During the Vietnam War, the Democrats made their loathing for the military patently clear. Troops were called baby killers and spat upon when they returned home. In subsequent years, Democrats realized that this was a politically untenable position in a nation with a citizen army, so they cleaned up their act. However, they never changed their core beliefs. Nothing makes that more clear than the last order given to the Marines in Afghanistan: Clean feces out of the airport to make it nice for the Taliban.

From 1973 through 1991, the Democrats were able to ignore the American military. There were no big wars going on, which allowed people to forget how cruelly the Democrat party treated the Vietnam vets. The vets, of course, never forgot (nor should they), but life resumed a normal tenor, and things went smoothly.

During the first Iraq War, Democrats discovered that Americans supported the troops, who were their husbands, fathers, and sons. And because the war ended quickly and cleanly, there was no political hay to be made from showing hatred toward the military.

When George Bush activated U.S. troops after 9/11, there was enough patriotism floating through the air so that the anti-war protests were against Bush, not against our troops. Democrats were wise enough to know that open hostility would be a mistake.

Image: The few, the proud, the pooper-scoopers. Public domain.  

Nevertheless, the hostility was there. In 2006, John Kerry’s Freudian slip was to say that America’s military was composed of idiots:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Barack Obama, who came from the same class of Democrat elitists, also denigrated the American military when speaking on the 2008 campaign trail about the need for more troops in Afghanistan:

We've got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.

You, baby killers, you!

Once Obama got into the White House, he systematically began to fire conservative Pentagon staff, whether civilian or military. Under his aegis, the military took on new enemies, not the kind from abroad who want to destroy America militarily, but imaginary and internal ones.

As Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley have made clear in word and deed, the new enemies are climate change, racism, and homophobia and transphobia. To the extent that each of these foci makes America less ready for battle, it’s effectively a death knell for the troops. Talk about hostility to the military.

But if you really want to show someone you hate them, you literally rub their faces in fecal matter, and that’s what the military command did to Marines serving in the last days of Afghanistan. The information comes from Jerry Dunleavy’s and James Hasson’s Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden’s Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End, and is based upon extensive interviews with the troops. As the NY Post summarizes,

Before they were allowed to leave Kabul in August 2021, having just lost 13 comrades to a suicide bomber, US Marines were ordered to pick up human feces and other disgusting trash at the airport so as to leave it pristine for the Taliban.

[snip]

More than 120,000 Afghans had camped there for a week, “defecating and leaving trash, bags, clothes, and other unspeakable things.”

Marines at every level were infuriated at being “forced to scoop up human poop.”

The order to clean “came with a threat that we would not leave at all if it was not completed,” one junior Marine told authors Jerry Dunleavy and James Hasson.

“It was degrading and ridiculous. We took a lot of casualties and put a lot of effort into that mission and to close it out that way was wrong. Morale was really down at that point, and it was an extremely pointless effort.”

Even after everything the Democrats have said and done about the military from the 1960s forward, it’s hard to imagine that they could have come up with something so demeaning, but they did. The American Marines, the ones who fought through Belleau Wood, the Pacific Islands, the Chosin Reservoir, and Fallujah, have been reduced to being pooper scoopers for the Taliban.

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