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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEisenhower: Every Gun . . .in the final sense is theft
and this from a republican president and general. . .
WI_DEM
(33,497 posts)The GOP of today is full of chicken hawks who never experienced combat and so have no problem sending other people to fight.
The GOP has moved so far out of the mainstream since Eisenhower it's hard to believe that they are a viable political party. But there are a lot of nuts in this country.
JustABozoOnThisBus
(23,338 posts)Everything bought or sold signifies a prioritization. If it is optional (not a necessity of life), it represents theft from the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.
What's special about guns, warships, and rockets?
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)"What's special about guns, warships, and rockets?"
I imagine that Pres. Eisenhower was referencing the Guns versus Butter macro-economic model-- a nation's investment in military (e.g., guns) versus its investment in civilian goods (e.g., Corvettes, as you mentioned, or "butter" as stated in model name).
JustABozoOnThisBus
(23,338 posts)I don't know what the OP's point is.
Defense spending vs other? Or guns (military and civilian) vs other?
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)If I do not or cannot understand a point being made (which happens more often than not), I often find that it's much more effective to simply ask for clarification directly rather than implying I understand, yet find points about it to disagree with, e.g, "What's special about guns, warships, and rockets?"
JustABozoOnThisBus
(23,338 posts)... and then your post #4 showed a different interpretation.
After that, I was less clear on the OP's intended point.
msongs
(67,395 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,647 posts)because they know that every word in that Eisenhower quote is true.
I consider Ike to be the last good Republican President. Of course, he could have been, and almost was a Democrat.
Initech
(100,063 posts)The Republican party has seriously lost it's way thanks to our parrot talking points media.
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)I was surprised after reading 'Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956' to find out the huge amount of animosity between Ike and the Joint Chiefs (eps. LeMay), despite Ike himself once being chairman of the Joint Chiefs-- about the same amount of hard feelings shared between the Kennedy admin and the JCS. But in the end, he wanted to promote American democracy overseas via education investments rather than military investments.
I'd hazard that in the here and now, the teabaggers would call him a dirty commie.
Jeff In Milwaukee
(13,992 posts)It's just a very sad reminder about just how far the Republican Party has drifted over the past 50 years. Being "tough on communism" was understandable back in the 1950's because, in a sense, our survival depended on it. But today? It just shows that the Republicans haven't had an original idea in nearly two generations.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)Just to put it into the proper context.
MicaelS
(8,747 posts)The fascination of some people on the Left with Eisenhower, because of his anti MIC speech as he left office never ceases to amaze me. He presided over the enormous buildup of the US Nuclear Arsenal, and regularly contemplated Thermonuclear War with the USSR. Eisenhower was no Dove.
I can't copy and paste the entire article, it's far too long, but the 4 paragraphs below hits the highlights. I suggest you read the entire article.
http://hnn.us/articles/47326.html
Early on, he noted in his diary what he later said in public: nuclear weapons would now be treated just as another weapon in the arsenal. We have got to be in a position to use that weapon, he insisted to Dulles. That became official policy in NSC 5810/1, which declared the U.S. intention to treat nuclear weapons as conventional weapons; and to use them whenever required to achieve national objectives. By early 1957, Eisenhower told the NSC that there could be no conventional battles any more: The only sensible thing for us to do was to put all our resources into our SAC capability and into hydrogen bombs. He found it frustrating not to have plans to use nuclear weapons generally accepted.
His whole reason for fighting was to prevent the communists from imposing a totalitarian state in America. He had long recognized the irony that nuclear war would lead to the very totalitarianism he abhorred. But he confessed to the Cabinet that he saw no way to avoid it: He was coming more and more to the conclusion that we would have to run this country as one big campseverely regimented. After reading plans for placing the nation under martial law, giving the president power to requisition all of the nations resourceshuman and material, he pronounced them sound.
It is hard to give up the man of peace that peace activists have come to admire. And perhaps its not fair to give him up. After all, we can never know what another person truly believes. But the record of the other Eisenhower is so consistent and so extensive (Ive offered only a sampling here) that it is hard to ignore. More importantly, it is dangerous to ignore, because the other Eisenhower was the one who made actual policy. It was a policy that put anticommunist ideology above human life, made by a man who would push whole stack of chips into the pot and hit em with everything in the bucket; a man who would shoot your enemy before he shoots you and hit the guy fast with all youve got; a man who believed that the U.S. could pick itself up from the floor and win the war, even though everybody is going crazy, as long as only 25 or 30 American cities got shellacked and nobody got too hysterical.