Mother of a Fallen US Navy SEAL speaks about what is important to her while a self absorbed POL focuses on only on himself

Thanks to Gateway pundit for putting this video front and center. It needs to be seen by all those who care about our nation and those who swore the oath to defend our nation against all enemies, foriegn and domestic.

All our prayers and thoughts to Karen and Billy Vaughn. True Patriots, Shipmates in the US Navy and all others will never forget the sacrifice your son made and your sacrifice for giving us your son to defend our nation and way of life.

Empty words from politicians and a self absorbed President mean little to the Mother of this fine Patriot. To Obama, this warrior was one more political pawn.

To a grieving Mother and Father, this was their little boy, a son who was only theirs for a short and meaingful life, given freely to preserve our Nation.

The long unbroken line....

The changing evolution of how our soldiers fight was made by advances in technology and more efficient methods of protecting the basic infantryman and by doing so, making sure he was able to stay in the battle....I was on the USS Constitution back in 1997 giving tours to our guests who wanted to see the ship. One woman asked me if I ever thought about if you could trade places, would I have wanted to been on the ship back in the late 1700-early 1800s when she was in her hey-day.

I thought about it for a minute and said, "No ma'am...they dealt with bad food, exposure to the elements, lack of decent medical care, etc. I am glad to be here today to tell their story."

Yes, it would have been something to see what it was like when the military and service was a rougher experience without the basic things we take for granted. We are the legacy of the sacrifices made by those who preceeded us and we able to share their story with those who will follow us in the long unbroken line of Patriots who defend our way of life.

The picture enclosed is of a flag flying at half-mast over FOB Lagman in Afghanistan.


Where They Got Their Grit
WALL STRET JOURNAL
By ALEXANDER ROSE

Why men fight, or more precisely, why they hazard their lives in combat, is a question of abiding interest, given the lunacy of braving the hiss and spat of bullets, of risking death and disfigurement by foes unseen, when shirking or flight offer tempting alternatives.

Surely, after a few unpleasant minutes in the maelstrom of Waterloo or Fallujah, Iwo Jima or Marathon, any "rational army would run away," as John Keegan, the author of the classic "The Face of Battle," famously observed. (Sir John was quoting Montesquieu, or at least thought he was: I recently passed on to him my finding that it was actually G.K. Chesterton.)


Yet, no matter who said it, most armies do not run away. Consider the American forces in Afghanistan, now in almost their 10th year of fighting—the same length of time, coincidentally, as the Greeks besieged the Trojans. As Agamemnon discovered, what with Achilles sulking in his tent and Odysseus intriguing behind his back, it is hard to keep warriors motivated for so long.

Nevertheless, despite multiple deployments, unclear strategic objectives, unrealistic tasking, a steady increase in casualties, and sometimes capricious political and public support, the esprit de corps and lethal effectiveness of American frontline units remain remarkably high.

As Christopher Hamner makes clear in his superb "Enduring Battle," America's warriors were similarly steadfast in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II. Why did American soldiers remain so persistently, or irrationally, devoted to duty in those conflicts? The traditional answer is that, ever since Homer and within every army, primary-group cohesion—the band-of-brothers-style loyalty to squad and platoon mates that includes a willingness to sacrifice one's life to save theirs—has been the universal, immutable motivator.


Mr. Hamner challenges this view by arguing that technology is in fact the cause: specifically, weaponry that between 1776 and 1945 fired farther, fiercer and more frequently, creating a need for new battlefield tactics that in turn changed how American soldiers experienced combat.

In the 18th century, says Mr. Hamner, armies robotically maneuvered in tight lines and columns under the strict watch (and stern discipline) of their officers. By the Civil War, to evade the ever deadlier enemy shot, formations that once had been dense were dispersed across the field and even permitted to seek cover. Soldiers, having escaped from the beady and vengeful eye of their superiors, could no longer be threatened with the lash or the gallows for their reluctance to serve, if necessary, as cannon fodder. Persuasion—in the form of stirring appeals to self-interest and core values—replaced forceful prodding as a means to motivate infantrymen.


The appeal to self-interest and core values became still more pronounced in the 20th century; from World War II onward, the American soldier was autonomous, not an automaton. Unlike his forebears, who had glumly accepted the randomness of death as they were ordered to advance toward the sound of guns, the modern infantryman is trained to follow rules of good practice (i.e., do it this way and you'll be OK) as he thinks fit to ensure survival. This radical shift in attitude and expectation helps keep today's American soldier motivated to fight. Monarch of his own fate, never a slave to chance, the modern warrior relies on his skills, judgment and prowess to control the future.

One can cavil that Mr. Hamner relies too much on instances of big-army conventional warfare to argue this assertion. Irregular outfits like Revolutionary militias, for example, did not fight in close-order linear fashion and were never subject to harsh discipline, so what motivated them? Those plucky, cranky Yankees at Bunker Hill were very much their own ornery men.

