This morning I happened to see one of our soldiers dressed in desert camouflage at a restaurant.

Waves of thoughts suddenly coalesced, and they began with the quote from the New Testament: “There is no greater love than that one lays down his life for his friends.”

How much greater is that love, when a soldier lays down his life for strangers in a foreign land?

As we debate deficits and taxes and spending and BIG BRObama’s Hell-th Care and the general monstrousness of everything planned by this not-so-crypto-socialist administration, as the Mainstream Media deliberately de-emphasizes the military’s activities, unless the military makes a mistake, we must remember that our military still “lays down their lives” every day, so that we may have these debates, and more admirably, even astoundingly, so that absolute strangers in foreign countries may ultimately enjoy American-style freedoms!

This has been the great American tradition: our soldiers have freed countries around the world, and too often the response is the false charge of imperialism and colonialism.  Today it is the theocratic Islamo-Terrorists who are the imperialists, trying to create a 7th-Century theocratic fantsasyland.  And yet American sacrifices to prevent that from taking place are denigrated or ignored.

That our president not-so-secretly detests our military, as proven by his snubbing of General McChrystal, his contempt for military justice, and his uneasiness with the term “victory,” should be a national disgrace.

As Pamela Geller wrote late last year:

“Obama is not a wartime president, and certainly no commander in chief. He is sending thousands to their death in Afghanistan for no purpose, no objective. As Obama said recently, “victory is not the goal.” His meandering, procrastination, and indecision are a prescription for casualties (the wrong kind: ours, not theirs). It makes no sense strategically. A weak, aimless strategy gets our boys killed.

America should be outraged.

Obama’s contempt for the military is palpable. Since he took office, we have been experiencing the highest U.S. troop casualty rate ever in Afghanistan, month after month. Why is Obama keeping our finest young Americans there when victory is not the objective? If he has no goal and no plan for victory, he should bring our soldiers home. Obama’s aimless, useless operation in Afghanistan is a death trap.”

http://newsmax.com/PamelaGeller/obama-afghanistan-terror/2009/09/30/id/335289

I am always humbled these days, when I see a soldier: I did not join the military, and looking back, believe that to have been a gap in my life.  That our president, the supposed commander-in-chief, shows no humility before them, but rather smugly feels free to use them as background props for the cameras, again should outrage America.

An earlier diary of mine meditated upon the similarities between today and 5th-century A.D. Rome.

http://www.redstate.com/ausonius/2010/01/24/leftist-barbarians-and-the-decline-and-fall-of-america/

In that diary I mentioned the story of “The Last Roman,” Aetius, who for twenty years defeated Germanic and Hunnic barbarians, including the seemingly invincible Attila, in an attempt to preserve what was left of the Roman state.  Aetius did this with a force that was itself made up of newly Romanized, former barbarians.

The Emperor Valentinian III, a jealous, spoiled, and cowardly politician, feared Aetius might want to become emperor himself, and after summoning him for a budget meeting, killed Aetius in front of various ministers.

A poet-politician named Sidonius famously told the emperor: “I do not understand your motives, sir, as to why you have taken your left hand and cut off your right.”

I wonder more and more, I fear more and more, that we have a president who is paralleling Valentinian III, and is cutting off America’s right hand with his left!

This is why I call on everyone to keep in mind the war our soldiers are still fighting, in the great American tradition of freedom, and also in the tradition of the Christian forces under Polish king John Sobieski at Vienna in 1683, and the sailors and soldiers at Lepanto under Don Juan in 1571, who stopped the Turks from invading pushing deeper into Europe.

With a president uninterested in victory, we must be more vigilant and active than ever before.