IT MIGHT succeed. That's not likely. (See below.) But if he succeeds in bringing the American military down to pre-WWII levels, Mr. Obama will have fundamentally transformed [read, essentially destroyed] yet one more basic American institution.
The ideological faction of the modern American left -- the progressives who set the agenda for their party and our nation -- intensely dislikes the military. The money could be better spent, Obamistas believe, for programs to make even more Americans dependent on the welfare state.
More likely, however, is that Republicans and vulnerable Democrats will restore some, perhaps most, of the proposed cuts. This will also help Mr. Obama and his party in several ways.
First, the proposed military cuts will operate as a political back fire. It will consume all the political fuel and oxygen. The continuing, slow-motion failure of Obamacare will be bumped off the front page. And, as usual, the continuing, slow-motion bankruptcy of America will never reach the front page.
Second, it will give participating Democrat candidates political cover against the charge that they are wild-eyed liberals, anti-military to the core, making it marginally more difficult to jack them out of their seats in Congress.
Third, it will force conservatives into a quandary: How will we pay for the added military spending?
One possible choice is to raise taxes, which the left desperately wishes to do anyway, to feed the Leviathan state.
Another choice is to borrow or print the money, which would also delight the left. It would force Republicans to join them in the mud pit of bipartisan fiscal irresponsibility.
The right choice, of course, is to cut spending elsewhere in the federal budget and use the money to keep the military whole. But in this era of decline, the responsible thing is almost impossible to pull off, politically.
Cutting anything hurts someone, and those someones will form a PAC, hire lobbyists and campaign gurus, and go to war against the responsible conservatives.
With the rarest of exceptions, all federal spending can be -- must be -- increased, but no federal spending can be cut or eliminated. That's the new normal. No self-respecting beneficiary of federal largesse will ever permit anything so unamerican, so unpatriotic, to occur.
As political mortor rounds explode around them, principled conservatives will press on, but the weak and endangered -- commonly known to the mainstream media as the responsible ones -- will retreat.
There's no path forward on this issue that will not benefit, and that does not please, Mr. Obama and his merry band of fundamental transformers and power grabbers.
Meanwhile, America continues to go broke.
Meanwhile, the economy pops along like a 1945 Studebaker with a missing sparkplug.
Meanwhile, Congress continues to write our budget through continuing resolutions and backroom deals made at midnight the day before the vote.
No committee hearings. No budget mark-ups. No regular order.
Meanwhile, the international bad guys will promptly start provoking mischief, first here, then there, confident that America -- the once-dominant world power -- cannot and will not do anything to stop them.
But who needs an army, navy, or air force when the Anointed One still has twin TelePrompTers loaded with grave concerns and rhetorical red lines?
* * *
All jokes aside, these outcomes are all horrifying -- a weak military and economy, debts and deficits as far as the eye can see, and a president and Congress running our affairs without regard to the Constitution or the traditional ways of making and enforcing laws. Horrifying.
What's needed is the wisdom and courage to fight back, no matter the cost, to give the American people one last chance to save their country from the fundamental transformers.
Mr. Obama has the courage to do what he does, however unwise. Who on our side is willing to take him on, whatever the cost?
The only answer I see right now is Ted Cruz and those who stand with him.
If not him, whom do you suggest, and with what strategy?
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