There is a grand theme running through leftism in America.  However much it professes to honor the men who keep us safe, the left quietly abhors these men.  The NYPD knows this, and so its members turn their back on a mayor who turned his back on them.  Obama showed this bigotry towardsour protectors in July 2009 when he condemned the arrest of Henry Gates by the Cambridge Police Department. 

This is an old theme of leftism.  “Police brutality!” was screeched throughout the 1960s and 1970s by leftists who watched violence engulf vast swaths of big cities, insuring that the blacks and other minorities in these areas would have hopelessness and dependency.  Protecting people from violent crime and businesses from robbery and vandalism is an indispensable step in making these areas livable and decent, and only resolute policing can do that. 

Our men in the military are in the group of those who protect us, too.  Obama seemed utterly indifferent to the atrocious behavior of the Veterans Administration and acted only after the deluge of horror stories grew too big to ignore.  Equally ham-handed was his attempt to score political points by trading a probable deserter for valuable terrorist nabobs.

Obama shows it as well in his LBJ-like gradual escalation of military force to fight our enemies.  Rather than approaching threats like ISIL with overwhelming force to win victories with as little American bloodshed as possible, Obama views military operations and missions from a cynical political angle.  His popularity seems to be the only calculation in his decisions regarding military operations.

Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, was the man who defamed American soldiers in Vietnam with his testimony about invented atrocities committed by our soldiers.  Dick Durbin, then second ranking Democrat in the Senate, in July 2005 famously compared our soldiers in Iraq to Nazis or to the Gulag.  (Durbin is still, of course, the second ranking Democrat in the Senate.)  Bill Clinton, the draft-dodger, famously wrote as a young man that he “loathed the military,” and there is little reason to doubt that he did.  

The same awful theme was played out in our failure to use force in a timely way and in strength in Benghazi, which led to the death of Americans, and in the recently released “torture report” that shifts the moral ground in our war on terrorism from the monsters who murder, torture, and destroy without conscience or constraint – except what checks our security forces can apply.

The men who put on uniforms to protect us from dangerous and evil men – whether our protectors are policemen or soldiers – are viewed by the left as the enemy.  Ideals like courage, sacrifice, and fortitude are alien to the leftists who scurry into safe professions like lawyers, professors, and “community organizers.” 

Why?  Leftism is at its shadowy center relentlessly selfish and craven.  Leftists cannot understand why any man would willingly put himself between danger and the innocent.  The roots of this sort of nobility are country, family, and faith – those very values leftists slam and slander all day long.  Devoid of any real moral character, the leftists fear what they cannot understand themselves and, in many cases, are secretly jealous of men who have the guts to do what these furtive little men could never dream of doing themselves.

Ordinary folks see things differently, of course: they are the ones being protected, and their sons, brothers, and fathers are the men who patrol crime-ridden streets or fight fanatical enemies in distant lands. Gallup conducts regular surveys of popular trust in different professions.  “Military officers” and “Police officers” routinely sit near the top of the list, far higher than lawyers or politicians or the news media.  Harris, conducting a similar poll, shows much the same. 

This fact is not lost on leftists, and so they mask their true feelings as much as possible.  They feign respect for those who they really despise, if politics demands.  Leftists do what they do best and most easily: they lie.