Fausta’s Blog

Unversal Civil Defense Training coming up:

Via Judith and Hot Air

Ace asks, How Exactly Do We Fight Compulsory the “Civil Defense” Army?

So the difficulty is formulating a response which doesn’t sound crazy.

For starters, we’ve survived without a domestic paramilitary for 240 years. Or, rather, we seem to have done all right with the National Guards fulfilling that function when necessary. We should press Obama to explain why such a thing is necessary — and get him to be more specific than alluding to gauzy generalities about a “common experience” to remind young people what it is to be “an American.”

Another point: Why does Obama wish to divert recruits from the military? Many young Americans sign up for a patriotic “common experience” which informs them what it is to be “an American” every year. We call this common-experience-providing organization the United States Armed Forces. In addition to providing common experiences to many young Americans of diverse backgrounds, the US Armed Forces also serve the minor secondary function of defending the nation against foreign threats.

What is Obama’s goal here if not to undermine one of the main attractors of military service? The campaign continues running on the claim that military recruitment is low. Why does he strive to lower it further?

This “Civil Service Plan” is right out of Castro’s Cuba, where you have to go work al campo in the countryside when you’re twelve years old.

The Emanuel plan is for ages 18-25, so you don’t have the outcry that using minors would generate. However, ages 18-25 are prime job-hunting ages. Anyone who doesn’t comply with the “Civil Service Plan” can be blackballed from any future employment.

Notice how high schools across the country already have mandatory community service as a graduation requirement. Implementing a mandatory “Civil Service Plan” in colleges, considering how academia is sympathetic to Obama, would be the easiest thing in the world.

From that, to making the “Civil Service Plan” mandatory to future employment would only take nod from Congress.

Can’t happen here?

Yes it can!

UPDATE
NewsBusters has the transcript, including the “circle of love”:

SMITH: I meant to ask you about the universal service piece of the plan. Can you tell me about it? Like, how is this going to work? Are people going to live in barracks?

EMANUEL: Universal civil defense training…I think he had it at 18, but we were saying somewhere between the ages of 18 to 25, you will do three months of training. You can do it in your(inaudible). Some point in college you can do just that. There can be nothing wrong with all Americans having a joint similar experience of civil …what we call civil defense training or civil service…some sense of service to country in preparation, which will give people a sense of what it means to be an American. We propose three months. At the end of the day someone says it should be four more. I’m not going to sit here and hold it up.

SMITH: I mean it’s a lot more than the U.S. government asks of anybody right now.

EMANUEL: Guess what? We have a lot more challenges, so we are going to need a lot to do it.

SMITH: I mean I don’t mean to get hung up on the aesthetics of it, but like uniforms…is it like Europe…people go absent

EMANUEL: If you’re worried about going to have to do 50 jumping jacks, the answer is “yes.”

SMITH: Are you kinda shifting the “country-esque” Army bases in the Summers? I mean… I wonder how it’s going work. This is people’s experiences. It’s so abstract. Do you go nine to five in some course in a Red Cross building?

EMANUEL: The whole idea there is it will be worked on you can do it through your State-National guard could be the vehicle for that. The goal here wasn’t to sit here and work on piece of legislation for ya’ and all that, but that’s one venue of doing it.

SMITH: I’m a little hung up on the Barracks.

EMANUEL: Is there a reason? Do you want to talk about it? Do you have Blue Cross Blue Shield coverage on this? Are you worried about this in some capacity?

SMITH: No, I’m just…just curious

EMANUEL: Rather than figure out if you take a train ride or a barrack, think of it this way: it will be a common experience, and you’ll be prepared. God forbid there’s a chemical hit, there’s another terrorist act, or a natural disaster (which are coming more frequent), there will be a body of citizens who are ready and capable and trained. That’s all you have to think about. We’re all here for you, ok? It’s a circle of love.

Circle of compulsory love, alright.

Also blogging on this: Gateway Pundit, RBO, Babalu, La Contra Revolucion

UPDATE, 13 November
Jeff aims, shoots, and scores: No worries on Compulsory Civil Service, folks: “Obama’s Call for Community Service Is Not Marxism”

No, the real question that needs answering here is who died and made Obama or Michele Catalano arbiter of what constitutes a “lasting gift”? Why does Michele Catalano presume to speak for those who have every right to run their lives as they see fit — not in the way some preening secular moralists dictate they must?

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Tags: Fausta's blog, Rahm Emanuel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Democrats, Fidel Castro, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.