Obama to U.S.: Don't be defensive

National defense? He don't need to show you no stinkin' national defense.

Your blogger is convinced that if the Bower-in-Chief thought he could pull it off, he would replace all our armed forces with ACORN goons. We've grown accustomed to his nominees and appointees who seem to have been hand picked for inability and being contrary to their supposed missions. Now he wants a Coast Guard commander who will turf out counter-terrorism efforts. AP reports:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's pick to lead the Coast Guard wants to make major cuts to the agency's counterterrorism mission over the next five years.

An internal memo from Vice Admiral Robert J. Papp Jr., Obama's nominee to become Coast Guard commandant, says that starting in 2012, he would slash funding for programs in the agency's homeland security plan, including patrols and training exercises.

The memo was "sensitive — for internal Coast Guard use only." I'll bet. This is just between us, ladies, no sense getting Congress steamed up. It might leak out to those tea bag people.

In the memo, Papp said he wants to eliminate teams that are trained to respond to and prevent terror attacks. These teams also train other Coast Guard forces on counterterrorism operations. … He says in the memo that other federal agencies are better at this type of mission.

That would be the U.S. Department of Agriculture? The Disability Employment Policy Office?

He also calls for cuts to the Coast Guard's largest homeland security operation, which patrols critical infrastructure and other sensitive security structures on or near waterways. And he would decrease the number of specialized units stationed in key coastal areas where an attack could be devastating. Obama has already proposed closing five of the 12 specialized units in 2011.

And renaming it the Cost Guard?

I've probably said it before, and I'll probably say it again. This country could not win World War II if it were fought today. I'm not sure it could win the Spanish-American War. We couldn't even call it World War II. It would have to be something like "the War Against European and Asian Extremist-Made Disasters."

An exaggeration? Consider: We have now been sacrificing American lives in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2003. (And yes, for the record, that was down to George W. Bush, not Obama.) Almost seven years. It took four years to see off Germany and Japan, two of the most powerful countries on earth at the time — not implying that we accomplished it by ourselves, of course, but at least in the Pacific we did the heavy lifting.

But we were a serious country then. Most of our citizens were peace loving, even strongly isolationist in some areas when the European war broke out. Once we were in, though, we were in. We understood that Cincinnatus could get back to his plowing when the war had been won.

What's the score in the Middle East? At a cost of a thousand lives and many more cases of lost limbs, disfigurement, and paralysis, we've killed a lot of Taliban and other unsavory types. To what end?

Nation building. A social work program on tank treads. Midnight basketball for at-risk tribal areas.

Speaking of defense, which the Coast Guard doesn't want to do, the Missile Defense Agency has unveiled a new Obamacare-for-incoming-missiles logo.

I won't go so far as Frank Gaffney and claim that it "appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo." Maybe it's just another of those almost-abstract logos that have been "in" for decades in the corporate world. It probably cost the taxpayers no more than a few million dollars to redesign the insignia.

From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, the new logo is an improvement on the old one (see the link above), which looks like it was created in a 5th grade classroom. What seems strange to me is that the words "Missile Defense Agency" and "Department of Defense" are entirely missing. Just as, according to Gaffney, our missile defense may be if present trends continue.