can you imagine such a speech today from an american president?

"every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. this world in arms is not spending money alone. it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. the cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. it is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000. it is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. it is some 50 miles of concrete highway. we pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. we pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. this, i repeat, is the way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. this is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

eisenhower, 1953.

this from a man, who unlike obama, bush, clinton, bush the elder, reagan, and the others, actually experienced war first hand. mind you, eisenhower was a 1950's republican, and yet, we don't hear our presidents speak in such a way today. my point is not to glorify eisenhower; his presidency saw the cia overthrow leaders in iran and guatemala, and he gave the go ahead for the bay of pigs fiasco/war crime in cuba. he did little to advance the cause of equal rights for black americans. he stood by quietly as mccarthy and others of his kind destroyed careers. and yet, who can imagine a leader today say that a life of war and militarism "is not a way of life at all, in any true sense." it seems safe to say that the members of both parties, with the exception of several progressive congress members, and a few senators, most of whom are democrat, are to the right of eisenhower. this is mind boggling, but true. compare these sentiments with an opposition to war based on the fact that saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, or that iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. there is no humanity in such an opposition. there is no decency to it; for what if he did have weapons of mass destruction? should we then use the crime of war to respond to that possession? this is an anti-war sentiment that is not anti-war. it doesn't acknowledge the horror that is war, and therefore, the person who makes such an "anti-war" argument will have no problem backing different wars with supposedly better reasons for being waged, as obama does with afghanistan. what eisenhower's statement does is acknowledge the essential crime that is war and the preparation for war in an industrialized, militarized state. such language has largely ceased to exist in major political party discourse, with the exception of minor party members within the major parties. because this is so, the sentiments can be ignored or mocked, as they are when kucinich makes them.

i ask you to read this message from eisenhower again and once more try to imagine a modern american president saying something like it. and i'll leave you with a couple of quotes from jfk that are along similar lines.

"those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

"war will cease when the conscientious objector is admired to the extent that the warrior is today."

think of that last line; can you even imagine an american president today acknowledging co's, much less hoping that they will one day be praised as heros? think of the modern political rhetoric and discourse. again, i am not trying to romanticize our past presidents; they too, committed profound crimes. but just think of our decline in this regard.

it is stunning.