What is sad though is that sometimes Paulbots are able to fool enough people and parlay this phony sense of support into actual results. See the final vote count of the Iowa Caucuses where Mr. Paul netted more than 21% of the vote.

Now, Ron Paul has some good ideas. He is right that the federal government spends too much money and does far too many things that it should not be doing. But of course his actual belief in such rhetoric on this important issue has to be questioned since it is a fact that he has helped bring back a plethora of earmarks for unconstitutional spending to his district in Texas. He spins this by saying that the money was going to be spent anyway so he was just doing what he should do and help out his constituency and that is how the game is played. To that I say you either believe in the Constitution or you do not. And these actions show me that Mr. Paul does not, absolutely, believe in the Constitution.

But there is one Big Lie that Mr. Paul’s supporters like to throw out there that really gets my dander up. It gets my dander up because it annoys so many people who are bravely defending this country day in and day out while standing on a wall and in the line of enemy fire. Something that few people, even ravenous Paulbots, have the courage to do. I hear it every day because the election is upon us. The Paulbot emails me and says, “Ron Paul has more support from the military than any other candidate!” Military personnel email me every day telling me that on base there is at best one Ron Paul supporter and how frustrated they are that the Paulbots are telling this Big Lie.

See, members of the military do not like Mr. Paul all that much because they have heard him denigrate America and its military as the source of evil in the world. While I have yet to meet a member of the American military who does not, in general, agree with Congressman Paul that the U.S. military is used too freely, too often and is too diluted around the world. I have also met very few members of the military who do not think that Ron Paul is a dangerous isolationist and worse, someone who cannot be trusted to stand up to evil when it rears its ugly head.

So I thought I would break it down in a manner so simple that we can put the issue of Ron Paul’s military support to rest once and for all and do so using the same standard that Paulbots use to tout how great and mighty this support really is. That method is to look at campaign donations by members of the military. The common refrain from Paulbots is that Ron Paul has more donations from military personnel than any other candidate. Ergo he has the most support. So let’s look at that shall we?

According to the numbers available on January 6th, 2012[1], Ron Paul has received $24,503, $23,335 and $17,432 from people who declared themselves as working for the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy respectively. The total is $65,270. They are the top three donors listed.

Now, let’s assume that this $65,270 donated to Mr. Paul’s campaign by members of the military all came in one dollar increments. The average donation was in fact higher. But bear with me as we make the number that follows as big, and as unrealistic, as possible to give the Paulbots as much of an advantage as possible ok?

So, $65,270 made in one dollar increments would mean 65,270 members of the military donated to Ron Paul. In September 2011[2] there were 1,468,364 total active duty military personnel in the United States. Divide the inflated number of Paul donors by the total active members of the military and you get 4.4%. Hardly an outpouring of support if you ask me. This leaves over 95% of the military that do not, but the Paulbots’ own flawed methodology, that do not support Ron Paul.

Now assume that the average donation by declared military personnel to Ron Paul is ten dollars instead of one dollar. The percentage of active duty personnel that support Paul dips to a pathetic 0.44%. Again, using the argument of Ron Paul’s supporters who like to tout that we look only at the dollar amounts of the donations by members of the military to him that is.

If the average donation was one hundred dollars? Well, that makes the percentage just 0.044%.

When you look at other candidates, it is true that you do not see anywhere near these numbers for these military professions if you even see them at all. There are however reasons for this. First, active duty personnel stationed overseas will often have their spouses make donation for their household to candidates. These donations are then listed under the spouse’s information which is often times not military related. Secondly is that members of the military, from my personal experience, hate to be used as political pawns and when they donate to political candidates they often do not list their military service as their profession. Thirdly, military personnel, as I have been told by military personnel themselves, generally really hate to be used for political purposes thus they again do not like to list their service on donations made to military candidates so that their donations cannot be used in this manner. And fourthly is that there is a concerted effort by Ron Paul supporters in the military to make sure that their donations are listed as coming from military personnel in order to perpetuate this talking point for political gain. But let’s ignore all that. Let’s ignore it because Ron Paul’s supporters use simply the dollar numbers as the end all and be all of the proof to support their supposed claims.

