That election thing

H1 sends us a link to the Military Times poll that purports to prove that 2/3 of their subscribers support Romney in the upcoming election. I doubt that their poll proves anything, really, but I’ll let them explain;

This population is older and more senior than the military population at large, but it is representative of the professional core of the all-volunteer force.

The 3,100 respondents — roughly two-thirds active-duty and one-third reserve component members — are about 80 percent white and 91 percent male. Forty percent are in paygrades E-5 through E-8, while more than 35 percent are in paygrades O-3 through O-5.

Almost 80 percent of respondents have a college degree — including 27 percent with a graduate degree and more than 11 percent with a post-graduate degree — while an additional 18.5 percent have some college under their belts.

And they are battle-hardened; almost 29 percent have spent more than two cumulative years deployed since 9/11, while a similar percentage has spent one to two cumulative years deployed.

All it really proves is that the staff of the Military Times is out of step with their readership, since they generally write stories about Rangers who support Obama and they give Paul Rieckhoff a handjob under the table to defend him against puny military blogs who point out that he wears stuff on his uniform he shouldn’t.

I’ve read the Army Times more since I got out than I did when I was in uniform. The only time I ever bought single issues was when I was competing for E-5 and E-6 and wanted to see the cut-off scores. And there was the time they ran an article about us during the Gulf War, so I’m not sure how representative their readership is of the entire military population. But that’s me.

If it’s true, and I kind of hope it is, it just means that most of the military isn’t being bluffed by the Obama Administration and their blather about increasing access to the VA, their commitment to fighting the war in Afghanistan, and their campaign slogan about bin Laden being killed by this administration instead of crediting the soldiers who’ve been fighting this war for 11 years.

On a similar note, The Washington Times reports that Romney is giving a foreign policy speech at VMI today;

And after delaying for nearly a month, the Republican presidential nominee will sharpen his attack about the way Mr. Obama handled the assault on American diplomatic posts in Egypt and Libya.

According to excerpts, he will say the president’s first reaction was to blame an Internet video mocking Islam, and only belatedly to spot “the deliberate work of terrorists who use violence to impose their dark ideology on others.”

“Hope is not a strategy,” Mr. Romney will say. “We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds, when our defense spending is being arbitrarily and deeply cut, when we have no trade agenda to speak of, and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.”

There’s more about his speech by Mr. Hanson. While I agree with Mr Romney on his characterization of this administration’s handling of the events in the Near East, I think the Obama Administration is most vulnerable on foreign policy if Romney summons the gonads to mention the war in Afghanistan.

The White House took the advice of the biggest boob on the planet in regards to foreign policy, Joe Biden, and subscribed to his “robot ninja zombie strategy” while they ignored the commanders in 2009. The troops did the best they could with what they had, but they weren’t given enough. And the Taliban only had to wait out the half-assed surge. Am I the only one to notice that the green-on-blue attacks peaked the same week that the administration was celebrating the well-publicized end of the “surge”? The same green-on-blue attacks that they were warned were going to increase this year more than a year ago? And it was a scant few weeks ago that Big Army decided that the troops should be armed while they’re in their bases.

Obama reticence to admit that there’s a war going on got troops killed. Like I’ve said ad nauseum, I’m in my living room in West Virginia and I have a loaded gun next to me, why weren’t our troops allowed to be armed in a war zone?

The Obama Administration thinks their drone strategy can win the war, like the Johnson Administration thought their bombing strategy could win the war in Vietnam. It takes troops on the ground to win wars and for purely political reasons this administration was unwilling to commit to giving the commanders the troops they needed. Mostly because victory isn’t in the Obama Administration’s vocabulary.

Romney should be making these points and take that “I killed bin laden” thing out of Obama’s quiver. Any of us would have made the same decision given the opportunity. Killing bin Laden didn’t win the war and neither did anything this administration did in that regard. In fact, everything they’ve done has strengthened the Taliban.

Folks in the military know that, if Military Times’ poll is to be believed, but we can’t win this election for Romney. He needs to say it out loud and often.

Category: 2012 election, Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan, Terror War