Friday, October 09, 2015

Ranger School: Everything in the Obama administration is make-believe and subordinated to the agenda—even truth

Something about the story of the first two women ever to graduate from the Army’s prestigious Ranger course seemed hokey
notes Benny Huang, one army veteran who is always suspicious of “firsts.”
Our society is so fixated on them that it creates an incentive to fudge facts and lower standards.

Liberals will of course contest my assertion, though these are the same people who don’t really object to lowering standards in academia to get more minorities in the door, lowering them again to get them to graduate, then lowering them a third time to hire them as faculty members. Liberals don’t really oppose lowering the bar in order to create “firsts.” They just don’t like to call it “lowering the bar” because that tarnishes the accomplishment. As it should.

General Martin Dempsey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed his doublethink in 2013 when announcing long-term plans to open combat positions to women. In the vey same press conference in which he stated that women would be allowed the opportunity to prove themselves under the same standards as the men, he also stated, “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?”

So the standard will remain the same…unless women can’t reach it. Then elite units will have to justify their standards to the service secretaries, who will probably not be swayed. So why even debate with the service secretaries if disagreement itself signals a career-killing reluctance to get with the program?

In any case, isn’t “we like being awesome” justification enough? Apparently not. General Dempsey’s pronouncement set the tone—we’re going full speed ahead with women in combat. There’s nothing you can do to stop it and you will only be crushed if you try.

It should come as no surprise then that some Ranger instructors now say that the first women ever awarded the Ranger tab, Kristen Griest and Shaye Haver, received plenty of assistance.

 … When it was all over, several anonymous Ranger instructors contacted Congressman Steve Russell (R-OK), a combat veteran and former Army Ranger, to tell him that they had been pressured to go easy on the women. They “got special treatment and played by different rules.”
 … This is all par for the course in Obama’s military. Everything in his administration is make-believe and everything is subordinated to the agenda, even truth. Especially truth. Just think of the Solyndra and “shovel ready jobs.”

Congressman Russell has requested to see the women’s training reports, though I doubt very much that he will find anything there. No one would be stupid enough to document the women’s failures and then graduate them. If the course was fixed, so were the records.

 … These Ranger instructors cared enough about the truth to speak out through the only channels available to them. The real crooks in this sordid tale are the Pentagon brass, the Secretaries of Defense and the Army, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the president. They’re the ones who pressured people beneath them to graduate at least one woman. Am I calling them liars? You betcha! As an Army veteran myself, I’ll tell you that general officers are very much political animals. They lie as much or more than politicians and they’re lying now.