Grandstander in Chief

I found it distasteful when George Bush took victory laps over the doings of the military as if he had been personally involved in their accomplishments and used our troops as visual backdrops for his self aggrandizement, and I don’t like it any better when Barack Obama does it. Yesterday’s stunt, and the date chosen to do it, was pure grandstanding, and it offends me that he uses our military in such a fashion, particularly those in a combat theater. To paraphrase Kenneth Roberts,

"They go to war, those young men and women, not to die for their country, but to place themselves, their precious lives, between their homeland and the forces which would destroy it."

These are men and women who are risking their lives in combat, not pawns to be used as a backdrop for this REMF’s reelection campaign. If you don’t know the term “REMF,” the first two letters stand for “rear echelon” and the last two are not complimentary.

Obama and his campaign staff are crowing about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, even taking a trip to Kabul to highlight the event, as if Obama himself had stormed the battlements in Abbotobad with a knife in his teeth and taken down Bin Laden personally in hand to hand combat. He did not. He played the role of a typical REMF, giving the order from an office safe at home and then running victory laps after the men who were risking their lives to perform the mission succeeded. And now they are running an additional grandiose victory lap a year later, after most of the men who did the actual work have been killed in combat without, of course, mentioning their subsequent sacrifice.

I was going to stay out of Obama’s campaign use of the Bin Laden killing, it’s not unreasonable for him to make some use of the good things that have happened on his watch, but this grandstanding was simply too Bushian for me to leave it alone. The power of the office has so corrupted Obama that the man simply no longer has any sense of taste or restraint.