We should be wary of truisms, too, that are partly falsisms. Despite popular perceptions of the severity of military discipline in the 18th century, it was by no means universally feared, for its application and vigor varied widely depending on unit, environment and commander. For every martinet of an officer there was a merciful one. And the "dumb robot" stereotype of the soldiery in that era turns individuals of flesh and blood into abstractions.

A more serious objection concerns Mr. Hamner's presumption that advancing technology unilaterally causes institutional change (in tactics, training, planning, equipment, force structure) and thus dictates combat behavior.

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, when excitement over the possibilities of technology ran white-hot, the idea that inventions and innovations acted as agents of change became conventional wisdom, particularly in military circles. By the 1980s and 1990s, the high priests of the futuristic movement known around the Pentagon as the Revolution in Military Affairs were confident that the silicon chip would forge a gleaming new era in warfare. Information technology, precision-guided munitions, stealth, satellite surveillance and sophisticated command-and-control would henceforth win wars swiftly without need of ground troops, brute force or bodybags.

Alas, 'twas but a cruel illusion. The arrival of a given technology—whether breechloading rifles, tanks or computers—does not itself miraculously produce progressive change or induce soldiers to behave differently. It's not that simple. In fact, it is the prevailing culture—a community's outlook, values, fears, myths, ideology, arts and traditions—that defines the rate and extent of any technology's adoption and use, its diffusion and impact. This is as true in the military as in any other quarter of society.

How we war, in short, is culturally specific, not technologically determined. In the 1500s and 1600s, for instance, the throned dynasts of Europe, Africa and Asia all put the same technology—gunpowder—to widely disparate uses and ends. Japan's reactionary Tokugawa shogunate employed gunpowder to obliterate troublemakers and then banned all guns—even its own—for the sake of preserving the samurais' sword-wielding hegemony.

The ruling Mamelukes of Egypt also forbade guns, not because they feared rebellions but because they haughtily believed that firearms were fit only for infidels. Meanwhile, the nearby Sharifs of Morocco enterprisingly outfitted their cavalrymen with guns to defeat the Portuguese and to establish themselves as a Mediterranean power.

Even in Europe, the place where gunpowder is assumed to have rapidly "caused" Western superiority and created the modern world, it actually took centuries to replace good old crossbows, longbows and pikes with firearms. As late as 1776 even that forward-thinking fellow Benjamin Franklin was convinced that pikes and bows were more effective and less troublesome than guns.

The Pentagon's Revolution in Military Affairs school unfortunately never grasped the concept that other cultures might be able to frustrate advances in technology. The puzzling inability to win outright in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fierce and strange foes encountered there, and the alien attitudes and mercurial tribalism of that theater's inhabitants made it imperative to understand an enemy's culture as intimately as our own, but we are only now coming up to speed.

Since military historiography often reflects current events, historians have begun to broaden the traditional master-narrative of American military affairs. In light of the bitter experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, Civil War scholars are spending less time on the big battles in the East and more on the extraordinarily violent guerrilla fighting in the West. There is, as well, a deeper interest—the reasons for which are obvious—in the 19th-century Army's efforts at Indian pacification and its "nation-building" operations on the frontier.

In keeping with this trend, Wayne Lee focuses his "Barbarians and Brothers" on the period 1500 to 1865, proposing that there was once a distinctive Anglo-American way of warfare. Mr. Lee delves into topics unfamiliar to many Americans, such as the Elizabethan wars in Ireland and the English Civil War, before shifting his attention to America and discussing the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. His central claim is that how the enemy fared depended on whether acculturated Anglo-Americans regarded their foes as dirty-fighting savages or as civilized combatants. If the former, well, they would be annihilated or ruthlessly suppressed and their land expropriated; if the latter, assimilation or reformation was preferable and they were treated honorably.

The author ends his panoramic analysis with the Civil War, for his model no longer holds in an era when (American) atrocities against civilians are rare and restraint common. Culture is not immutable, after all. While there are certainly any number of long-lived continuities between today and 1865, our culture has changed vastly over the intervening sesquicentennium, and there were similarly profound shifts in the century after 1775.

Americans themselves are much transformed since independence, and as "Enduring Battle" and "Barbarians and Brothers" demonstrate, today they not only fight differently from men of yore but fight for different reasons.

—Mr. Rose is the author of "Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring" and "American Rifle: A Biography."

Oikophobia and how the Liberal Elite have taken their cues from the TALIBAN

Definitions are extremely important as you need to understand the words you use to be sure that your prose conveys the essential ideas & concepts to your reader.