When you look at the numbers alone and apply a little logic you see that less than 5% of active duty military personnel support Ron Paul at best. In reality however the number is less than half a percent. Again, using the “logic” of the Paulbots of course. Not the numbers they want to paint. But the numbers they are forcing us to accept if they want us to accept their initial premise.

Now I am emptying out my email inbox. I have to. Because over the next month I am going to have to field all the angry emails from Ron Paul supporters because I dared to once again bust their little bubble.

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?cycle=2012&id=N00005906
[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004598.html

You know that the whole story is something more like this dramatization:

In 2005 a soldier, after witnessing his buddies getting blown up by an IED, goes to his commanding officer and asks if there is anything the military can do to help them detect these devices in advance.  Thoughtfully, his commanding officer passes this request along to the generals who then pass it on up to the Department of Defense.  At the Department of Defense the request lands on the desk of a bureaucrat who promptly calls in a favored defense contractor.  The bureaucrat lays out the desire of the military to have a device capable of detecting, in advance, an IED.  He then asks them to prepare their proposal and get back to him as soon as possible.

Four years later (now 2009) the contractor returns with a proposal.  It contains the designs for an reusable, armored, advanced detection robot, with all the latest technology, which will go out ahead of the soldiers and find and trip the bombs.  But the bureaucrat balks at the price; $10.3 billion apiece.  Shocked the bureaucrat asks if he can do better on price.  The contractor laughs!  “Seriously?” the contractor counters.  “You are going to quibble over a couple billion when the lives of our soldiers are at stake?”

The bureaucrat concedes his point but asks if they could make the device any cheaper if it was not reusable.  He tells the contractor to come back with a new proposal, unconvinced that his “reusable” device would actually be such.  The contractor shakes his head and leaves.

In 2010 the contract comes back again.  He tells the bureaucrat that the non-reusable version of their robot will be a mere $7.6 billion each.  While better in price, it still exceeds the department’s budget.  Again the contractor chastises the bureaucrat for putting money ahead of the troops in the field.  The bureaucrat decides to take the proposal to his superiors anyway.  They look it over and ask how long for a prototype to be made and tested, apparently not at all phased by the price.  The contractor is called in, awarded the contract and tells DoD that he can have a working model for testing some time in 2015.

The Deprartment of Defense waits …

Meanwhile, in the Summer of 2011, a forward thinking American, who is actually concerned about the welfare of our troops, sends his brother a $500 toy truck with a wireless video camera mounted to it.  While the troops are on patrol the $500 truck runs out in front of the soldiers and detonates an IED saving their lives.

Response from the Department of Defense?  Who knows.   Probably shock.  And maybe they will send some government officials to visit the man who sent the truck to fine and arrest him for sending unauthorized tech into their war zone.  Can’t have a common citizen making the government look bad ya know.

The Department of Labor announced yesterday that 400 civilian defense workers in Missouri affected by this action (back in 2005) received a $543,705 National Emergency Grant to “to continue re-employment services” for these workers.

Excuse me? Are these workers so unskilled that they need half a million dollars from the tax payers to get them “re-employed”? Hey I know the economy is bad but if these people are so unemployable that they need the government to help them then maybe they should never have been employed in the first place.

This fiasco, comes on the heals of a $1,040,969 grant to Missouri in November and a $1 million “National Emergency Grant” back in June! For essentially the same issue!

That is now over two and a half million tax payer dollars thrown into just the base closure process in Missouri this year alone! This base closure thing was supposed to save the tax payers money not keep costing us money!

Ronald Reagan said that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program. This is another example of this. Will we still be seeing money being spent on base closures and realignments decided in 2005 in 2015? Don’t doubt it!

America has also learned a lot more about this man who, to put it bluntly, is a coward. And the more we learn about Mr. Hasan, the more we see him for what he really is.

