What Matters... a note from Mike Walker, USMC Colonel (retired). I am always impressed with Mike's message but this piece speaks to purpose and strength in an individuals life and how that person chooses to share that in his/her community.

Marines,

We veterans got it right about the far-leftist liberal elites a long time ago. Long serving Democratic Senator John Glenn of Ohio said it best more than thirty years ago.

A rich and removed Howard Metzenbaum, a man whose ignorance was always in competition with his arrogance, never grasped what made a real American.

But Howard got a glimpse when he ran into the real deal in the form of a grass roots all-American hero, John Glenn, US Marine and Astronaut. Here is what transpired way back in 1974:

Howard Metzenbaum: “How can you run for the senate when you never held a job?”

John Glenn: “I served twenty three years in the United States Marine Corps. I went through two wars. This was not a nine-to-five job. I flew one hundred and forty nine missions. My plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire on twelve different occasions.

I was in the space program. It wasn’t my checkbook; it was my life that was on the line. This was not a nine-to-five job where I took time off to take my daily cash receipts to the bank.

I ask you to go with me, as I went the other day, to a veterans’ hospital and look those men, with their mangled bodies, in the eye and tell them they didn’t hold a job. You go with me to any Gold Star mother and you look her in the eye and tell her that her son did not hold a job.

You go with me to the space program and you go as I have gone to the widows and orphans of Ed White and Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee and you look those kids in the eye and tell them that their father didn’t hold a job.

I tell you, Howard Metzenbaum, you should be on your knees every day of your life thanking God that were some men – some men – who held a job. And they required a dedication to purpose and a love of country and dedication duty that was more important than life itself. And their self-sacrifice is what made this country possible.

I have held a job, Howard.”

What today’s pampered, blessedly isolated, and simple far-left liberal souls, like Howard before them, will never realize is how their disdain for best and brightest in America will become an eternal rallying cry. To understand please see the video from Afghanistan:

http://www.mca-marines.org:80/leatherneck/2d-marine-division-combat-camera.asp

How does that Marine, in the midst of war, recall that dialogue word for word with such passion?

Because it matters.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Slapping Friends

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack Obama's America?

If you're a Brit, your head is spinning. It's not just the personal slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One.

Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama returning the Churchill bust that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of Obama's sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil rather than ostentatiously repatriated?

Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt.

And then there was Hillary Clinton's astonishing, nearly unreported (in the U.S.) performance in Argentina last month. She called for Britain to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands.

For those who know no history -- or who believe that it began on Jan. 20, 2009 -- and therefore don't know why this was an out-of-the-blue slap at Britain, here's the back story:

In 1982, Argentina's military junta invaded the (British) Falkland Islands. The generals thought the British, having long lost their taste for foreign lands, would let it pass. Besides, the Falklands have uncountably more sheep than people. They underestimated Margaret Thatcher (the Argentines, that is, not the sheep). She was not about to permit the conquest of a people whose political allegiance and ethnic ties are to Britain. She dispatched the navy. Britannia took it back.

Afterward, neither Thatcher nor her successors have countenanced negotiations. Britain doesn't covet foreign dominion and has no shortage of sheep. But it does believe in self-determination, and will negotiate nothing until and unless the Falkland Islanders indicate their desire to be ruled by a chronically unstable, endemically corrupt polity with a rich history of dictatorship, economic mismanagement and the occasional political lunacy (see: the Evita cult).

Not surprisingly, the Falkland Islanders have given no such indication. Yet inexplicably, Clinton sought to reopen a question that had been settled for almost 30 years, not just pointlessly stirring the embers but even taking the Argentine side (re: negotiations) against Britain -- a nation that has fought and bled with us for the last decade, and that today has about 10,000 troops, far more than any other ally, fighting alongside America in Afghanistan.

Of course, given how the administration has treated other allies, perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised.

-- Obama visits China and soon Indonesia, skipping India, our natural and rising ally in the region -- common language, common heritage, common democracy, common jihadist enemy. Indeed, in his enthusiasm for China, Obama suggests a Chinese interest in peace and stability in South Asia, a gratuitous denigration of Indian power and legitimacy in favor of a regional rival with hegemonic ambitions.

-- Poland and the Czech Republic have their legs cut out from under them when Obama unilaterally revokes a missile defense agreement, acquiescing to pressure from Russia with its dreams of regional hegemony over Eastern Europe.

-- The Hondurans still can't figure out why the United States supported a Hugo Chavez ally seeking illegal extension of his presidency against the pillars of civil society -- its Congress, Supreme Court, church and army -- that had deposed him consistent with Article 239 of their own constitution.

But the Brits, our most venerable, most reliable ally, are the most disoriented. "We British not only speak the same language. We tend to think in the same way. We are more likely than anyone else to provide tea, sympathy and troops," writes Bruce Anderson in London's Independent, summarizing with admirable concision the fundamental basis of the U.S.-British special relationship.

Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the U.S., to a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: "He (Obama) is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there."

I'm not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but Manning's guess is as good as anyone's. How can you explain a policy toward Britain that makes no strategic or moral sense? And even if you can, how do you explain the gratuitous slaps to the Czechs, Poles, Indians and others? Perhaps when an Obama Doctrine is finally worked out, we shall learn whether it was pique, principle or mere carelessness.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com