Ronald Reagan Would Be Ashamed of GOP Anti-Military Candidates Today
By June 27, 2011, Rep. Allen West was so alarmed that he expressed concern about the direction the GOP is going in and judged that none of the candidates who attended the May/June 2011 GOP primary debates understood defense issues or was committed to protecting the U.S….That’s because Republicans are no longer committed to, and no longer care about, the military.
Today, the GOP — contrary to popular belief — is no longer the party of a strong defense. It’s now America’s second pro-weak-defense party, desiring to use the military as a billpayer for runaway domestic spending and to treat defense as just another line item in the federal budget. It’s indistinguishable from the Democratic Party in that respect. — Zbigniew Mazurak
The Republican Party used to be the party standing for a strong defense. This was true from at least the Goldwater times. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ronald Reagan strengthened the GOP’s commitment to a strong military and
simultaneously devoted much time to explaining this issue to the American people. He frequently reminded Republicans of various stripes that the GOP was a three-legged stool, consisting of social, fiscal, and defense conservatives. Each of these stools belonged in the GOP, and none of them was more important than the others. Thus, the GOP was kept united, and the country was kept safe.
In 2000, another Republican president re-committed the GOP to the goal of a strong defense, after twelve years of continous defense cuts. Since the late 2000s, however, Republicans have been abandoning this commitment and principle, with the result that nowadays, most Republican politicians, and the party as a whole, are no longer committed to a strong military. In the best case, they’re indifferent, and in the worst cases (e.g., Sen. Coburn, Rep. Paul), they’re hostile and supportive of massive defense cuts.
Sure, some of the Republican presidential candidates will offer token objections to the Vietnam-style pullout of American troops from Iraq. But it’s easy to see that conservatives in every sector of American life are doing “too little, too late” to meet the challenge of crumbling tradition and values. Yes, this includes the churches as well.