Maj. Hasan is one of those typical sorts it seems who join the military and take tax payer dollars to support their education and lives. But when they are asked to repay that debt and serve their country they get all offended about such a request. Hasan apparently was not all that happy that the United States was fighting his radical Islamic brothers and sisters abroad and when he learned that the messiah, Barack Obama was not going to immediately halt the fight against them he reportedly became even more agitated at the situation. His pending deployment to fight against the Jihadis he seems to have supported, by several reports, apparently pushed him over the edge.

His family seems to be feigning surprise! Yet already reporters have had little trouble turning up at least a few people inside and outside of the military whom Hasan had given detailed information to about his opinions on the matter of the War Against Islamic Terror. Even more stranglely, according to reports, Hasan, a life-long Muslim and United States citizen, listed his nationality as “Palestinian” with his Mosque according to reports.

There is also a bizarre and quite frankly morbid attempt going on right now by some to portray Hasan as the victim in all this. There are claims that he was the victim of harassment because of his faith. Yet after having spoken to several active duty soldiers and veterans, their response to such claims is disbelief reinforcing that there is no way that a Major would be harassed without serious implications for those doing the harassment no matter where it came from in the chain of command. It just does not seem to happen. Reports are that he had few friends and was a loner. Apparently now we see why! The man was a psycho!

I have also heard reports that seem to portray this man as having led some sort of ultimately stressful existence while in the military. There are people that are writing rambling excuses for this man that makes it sound as if he had been on the front lines of the War Against Islamic Terror watching his buddies getting blown to smithereens and dying in his arms. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here, however, is what we ultimately know. After the entire exercise of excuse making by the sniveling and once all the hand wringing is done the truth is just so simple. Nidal Malik Hasan is a cowardly terrorist. You can spin it any way you want. You can sugar coat the man with all the sweetness that you can concoct. But Hasan was just a little Jihadi who was biding his time waiting to kill. And no one, despite the warnings, seemed willing to do anything about it.

However the saga seems unwilling to die and WorldNetDaily does a great job of keeping tabs on the weird things happening with regards to the issue. The left hates WND for this and other reasons and their vacuous attacks on the site while not actually disproving anything they have to say on the issue are always humorous reads.

The latest involves the case of U.S. Army Reservist Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook who has objected to being deployed out of concerns that he might be following the orders of an unqualified President and thus making him party to war crimes. He was scheduled to leave on assignment and fulfill his duties but remarkably, instead of pressing the issue and hauling Mr. Cook up on charges of insubordination the army has just circumvented having to deal with the issue according to Orly Taitz, his lawyer:

She continued, “They just said, ‘Order revoked.’ No explanation. No reasons – just revoked.”

I have talked to some military personnel and all of them but one have told me that they have been surprised to hear this. Apparently the military did not want to get involved over this dispute or perhaps the order to try and sweep this challenge under the rug came from the highest level of the military itself – the Oval Office. It is unknown but very bizarre that the military, a government funded wing with infinitely deep pockets, would just let the issue die.

The question becomes now, what if other use the same tactic and what if LOTS of other military personnel use this same tactic and decimate the military? I don’t think you will see that because members of the military generally do not tend to do things to benefit themselves that would put others in harms way. In this case, by refusing to deploy they would be sending another soldier in their stead. But then again, maybe this is a way to get attention to an issue that just doesn’t seem to want to die.

The mystery continues.

Now another report from NewsMax:

A recent survey conducted by The Military Times shows six out of 10 active-duty service members are uncertain or pessimistic about President-elect Barack Obama as the nation’s next commander in chief.

Respondents to the survey of more than 1,900 active-duty subscribers to Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times newspapers say much of the uncertainty lies in Obama’s lack of military service and experience in leadership abilities.

“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,” one lance corporal who asked not to be identified said in a follow up interview with The Times.

Ok … there is more:

A higher percentage of respondents say outgoing President George W. Bush has their best interests at heart over Obama. Nearly half 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.

Liberals support the troops? Nope. But they will continue to believe that they do!

