US leaders' refusal to take responsibility for military disasters while pushing its liberal social agenda dissuades patriotic Americans from enlisting, a conservative political campaigner says.
On Tuesday, the father of one of the 13 US service members killed in the August 2021 Kabul airport bombing told Congressmen that President Joe Biden should be held to account for the massacre which occurred after he reneged on predecessor Donald Trump's peace treaty with the Taliban*.
Mark Schmitz, the father of US Marine Corps Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz, told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee that Biden a "disgrace" and an "a**hole."
“Not a single person has been held accountable,” Schmitz charged. “Our so-called leader can’t seem to even utter their names in public, not even once.”
“Two years has gone by, and where are we? To be frank, we’re knee deep in bullsh*t, is where we are,” he added. “Everyone who held a key position in the military still has that position or has been promoted.”
"You, sir, stole their lives, their futures, their dreams and have ripped apart 13 families," Schmitz said, addressing Biden personally.
Political action committee director Tom Norton told Sputnik that Biden's failure to accept responsibility showed he was unfit to lead the nation.
"You can't have somebody that clearly has dementia in charge of the country and expect results of competence," Norton said. "That's really where the crisis is coming from."
The lobbyist recalled the maxim of late president Harry Truman, another Democrat, that "the buck stops here."
"Biden had been president for, by that point in time, eight months... on top of that vice president for eight years," Norton stressed. "For him to try to say that he had no input on a withdrawal is just complete and utter, utter ignorance of the situation."
The former serviceman pointed out that low-ranking soldiers regularly face demotions and for minor breaches of security.
"Now you're talking about a withdrawal with such a failure that in the history of militaries, people would have resigned, had been removed from their positions," Norton said. "Instead, a lot of these people have been applauded and promoted and covered up."
"That failure is on the upper brass of the military. Every single one of them at this point should essentially resign and have retired. And Joe Biden should have, if he was going to be a president of competence, fired him and showed that he can lead and that he can fix mistakes and then apologize to the families.
The US military is now facing a major recruitment shortfall, as it did during the Vietnam War — and just as it did back then, has lowered the physical and intellectual standards for applicants to compensate.
Norton said that both Republican and Democratic party politicians are quick to mouth platitudes like "thank you for your service" to war veterans.
"But the moment that you sit there as a service member or a veteran, talk to them with a blunt and honest tone, they'll sit there like, 'oh, you need to be nicer. You're hurting my feelings'," he said. "Well, you can't conduct a war with people that only care about feelings, because you're going to hurt somebody."
But the rot runs deeper than that, the commentator argued.
"The biggest problem is the United States is so morally and politically corrupt at this moment, and so rudderless domestically, that is probably the largest portion of the contributing factor," Norton said. "The problem is here at home, we have destroyed ourselves personally here domestically."
He warned that the aggressively woke agenda pushed by liberal politicians was alienating the people who make up the backbone of the armed forces.
"You have to restore national pride and personal responsibility before anybody would want to serve this country. I don't want to go sit there and I don't want to go to find somebody who's going to sit there and cry because I mis-gendered them," Norton stressed. "Your military tends to be 75 to 80 percent more conservative and patriotic. And if you're destroying the domestic policy of that group, they're not serving."
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* The Taliban is an organization under UN sanctions for terrorist activities.