of the Left can be laid at the feet of Ike just as much as FDR.

U.S. Grant led the United States military to victory in the Civil War, but his administration was one of the most corrupt in the history of the Republic. In fact to find one more corrupt you have to wait until 1992.

Although it is a secular blasphemy against the civil religion of the United States to criticize George Washington the fact remains that in the great debate between the Federalists and the Republicans he was on the wrong (Federalist) side. He promoted the political career of Alexander Hamilton who would have turned the US into a despotism little different from a European monarchy.

The fact is that the military is at its heart a giant government bureaucracy which is funded by taxes laid upon the productive part of the US economy. The budget of the military is set by congress and congress has approval over procurement of weapon systems and even the promotion of its highest ranking officers.

The fact that the military feeds at the same public trough as welfare agencies and other bastions of the liberal left creates on some level a similar mindset. This mindset does not translate into the kind of "governing principle" which comprehends the best way to manage a civilian free market economy.

We need to honor and venerate our military heroes but we need to realize that just as we would not take the CEO of a fortune 500 corporation with no military experience and place him in command of a Marine expeditionary unit on the eve of battle you would also not take the commander of that MEU and place in in charge of developing tax and regulatory policy for that corporation.

If you need more convincing just consider the performance in civilian political positions of high ranking generals Alexander Haig and Colin Powell.

Other Watchers Council results for the week can be seen here.