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
A day in September and going to work.
On the way there I was planning my day.
Hearing the news of an attack on our home.
Watching on television as the twin towers were set ablaze.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
The news of those cowards that killed even more.
As they plowed another plane into the Pentagon.
Those that rallied on board a fourth plane.
Those that sacrificed and put it all on the line in Shanksville, PA.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
Praying for those that we knew who were dead.
Praying for those that we hoped to have survived.
Confusion that gripped a nation trying to come to a realization as to what happened.
The roar of fighter jets in the sky above.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
The radicals claiming that this was not over.
How they would make us pay for imagined sins in their own little brains.
The way Americans rallied against the face of evil.
And a man with a bullhorn standing among what was now rubble.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
A brief moment of unity in Washington, DC.
Unity that quickly started to faded as politics came into play.
A choice to fight back and not cower and hide.
Political back biting and then claims of big lies.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
Soldiers who prepared to head off for a war.
Others that wrung their hands at the thought of defending our selves.
Brave men and women alike that went overseas.
And not a single one of them forced to do so with a gun to their head.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
A powerful defeat of the evil from that September day.
And others that plotted and told us that this was all wrong.
The betrayal of our men, our women, our country.
Slurs comparing our soldiers to NAZIs, Pol Pot and others.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
Hollow men of a by gone era implying our soldiers were murderers.
Vigorous defense of such claims and trumped up charges.
The faces of men and women with purple fingers and with some more liberty than the day before.
And anger in my gut at those who claimed that it was still all wrong.
I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.

I have not forgotten, nor will I forget.
That for one shining moment a belief in liberty united us all.
A belief that all were given by God himself the right to such.
How many have tried to taint our reaction.
How many have tried to claim it was too much.
How many have tried to lie about why all was done.
How many have at every turn worked to undermine the mission.
How many have sought to do so for no other reason than the pursuit of their own power.
How many have sought to use these lies to rally against doing what was right and just to take America down a notch.
How evil still exists and continues to plot our demise.
How the dead are still gone and without vigilance and determination more will leave us.
No, I certainly have not forgotten.
And you bet your ass I will never, ever forget.

==========================
This article is a Liberty Reborn exclusive and may not be reprinted without purchase of a license. To obtain a license please contact Mr. Jackson at jackson@libertyreborn.com

Blessed are the peacemakers, especially those that did not return. Memorial Day is the day we honor those that died in battle fighting not just for Americans, but for all people who yearn to have the blessings of liberty.

To call them “heroes” does not do them jsutice. They are so much more. They deserve a name that has not yet been created or spoken and worthy of their sacrifice. This Memorial Day, like all Memorial Days past and yet to come we remember them in the hopes of the day when that word is first spoken.

For these are men and women whose blood has been spilled from the shores of Tripoli, to the beaches of Normandy, to the sands of Iwo Jima, to the jungles of Viet Nam, to the moutnains of Afghanistan, to the deserts of Iraq. Yes, they are more than heroes.

Blessed are they for they were not only willing to put their lives on the line but actually lost their lives.

Blessed are they for their end did not always come swift and painless while staring into the eyes of the enemy.

Blessed are they for they knew that in war some will always die and knew that it could very well be them.

Blessed are they because they gave their lives so that others may live on.

Aristole once said, “we make war so that we may live in peace”; that we fight in order to gain peace worthy of being had. Sure we could chose not to fight and allow an unkind master to enslave us. But that is a peace not worth having for there is no liberty. The warriors are the true peacemakers; when their cause is just. Hope for liberty is always just.

But peace is always short lived. Evil always rears its ugly and immortal head.

Plato once said, “only the dead have seen the end of war”; that there will always be war because there will always be a need to defend liberty from others. Those that we remember on this Memorial Day have certainly seen an end to their own war. And they are in a far better place. And we will not forget their sacrifices.

They are gone. They are not forgotten. This Memmorial Day we remember the most blessed of all the peacemakers.

* This article is a Liberty Reborn EXCLUSIVE and may not be reprinted without the purchase of a license for this particular article. If you wish to request a license and pricing information for reprinting this article you must contact J.J. Jackson at jackson@thelandofthefree.net