Free Republic

The 2008 presidential campaign is starting to take on the contours of the 1980 race. Jimmy Carter was the Democratic candidate back then. He also happened to be the incumbent president. Beyond that difference with today and its term-limited George Bush, there are eerie resemblances between then and now. Yes, the economy stunk in 1980 and smells fairly fragrant now. But recall that the "national malaise" of the economy in 1980 was not the fundamental reason Carter lost. Polls showed he still had a chance. They also pointed to the issue that did him in -- the Iranian hostage crisis....

Do you have a "Support the Troops" sticker on your car? How do you support our troops? What do you do differently since the war started? Has your suffering increased the way it has for our troops and Iraqi citizens in harm's way? Ask your grandparents what did they did when WW2 was going on? Did their president ask them to take more vacations to Disneyland to help our economy after Pearl Harbor was bombed? If you believe we are in Iraq becasue Al Queda hates freedom, I've got some land in FL to sell you. If you really want...

The All-Volunteer Force (AVF), arguably the most successful and widely hailed federal program of the past thirty years, is failing. The conditions that enabled the AVF to thrive through the 1980s and 1990s no longer pertain. The erosion of those conditions, greatly accelerated by the Iraq War, is exposing as false the great unspoken assumption undergirding U.S. policy since the end of the cold war, namely, that the United States can enjoy the prerogatives of being the world’s sole superpower on the cheap.