On September 20, 2012, Ann Romney appeared on Radio Iowa to help her husband, Mitt, carry the state.
Many Republicans feared that Romney had forfeited his chance for victory in November. His videotaped comments to wealthy donors–in which he dismissed “47%” of Americans as non-tax-paying government dependents–had drawn criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.
So when the interviewer asked Ann to respond to Mitt’s Republican critics, she was ready.
“Stop it. This is hard,” she said, in a tone that sounded like an angry mother defending her son’s slipping grades at a PTA meeting.
Mitt and Ann Romney
“You want to try it? Get in the ring. This is hard and, you know, it’s an important thing that we’re doing right now, and it’s an important election.”
Then she aimed her ire at those Americans who hadn’t yet accepted her husband as the Coming Messiah.
“And it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country.”
Click here: Ann Romney defends Mitt – Anderson Cooper 360 – CNN.com Blogs
Maybe Ann simply felt her husband deserved uncritical loyalty from his fellow Republicans. Or maybe she felt mounting dismay at seeing her chances of becoming First Lady going down the toilet.
After all, on April 16, she and Mitt had given a joint interview to ABC News that pulsed with hubris.
Asked if he had anything to say to President Barack Obama, Mitt replied: “Start packing.” As if the most powerful leader of the Western World should snap to attention at Mitt’s command.
And Ann gushed: “I believe it’s Mitt’s time. I believe the country needs the kind of leadership he’s going to offer… So I think it’s our turn now.”
Click here: Mitt Romney Tells President Obama to ‘Start Packing’ | Video – ABC News
So now, after a series of potentially fatal gaffes by her husband, it may be that Ann feared it wasn’t their turn after all.
During a May 17 private fund-raising event, Mitt Romney addressed a roomful of wealthy donors. Toward the end of his remarks he scorned “entitlements” for those Americans who didn’t belong to the privileged class:
“Well, there are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what….
“Who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they’re entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
But the Romneys aren’t the only members of the pampered set to feel entitled to holding the most powerful office in the world.
Earlier in 2012, Anita Perry, the wife of Rick Perry–Texas Governor and Presidential candidate–had indulged in her own moment of self-pity.
Rick and Anita Perry
She said she knew what it was like to be unemployed–because her son had resigned from his job at Deutsche Bank to campaign for his father.
“He resigned from his job two weeks ago because he can’t go out and campaign with his father because of SEC regulations,” she said in a Pendleton, S.C. diner on October 14, 2011.
“My son lost his job because of this administration,” she added.
But only a day earlier, Anita Perry had said that her son had eagerly resigned to help his father run for President.
“So, our son Griffin Perry is 28. He loves politics, and he just couldn’t wait. He said ‘Dad, I’m in! I’m in! I’ll do whatever you need me to do. I’ll resign my job. I’ll do what you need me to do,‘” recalled Anita Perry.
There is a difference between voluntarily resigning from a job and being involuntarily terminated from it.
Nor was the voluntary resignation of her son Anita Perry’s only complaint.
“We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party,” she had told a South Carolina audience on October 13, 2011. “So much of that is, I think they look at [Rick] because of his faith.
“He is the only true conservative–well, there are some true conservatives. And they’re there for good reasons. And they may feel like God called them, too. But I truly feel like we are here for that purpose.”
Perhaps the final word on the revealed character of these entitled would-be rulers belongs to Plutarch (c. 46 – 120 AD), a Greek historian and biographer. In the foreward to his biography of Alexander the Great, he wrote:
And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever.
It is well to remember such truths when assessing the characters of our own would-be Alexanders–and those who would be their queens.
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THE DOOM OF MEN
In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 21, 2014 at 12:35 amIn ”Excalibur,” director John Boorman’s brilliant 1981 telling of the King Arthur legends, Merlin warns Arthur’s knights–and us: “For it is the doom of men that they forget.”
Not so Steven Pressfield, who repeatedly holds up the past as a mirror to our present. Case in point: His 2006 novel, The Afghan Campaign.
By 2006, Americans had been fighting in Afghanistan for five years. And today, almost ten years into the same war, there remains no clear end in sight–to our victory or withdrawal.
Pressfield’s novel, although set 2,000 years into the past, has much to teach us about what are soldiers are facing today in that same alien, unforgiving land.
Matthias, a young Greek seeking glory and opportunity, joins the army of Alexander the Great. But the Persian Empire has fallen, and the days of conventional, set-piece battles–where you can easily tell friend from foe–are over.
Alexander next plans to conquer India, but first he must pacify its gateway–Afghanistan. Here that the Macedonians meet a new–and deadly–kind of enemy.
“Here the foe does not meet us in pitched battle,” warns Alexander. “Even when we defeat him, he will no accept our dominion.
“He comes back again and again. He hates us with a passion whose depth is exceeded only by his patience and his capacity for suffering.”
Matthias learns this early. In his first raid on an Afghan village, he’s ordered to execute a helpless prisoner. When he hesitates, he’s brutalized until he strikes out with his sword–and botches the job.
But, soon, exposed to an unending series of atrocities–committed by himself and his comrades, as well as the enemy–he finds himself transformed.
And he hates it. He agonizes over the gap between the ideals he embraced when he became a soldier–and the brutalities that have drained him of everything but a grim determination to survive at any cost.
Pressfield, a former Marine himself, repeatedly contrasts how civilians see war as a kind of “glorious” child’s-play with how soldiers actually experience it.
He creates an extraordinary exchange between Costas, an ancient-world version of a CNN war correspondent, and Lucas, a soldier whose morality is outraged at how Costas and his ilk routinely prettify the indescribable.
And we know the truth of this exchange immediately. For we know there are doubtless brutalities inflicted by our troops on the enemy–and atrocities inflicted by the enemy upon them–that never make the headlines, let alone the TV cameras.
We also know that, decades from now, thousands of our former soldiers will carry horrific memories to their graves.
These memories will remain sealed from public view, allowing their fellow but unblooded Americans to sleep peacefully, unaware of the terrible price that others have paid on their behalf.
Like the Macedonians (who call themselves ”Macks”), our own soldiers find themselves serving in an all-but-forgotten land among a populace whose values could not be more alien from our own if they came from Mars.
Instincitvely, they turn to one another–not only for physical security but to preserve their last vestiges of humanity. As the war-weary veteran, Lucas, advises:
“Never tell anyone except your mates. Only you don’t need to tell them. They know. They know you. Better than a man knows his wife, better than he knows himself.
“They’re bound to you and you to them, like wolves in a pack. It’s not you and them. You are them. The unit is indivisible. One dies, we all die.”
Put conversely: One lives, we all live.
Pressfield has reached into the past to reveal fundamental truths about the present that most of us could probably not accept if contained in a modern-day memoir.
These truths take on an immediate poignancy owing to our own current war in Afghanistan. But they will remain just as relevant decades from now, when our now-young soldiers are old and retired.
This book has been described as a sequel to Pressfield’s The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great, which appeared in 2004. But it isn’t.
Virtues showcased the brilliant and luminous (if increasingly dark and explosive) personality of Alexander the Great, whose Bush-like, good-vs.-evil rhetoric inspired men to hurl themselves into countless battles on his behalf.
But Afghan thrusts us directly into the flesh-and-blood realities created by that rhetoric: The horrors of men traumatized by an often unseen but always menacing enemy, and the horrors they must inflict in return if they are to survive in a hostile and alien world.
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