Anyone who thinks gathering in a library to hear like minds pontificate that “war bad”, “peace good”, can help to bring an end to war and a lasting peace is - delusional. But he's so full of himself he can't see how wrong he is.
Barry's my age. He's lived a sheltered life and “endured” many years of college and no real job. What he knows of war he's absorbed from folks who have also never served.
He's never witnessed massive anti-Pershing demonstrations first hand. Experienced the Red Army Faction blowing up US Army POVs by placing a bomb under the seat of the unsuspecting person. He's probably never heard of the LaBelle disco bombing. He has no idea of what it means to live in a city surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops ready to turn it into the largest concentration camp in history at a moment's notice. Nor has he ever had to worry about the Soviets finally saying Solidarity is an enemy of the people and, oh, by the way, we won't conduct combat operations in Poland for as long as we did in Hungary or Czechoslovakia.
Barry's daughters have never had to ride to their elementary school with MPs onboard their school bus with combat load, and a jeep following with a mounted Ma Deuce. Once they get there they see a school with flatbed trailers surrounding the entire school and loaded to the school roof with full sandbags. This was to guard against terrorists. The same type of terrorists that some of Barry's cohorts and kool-aid drinkers pal around with.
He's never deployed to the East German border, stood watch over nuclear facilities in -30F weather or picked sand out of every crack in his body for a year.
In short, it's impossible for Barry to “Break” the War Mentality without experiencing the preparations for war or war itself. To think otherwise is - delusional. The media, and Barry himself, have played-up his world travels and oh so marvelous cosmopolitan he is for those world travels. Problem is Barry saw what they wanted him to see. Not what he could have seen from our point of view had he served in the military.
Our country has a long, proud history of a civilian executive. A civilian executive who has served in America's military. Barry is the first break in that chain. And reading this paper of his in that light gives me the willies.
Or have an alert called at 2am.
As far as military service, there have been many who never wore the uniform to include:
John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Martin Van Buren
Grover Cleveland
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Warren G. Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Bill Clinton
Barack Obama
bttt