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“brings” denotes current. Eisenhower has been dead a long, long time.

It is one of the most common liberal arguments to misapply Eiesenhower’s statement.

“brings” denotes current. Eisenhower has been dead a long, long time.

Nice recovery, lol. Took you about twenty minutes though.

At the time Eisenhower made his "military industrial complex" remarks, he was pretty well anathema to conservatives. Not just the fringe like the Birchers, but the mainstream conservatives like the National Review staff of the time disliked him for failing to repeal the New Deal social and regulatory legislation and for not being sufficiently aggressive against the Soviets and their satellites. Eisenhower was blamed for letting Castro take over Cuba and not intervening when the Soviets suppressed the uprising in Hungary and other Communist states. John Kennedy ran for the White House with accusations that Eisenhower's poor administration had led to a "missile gap" with the Soviets.

The context of Eisenhower's speech dealt with the close association between the military and defense contractors, one that persists to the present. Leaders in these industries and many high ranking officers of the time were aligned with Eisenhower's nemesis in the GOP: the conservatives led first by Taft and later by Goldwater. Numerous active and retired generals like Douglas MacArthur, Charles Willoughby, Edwin Walker, and Curtis LeMay had strong ties with the conservative wing of the GOP and even the "farther shores" of conspiracists such as the John Birch Society. Think about movies like Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove from the early 1960s, where right wing generals are the villains trying to overthrow the government or start a nuclear war with the USSR.

It is ironic that Ron Paul, whose political support draws in part from the lineal descendants of the 1960s era conspiracists and old school conservatives, such as the 9-11 Troothers, cites the old Eisenhower rhetoric originally aimed at those very people.