On Breitbart News Sunday, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) said President Barack Obama’s latte salute symbolizes Obama’s resentment of the military.
Speaking to host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125, Franks said it was “callous for the ostensible leader of these men and women to just throw his coffee cup and do a half-salute.”
“It is indicative of his casual, laissez faire attitude toward the military,” Franks said. “He sort of has a resentment of the military … It’s all casual to him. Can you imagine a Ronald Reagan doing that?”
Franks said any reasonable observer can say Obama is “not fulfilling his obligations as the commander-in-chief” because he is “ignoring his principle duty, which is to protect the lives of Americans.” He said Obama “simply seems to be out for lunch” and cited Obama’s mispronunciation of “corpsman” as yet more proof that Obama “fundamentally is not familiar with the whole national security vernacular.”
Franks said President George W. Bush was prophetic about the dangers of leaving Iraq too early, and he said that Obama owes an apology to “Bush and all the other men and women who watched their blood-bought gains evaporate while this president was holding his golf club.”
“It’s hard for me, within the confines of the English language and some modicum of respect for the office, to properly articulate what this president has done to the presidency and to the presence of the United States in the world,” Franks said before noting that Obama has “emboldened our enemies… bewildered our friends, and made our presence in the world diminished beyond my ability to articulate.”
Franks said Obama has “projected nothing but weakness and incompetence,” and America’s enemies sense that and “they will take advantage of that.”
He said that though “taking a vacation from history may sound” good to the naive, Franks warned that “whenever we have ignored history and the dangers of certain enemies that threatened peace in the world… it has not brought peace, it has only increased the chances of war and only increased the cost of responding.”
Franks said the Iranians released the American hostages when Ronald Reagan took office because they knew they were dealing with a different type of leader. He said “the enemy recognizes when a man in leadership is serious or not,” and he said Obama is “is not only not serious, he is tepid, incompetent and inept, and he is simply not focused on anything but the politics of the moment.”
“When I see a President of the United States leading the greatest nation in the world into diminishment and increasing the chaos and the death and suffering in the world because of it, I have to at least respond accordingly,” he said.
Franks will participate in Monday’s National Security Action Summit (NSAS II), co-sponsored by Breitbart News and EMPAct America, which will take place in Salon III at Washington D.C.’s Marriott Wardman Park Hotel (2660 Woodley Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008).