At a Virginia campaign appearance on Saturday, former President Bill Clinton was in the middle of a hilariously delusional stemwinder about how Barack Obama, the most bitterly divisive President in modern history, had worked to bring us all together. (This was after Obama told one of his own audiences to think of voting as an act of revenge against their enemies.)
But then Clinton unleashed a storm of controversy by saying this about the American military: "One of the things the Decider-in-Chief has to do is decide whether he???s going to bring this country together across all its diversity or let it drift apart. Look at how much stronger the American military is because it is less racist, less sexist and less homophobic and we???re just looking for people who can do the job."
In the wake of the Benghazi outrage, calling Barack Obama the "Decider-in-Chief" is grimly comical, if not an outright insult to the dead. He's reasonably good at giving the order no President - except, demonstrably, Bill Clinton - would have given to take out Osama bin Laden, after his political guru Valerie Jarrett thinks it over and decides it's a good idea. But if you're under fire in a foreign land, Obama is pretty much useless; he's already thinking about tomorrow's fundraiser and working up his strategy for spinning the next couple of news cycles while terrorists are lobbing mortars into your safe house.
And if you get creamed by a hurricane, Obama will put on a bomber jacket and give you a nice speech about cutting through red tape to get you anything you need, but the actual results will be a horror story of neglect... coupled with lavish media praise for Obama's entirely symbolic "leadership" skills, which would make your blood boil if you could see them, but you can't, because Obama's eco-radical pals insist on saddling major cities with primitive electrical grids that can be easily knocked out by hurricanes.
But Clinton's backhanded "less racist, less sexist, less homophobic" insult to the American military is the show-stopper. One might be tempted to immediately raise the point that Bill Clinton signed the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy he's now deriding as "homophobic," but you have to remember that Democrat true believers will never hold that against him, any more than they care Obama was nominally opposed to gay marriage for years before he became nominally supportive of it. "Progressives" are always very forgiving of past liberal leaders who claim they swung as far Left as they could get away with in their time. The journey Leftward is incremental, and liberals are willing to extend unlimited benefit of the doubt to those who claim they had both their hearts and Party credentials in the right place. There are times Republicans would be more politically effective if they took a page from the Democrat playbook, and learned to hold the good as an ally of the perfect, rather than its enemy.
The more telling point about Clinton's comments is that he sees the military as a herd of Neanderthals who still require more social engineering to complete their evolution. They're still racist, sexist, and homophobic, just not as bad as they were before Barack Obama got hold of them. Remember when a lot of the people who supported the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" claimed they only thought it was a good idea because most of the military brass felt it wouldn't compromise the ability of the armed forces to attract new recruits and maintain unit cohesion? So much for that reasoned and "moderate" position - the old policies were all "homophobic," morally indefensible no matter what effect their repeal might have on the military's war-fighting capabilities. And even after their repeal, Clinton sees the military as merely "less homophobic," not completely evolved. It's not clear from his speech what he thinks Obama has done to make it less sexist and racist, unless the military got an automatic racism and sexism discount when they shed some of their homophobia.
It's funny how, even when they're trying to run as star-spangled terrorism busters, liberals can't quite shed their visceral distaste for the military. Just imagine Bill Clinton rendering this kind of backhanded "compliment" to one of the Left's preferred dependency groups, and describing them as a little less despicable than they used to be. Will anyone in the media catch up with Obama on the campaign trail and ask him to denounce Clinton's comments?
