Civilians, it seems to me, shouldn’t sit out an election because they don’t like the choices, not while American fighting men and women are in harm’s way, flying missions to attack the Islamic State from carriers or as part of special forces deployments in Kurdistan or Syria. Civilians are being protected from our enemies by sailors deploying under and on the sea for six months at a time — minimum — or by soldiers and Marines in far away places like Kosovo for more than a year at a time.
The civilians get to go to the movies, play golf, have a beer. The soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines get to pull watch or, at times, go into combat.
Civilians owe the military their best judgment as voters as to who ought to be the commander in chief and whose team ought to take up the positions in the Pentagon that are a part of the approximately 3,000 appointees the new president will bring with him or her. When active duty military are putting their lives on the line, civilian voters ought to at least put themselves through the stress of making a necessary if unpalatable choice.
When House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it perfectly clear that there would be no mutiny at the GOP convention in Cleveland, the obligation to choose between Clinton and Trump became very obvious to me. Once Ryan and McConnell closed all the exit ramps, I quickly chose Trump for a host of reasons, the most important being the inescapable conclusion that former Secretary of State Clinton’s law-breaking maintenance of the unsecured server handed our enemies a complete dossier on her and her associates. I have expert testimony on this reality given to me on the record on air by former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morell and off the record by a former senior CIA operations officer.
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