Obama: No Respect From Those In The Military
President Elect Barack Obama gets no respect as the incoming Commander in Chief from a poll conducted by The Army Times. 6 out of 10 active-duty service members say they are uncertain or pessimistic, according to a Military Times survey.
Commander in Chief elect Barack Obama's limp salute
A lance corporal who asked not to be identified said, “Being that the Marine Corps can be sent anywhere in the world with the snap of his fingers, nobody has confidence in this guy as commander in chief,”
During Christmas, Obama visited Marines in Pearl Harbor, while they were eating their Christmas dinner. It was a great photo op of the newly elected President visiting ‘his’ troops.
Anecdotal reports say Obama was not greeted with any enthusiastic applause in fact it was pretty silent.
A post on Powerline says this:
A reader writes from Hawaii regarding President-elect Obama’s visit with the Marines:
Aloha.
I’m an active duty naval officer stationed in Pearl Harbor. I was there for the president-elect’s appearance. The crowd was respectful, as you might expect from today’s professional Marines.
The reception was a short photo-op kind of thing. Couple of quick turns around the tables and he was gone.
What was of more interest, at least to me, were the conversations after he left. Many Marines expressed concern that they will be out of Iraq before it’s prudent. These are 3rd Regiment Marines, who have been in heavy rotation in Iraq for the past 3-4 years; many are returning from their 3rd tour and will be heading out on their 4th presently.
Being Marines, they want the Army to hold Iraq so they can go to Afghanistan and work on solving that problem. What they don’t want is a retreat or a hollow residual force that masks a retreat. They know Iraq is on weak legs now and it will need a strong US presence for at least a decade.
Hope the P-E knows that too.
At least the main stream media is finally starting to acknowledge the U.S. military’s success in Iraq. CNN has a headline saying: U.S. deaths in Iraq down 66 percent from last year.
That is a sea change from the “War is Lost” crowd, including Barack Obama.
The Army Times: Underlying much of the uncertainty is Obama’s stated 16-month timetable for pulling combat troops out of Iraq, as well as his calls to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to allow gays to serve openly in the military, according to survey responses and interviews.
“How are you going to safely pull combat troops out of Iraq?” said Air Force 1st Lt. Rachel Kleinpeter, an intelligence officer with the 100th Operations Support Squadron at RAF Mildenhall, England. “And if you’re pulling out combat troops, who are you leaving to help support what’s left? What happens if Iraq falls back into chaos? Are we going to be there in five years doing the same thing over again?”
The findings are part of the sixth annual Military Times survey of subscribers to Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times newspapers. This year’s survey, conducted Dec. 1 through Dec. 8, included more than 1,900 active-duty respondents.
But as a snapshot of the professional corps, the responses highlight the challenges Obama faces as he prepares to take command of military careerists with different political and cultural attitudes.
In keeping with previous surveys, nearly half of the respondents described their political views as conservative or very conservative. Slightly more than half said they consider themselves Republicans, 22 percent independents and 13 percent Democrats.
It looks like Obama will have about the same level of “respect” as President Bill Clinton. By running as the anti-Iraq war candidate, Obama has a big hill to climb.
I never heard him praise the troops, or comment on their sacrifice to keep this nation free. Personally I believe Obama hates the military and all it stands for.
What else would you expect from a true leftist, elected to President?
Photo Credit Flikr
Posted: 1850PT 12/30/08
autone.wordpress.com
An Angeleno's View of the World 
I guess that’s why strategy is best left not to LTs but to Generals.
Not true.
This was not by any stretch a scientific survey.
See article by Brandon Friedman, Vice Chairman of VoteVets.org:
The articles is “full of self-selected, academically useless responses from the Military Times’ older, white, subscribing readership. The only question is whether they’re doing this deliberately, or whether no one who works at the paper is actually educated enough to know how important the difference is between a scientific survey and a haphazardly conducted poll of subscribers who choose to participate.
“Either way, they’ve completely blown up the idea of journalistic credibility by actively pushing this nonsense. And this is critically important because the Military Times has long been the most respected source of objective information for uniformed service members….
“Regardless, by being so careless, they’ve done a disservice to both the military and its new Commander-in-Chief. If they’re going to conduct self-selecting polls like these, they need to quit promoting them as representative of the entire military. Because they’re not.”
http://www.vetvoice.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2330
or
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brandon-friedman/military-times-damages-cr_b_154406.html
Good luck with the research!
Your sources to refute the scientific validity of the Army Times survey are just as unscientific.
VoteVets.org is a left leaning organization. Their Vice-Chairman, Brandon Friedman, wrote the article you link to on the very leftist Huffington Post and writes for Daily Kos. And another of VoteVets.org, Richard Smith blogged at the dreaded Daily Kos!
Here is the list of VoteVets Board of Advisors: Jon Soltz,Co-Founder and Chairman, VoteVets.org, Douglas J. Band, Richard Beattie, Bill Belding , General Wesley K. Clark (ret.) , Tammy Duckworth, MG Paul D. Eaton (ret.), Leslie H. Gelb, Paul Hackett, Elaine Kamarck, Bob Kerrey, Former US Senator, Lawrence J. Korb, William E. Little, Lawrence E. Penn III, Brian Snyder , Ed Vick.
So you cite a group of Doves versus the Hawks that the Army Times does.
I’ll guess you are anti-war and Code Pink represents your political platform versus a strong military.
As a veteran, Baracky gets no respect from me either.
Indeed.
And indeed.