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Which Came First? The Mission, Or the Troops?

It’s Patriot Day this coming Sunday, a name which fails to register with most Americans if you mention it. “What day is that?” they ask.

Like most of you, I remember exactly where I was on the morning of September 11, 2001. I lived in a beachfront apartment in Santa Monica, Calif., with my mentor, a quadriplegic multi-millionaire. It was a rent-free apprenticeship in exchange for help with tasks the man could not physically perform.

We woke up around the same time every day, but I recall hearing the sound as he switched on the television. It was the sound of a television newscast, with footage of a city, but without narration. All you heard was the normal ambience sound of a city – the hum – and sirens. I was in the next room and could not see the screen.

We weren’t sure what had happened. By now the events were a good thirty minutes old, and the immediate reports had been swallowed up by the wall-to-wall coverage we would see for the next several weeks. But we sat in silence and disbelief, absorbing what had happened.

It bears mentioning that, as a young, arrogant leftist, I thought to myself, “Well, this was bound to happen sooner or later. It’s what happens when America sticks its nose where it doesn’t belong.”

But for whatever reason, that all changed six weeks later when I joined my family to visit my sister, who was living in Jersey City, N.J., at the time.

She had rushed to the waterfront of the Hudson River and watched the towers collapse before her very eyes, and traveled into the city to help with the rescue efforts.

We ascended the Empire State Building, and as we walked about the observation deck at the top, I could not help but look down.

I tried to imagine being so choked out by smoke from the explosion that I would actually leap to my own death.

I also remembered that the 9/11 attacks had struck close to my sister’s life and livelihood, and they had also struck 80 miles from Pittsburgh, Penn., where my parents lived at the time.

One year later, I raised my right hand and became a United States Soldier.

You know the general story from then on; the US invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq; the global left rebelled against the war and spent the next seven years undermining, badmouthing and opposing it.

Then the American left recaptured Congress and the White House, and now they can’t get enough of the war. They love it so much that they’ve launched a new offensive in Libya, just to show us how it’s really done.

We’re still waiting for the White House to request approval from Congress and the United Nations, but the French are very impressed; in fact, they’ve led the offensive.

You may recall the mantra of anti-war liberals during the years when George W. Bush was commander-in-chief of our nation’s armed forces: “I support the troops, but not the mission.”

And perhaps you’ve heard lately of rapper Soulja Boy, a microcosm of anti-American liberalism, who has come under fire for his song “Let’s Be Real,” in which he vomits, among other choice phrases, “F–k the troops.”

Throughout those wonderfully hypocritical years when the left relived their glory years of Vietnam, I heard plenty of people say the equivalent of “I support the troops, but not the mission.”

Here in the wayward land of Olympia, you could regularly observe the traitors gathered on the State St./4th Avenue bridge that crosses the port. They would display signs that read, “Support our troops … bring them home now.”

A close relative of mine declined to criticize me personally, trying to sound sincere by saying, “I objected to Vietnam, but I also thought it was horrible how they treated the soldiers when they returned home, and never approved of it.”

And when I criticized this doublespeak, I’ve been met with emotional responses that sounded too familiar:

“We support them and love them because they obey their orders and do what they’re told whether or not they want to or agree with it.”

Of all the people I’ve ever told that I served in Iraq, I estimate that roughly 75% of them winced, expressed morbid sympathy or acted as though I had to be handled delicately, as though I might at any moment explode or collapse in tears.

Unlike Vietnam, the left did not begin the Iraq War and mismanage it to the point that the Silent Majority stormed the polls to re-elect Richard Nixon in a 49-state landslide to correct a seven-year quagmire.

This time, they pointed fingers and cursed our military and our president until they won control, and now they’re busy undoing everything we fought and died for.

The odious fool who currently occupies the White House was among the Iraq War’s most vociferous congressional critics prior to his election. Now, he’s overseeing the extension of a US military presence beyond the withdrawal deadline. 

His running mate, our treasonous current vice president, is on record as having credited any success in Iraq to Iraqis, not American GIs, in 2007. Then, once his party controlled the government, he turned around and lavished praise on American GIs, recently dubbing us “the greatest generation of warriors ever.”

As one listener put it, it seems that before 2008, Barack Obama and Joe Biden supported the troops, but not the mission; and now that they control the government, they support the mission, but not the troops.

That’s two parts equal absurdity, I know, so let me expound. Just remember that in either case, the “mission” for Obama and Biden never was victory in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Supporting troops, if you believe that words have meaning and definition, implies supporting the mission.

Civilians don’t carry out the mission; they come over to take top-paying contractor jobs with Kellogg, Brown and Root, living in the best conditions and paying zero taxes. They cannot carry the mission out; they are not “our troops.” Only soldiers carry out the mission, and since the mid-1970s, only volunteer soldiers carry it out.

A person is not a “troop” or part of a troop until they enlist or commission as a member of the armed services.

In so doing, however, they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, obeying the orders of the president and the officers appointed over them.

The fact that every last one of our service members did what they did in Afghanistan and Iraq voluntarily, in a free and fair exchange with our government, gets completely obscured by the people who offer up the shallow, vacuous, weaselly retort, “I support the troops, but not the mission.”

Using that scurrilous logic, they may as well say, “I support people who’ve never been there and have nothing to do with it, but not the mission.”

President Hussein and his asinine sidekick Biden are the worst of them all. Not only did they not mean a word of what they said, but they now show up in front of battalions of soldiers and say the most wonderful things about us, as though they’ve long been our biggest supporters.

They now think that nobody will notice or say anything as they escalate and prolong the wars they swore to end, retaining all of the aggressive and effective postures put in place by the Bush administration to prevent another attack like the ones we suffered on that awful day 10 years ago.

So on this somber occasion, if you should hear that loathsome, adolescent mantra, “I support the troops, but not the mission” – and you won’t, because Bush is long gone – simply offer this in reply: “I support the mission, but not the troops.”

They’ll give you a puzzled look, or perhaps they’ll even dare to lecture you about patriotism.

But when you remind them that President Hussein’s mission is to win re-election rather than war, it will all make sense; you can support this particular mission (to elect a president) without supporting the troops (Hussein, Biden and their campaign staff).

And if that fails, just remind them that Hillary Clinton has already told us that dissent is patriotic, and that you would gladly support her in a primary challenge to President Hussein.

© 2011 Ed’s Voices LLC