Consider the following definition :

Taliban--fundamentalist Islamic clerics currently attempting to control Afghanistan; the Taliban have achieved worldwide notoriety for their drastic imposition of their own severe interpretation of Islamic law on the Afghan society

In the enclosed article by James Taranto, he describes what has been called "
Oikophobia or "fear of the familiar: - the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' "

He describes that the Liberal Elite alledges that Americans are either uninformed, dullards, bigots or all of the above because the majority of Americans don't agree with their warped view of right & wrong." A prime example is that critics of the President have been labeled " racists " simply for not agreeing with him or openly objecting with his point-of-view on issues.

I make an additional supposition... that the Liberal Elite in America are using the same methods as the Taliban. If the Taliban "have achieved worldwide notoriety for their drastic imposition of their own severe interpretation of Islamic law on the Afghan society", it is my supposition that the Liberal Elite " have achieved worldwide notoriety for their drastic imposition of their own severe interpretation of Liberal interpretations of our laws on the AMERICAN society."

The only difference is that those who are trying to make us feel shameful about the America we love have not started beheading "Infidels", re: YOU & ME.....

It's time the voters went JIHAD on the "American Liberal Taliban"....November is the time and the best weapon is your right to vote for the candidate of YOUR choice - send them a message - Fire for full effect.

MY message to the American Liberal Elite Taliban - " STAND BY FOR INCOMING " - You find out what Americans REALLY think about you & your warped views of America in November.

-----------------------------------------------

Oikophobia
Why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.

By JAMES TARANTO - WSJ

If you think it's offensive for a Muslim group to exploit the 9/11 atrocity, you're an anti-Muslim bigot and un-American to boot. It is a claim so bizarre, so twisted, so utterly at odds with common sense that it's hard to believe anyone would assert it except as some sort of dark joke. Yet for the past few weeks, it has been put forward, apparently in all seriousness, by those who fancy themselves America's best and brightest, from the mayor of New York all the way down to Peter Beinart.

What accounts for this madness? Charles Krauthammer notes a pattern:

Promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Krauthammer portrays this as a cynical game: "Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. . . . What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument."

But this has its limits as a political strategy. Krauthammer writes that "the Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November," and no one will credit him for boldness in that prediction. Some may disagree with his reckoning as to the reason for that likely loss: that "a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them."

But can anyone argue that a show of contempt is a winning political strategy? The question answers itself and implies that the contempt is genuine.


What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"--or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.

In more cerebral moments, the elitists of the left invoke a kind of Marxism Lite to explain away opinions and values that run counter to their own. Thus Barack Obama's notorious remark to the effect that economic deprivation embitters the proles, so that they cling to guns and religion. (Ironically, Obama recently said through a spokesman that he is Christian.) Here's Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor secretary, explaining "The Anatomy of Intolerance" to readers of TalkingPointsMemo.com:

Many Americans (and politicians who [sic] the polls) don't want a mosque at Manhattan's Ground Zero. . . .

Where is all this coming from?

It's called fear. When people are deeply anxious about holding on to their homes, their jobs, and their savings, they look for someone to blame. And all too often they find it in "the other"--in people who look or act differently, who come from foreign lands, who have what seem to be strange religions, who cross our borders illegally. . . .

Economic fear is the handmaiden of intolerance. It's used by demagogues who redirect the fear and anger toward people and groups who aren't really to blame but are easy scapegoats.

So if some Americans are afraid of people "who have what seem to be strange religions," it must be a totally irrational reaction to "economic insecurity." It couldn't possibly have anything to do with an act of mass murder committed in the name of the religion in question.

And Reich doesn't just fail to see the obvious. He dehumanizes his fellow Americans by treating their values, feelings and opinions as no more than reflexive reactions to material conditions. Americans in fact are a very tolerant people. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was no serious backlash against Muslims. What makes them angry--what makes us angry--is the bigotry of the elites.

The Ground Zero mosque is an affront to the sensibilities of ordinary Americans. "The center's association with 9/11 is intentional and its location is no geographic coincidence," as the Associated Press has reported. That Americans would find this offensive is a matter of simple common sense. The liberal elites cannot comprehend common sense, and, incredibly, they think that's a virtue. After all, common sense is so common.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates how what are sometimes dismissed as mere matters of "culture" tie in with economic and social policy:

The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence's question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.
The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France. It will be felt soon everywhere, and the result may not be what the oiks expect.

There is one important difference between the American oik and his European counterpart. American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as--and may even believe themselves to be--superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as "un-American" for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Yet the oiks' vision of themselves as an intellectual aristocracy violates the first American principle ever articulated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."

This cannot be reconciled with the elitist notion that most men are economically insecure bitter clinging intolerant bigots who need to be governed by an educated elite. Marxism Lite is not only false; it is, according to the American creed, self-evidently false. That is why the liberal elite finds Americans revolting.