Seems like I've heard a fair amount of "support the office of the President" types of comments over the last 6 years. More, in my opinion than in the previous 8. So when I read this (gotta love the sports page), it just seemed to be more of the same type of hypocrisy.
I'm all for supporting the office of the president, why can't the "right" do it too? Or is there another explanation I'm missing?
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http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/070123
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Next, the Cruiser Mark Foley : The Navy just announced its next supercarrier will be the Gerald Ford. The ship is the first of a new design supplanting the current Nimitz-class, and thus the new class of supercarriers will also be named Ford-class. The three most recent supercarriers, the Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, are all named for presidents. This is a big step up from the previous supercarrier, the John Stennis, which was named for a congressional committee chairman who opposed the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and whose main accomplishment in the Senate was never saying no to a Pentagon budget overrun. The British Navy has ships with glorious names such as Illustrious and Invincible. America has ships named after committee chairmen!
Check the list of the U.S. Navy's supercarriers and note the presidential succession. Of postwar presidents, Republicans Dwight Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan and the elder George Bush have supercarriers named after them; Democrats Truman and John Kennedy have supercarriers in their names; the missing presidents are Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Since Nixon is the only president ever to have resigned, it would be inappropriate to name a ship after him. That means there are three postwar presidents worthy to have their names placed on Navy capital ships, who have not had a supercarrier named for them -- and all are Democrats. Attention Pentagon: You're not supposed to be partisan, how come the Navy is showing favoritism to the Republican Party in the naming of supercarriers? There is an attack submarine named for Carter, but no ship named for Johnson or Clinton. Bill Clinton was elected to the presidency twice; Gerald Ford was never elected to any national office, and served only an interregnum term in the White House; Jimmy Carter is is the only living president to have won the Nobel Peace Prize; yet Ford's name now graces the new class of supercarriers, while the Navy has extended only a lesser honor to Carter and no honors to Johnson or Clinton. This seems cheap political favoritism unbefitting the United States military.
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