Remembering Ike

Please consider investing a few minutes of your time reviewing President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address to the nation.

His message is as important and relevant now as when it was written at the height of the Cold War. Here are three web links:

Video:

Audio transcript and link to audio recording
Press copy

Ike was a true American war hero and patriot, and a popular and revered Republican president. Compare his warm, inclusive, and reasoned rhetoric and unflinching insights into a post-Hiroshima world with the words and actions of today’s radical right wing Republican luminaries.

Sleep of Reason

After 9/11, all President George W. Bush asked of the American people was to go shopping. As the eldest son and political heir of the respected former president and decorated WWII fighter pilot, George H.W. Bush, the boomer Bush could have asked for real national sacrifice — and gotten it.

It has been almost 11 years since a group of 19 Islamic fanatics crashed hijacked commercial aircraft into the twin World Trade Center towers, Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

Our nation has initiated two largely unsuccessful wars that have cost the American people at least 3 to 4  trillion dollars, over 6,300 U.S. military fatalities, and over 633,000 U.S. soldiers with a military disability.

A cost of war: Soaring disability benefits for veterans

Our government and mass media has largely ignored constitutional safeguards on the abuse of executive power and creation a massive new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security, with little real congressional oversight.

I suspect Dwight Eisenhower would now look at the current extreme political posturing and immoderate language of many in his beloved Republican Party and be disgusted.