Dave Lindorff: To Hell With the Chief!

[Demeter]

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/lindorff/060

What is all this nonsense about us electing a "commander in chief"?

Okay, I mean we all know it's President Bush's favorite title. He thrills to being a "war president," and loves strutting around in front of guys in uniform and getting saluted. But really, what is this all about? ...The idea that Americans, when they go to the polls, whether in a primary or a general election, are choosing a commander in chief, as our feckless media pundits are wont to tell us, or as candidates running for president are fond of saying in these trying times, is not only overwrought rhetoric, but also downright dangerous and idiotic too.

What voters are electing is the leader of the country -- the person who is responsible for administering the federal bureaucracy that protects our environment, regulates our commerce, funds our education system, builds our roads, and, oh yes, chooses the top brass that runs our military.
Great presidents in wartime -- Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt -- were great not because they were generals. Certainly Lincoln and Wilson had no significant military experience, and Roosevelt's military experience was limited. And generals who have been presidents have been a mixed bag. General Grant was by all accounts a poor president; Eisenhower a good one.

Our current commander in chief, because he is obsessed with this one little aspect of his job description, has plunged the country into the most disastrous war of its history -- a war fought entirely on borrowed funds. Faced with a handful of rag-tag terrorists, he has bloated the military with 30 percent more money over the course of his tenure, so that today, the American military budget, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is about to equal the amount the government spent on the military in World War II, when the entire nation was mobilized to confront two powerful adversaries in a global conflict involving millions of American troops.

What a pathetic picture!

America doesn't need a commander in chief. It needs a wise, level-headed leader who has the courage to acknowledge that you can't solve problems by throwing ordnance at them, the courage to tell the citizens of the country that we don't need to spend $1 trillion a year on war and preparations for war, and that in fact, if we cut that spending by two-thirds or three-fourths, we'd still have the mightiest military in the world -- and more importantly, a much stronger society and economy.



DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.