If Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had been a dopey, gutless sap, he might have fallen for Operation Greif when the Jerrys tried to pull the wool over the eyes of allied forces in Europe in 1944, which could have swept the tide of the war back into Germany’s favor.
And if the Eisenhower Foundation out at Abilene was as mealy-mouthed and directionless as a host of other cancel culture infused, Trump-hating presidential libraries and associations across the country which circulated a thinly-veiled We-Hate-Trump-You-Should-Too statement last week, Americans would have one less real voice for the actual principles these deceitful cads claim to uphold.
Like Ike and the boys discovered in Operation Greif, even though something looks like a duck and talks like a duck – it can still be a viper.
Back in October 1944 Hitler needed a viper. Eisenhower landed the massive allied invasion force at Normandy five months before and the Germans were tottering. Hitler’s plan for the Ardennes Counteroffensive hinged on securing at least one bridge across the Meuse River, with a plan to split the American and British forces, cross the river and drive to the coast at Antwerp in Belgium. Hitler put Lt. Colonel Otto Skorzeny in charge of Operation Greif – a plan to quickly locate and train a group of English-speaking German commandos, dress them in captured U.S. Army uniforms, and infiltrate the allied thrust to seize a bridge on the Meuse and hold it for the German counter attack under the guise of Americans defending the post for the good guys.
Skorzeny couldn’t come up with all the American equipment or English speakers he needed, so Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel issued a very public message seeking English-speaking volunteers that went out across the Third Reich, which of course caught the attention of Eisenhower’s spies in the Resistance.
To shorten the story, the deceivers were eventually exposed, Hitler’s plan went to pot, and now you can buy a Coke at any one of 1,478 McDonald’s across Deutschland.
That’s the thing about deception – when conceived by the desperate, it’s often easily revealed. Hence the nervous babble from these Deep State defenders just when the bogus Trump prosecutions start to swell his presidential possibilities among increasingly fed-up Americans once again, according to both Wall Street Journal and CNN polling.
The “Democracy Holds Us Together” statement invoking unarguables like freedom, rule of law, “principles of democracy undergirding this great nation,” baseball, motherhood, apple pie and Chevrolet – was penned by the head cheese of the Trump-hating George W. Bush Presidential Center with a “yeah, what he said” from other established never-Trumpers like The Clinton Foundation, the Obama Foundation, the George & Barbara Bush Foundation and The Carter Center. Its finger-wagging context demands allegiance to vaunted American principles – like never opposing the orthodoxy of the establishment; not questioning the authority of the sainted bureaucracy and never, ever, suggesting Deep Staters who reap lots of scratch from expanding government and restricting your rights – might try to snooker you.
All these government-funded, Deep State outfits despise Trump and push the status quo baloney that brought us Joe Biden. Obama, Clinton, Bush – seriously? Their lofty idealistic words point a finger around the corner at Trump’s ripping off of the bandaid of governmental largesse and mediocrity. How dare an obnoxious real estate rube question the dubious conduct of the 2020 election and the entrenched U.S. bureacracy? But no reason to be suspicious of the pious reminder about the sainted hopes of Democracy from these shifty operators. Just swallow it all and move along to the gift shop, please…
The folks at the Eisenhower Foundation had a little more Kansas gumption than the rest. They refused to sign on to this tripe. Its duplicitous text rings of Keitel’s call for English-speaking Germans. It’s signors even manage to guilt others into support of this disingenuous drivel whose progenitors would have known better – like the Truman Library and the Reagan Foundation. The punchline to the piece is rich: That we shouldn’t call attention to the crappy state our current government is in, because it might detract from us being a shining example for other crappy governments across the world.
In his exit warning to us about the perils of the military industrial complex, Eisenhower only scratched the surface of just how bad American government would become.
Never forget – these go-along and get-along establishment types brought you Joe Biden and Kamala Harris; skyrocketing gas prices; Pete Buttigieg’s fashion shoe incompetence and the dog fetish luggage stealing nuclear waste kingpin; the Afghanistan disaster; ridiculous wind farm subsidies and the rest of the Green Energy debacle; men invading women’s sports; taxpayers paying off private student loans; pointless mask mandates; the Wuhan lab coverup – and they’re barely half done. And this is what they claim is best for American democracy?
Eisenhower wasn’t fooled in ‘44; and his foundation wasn’t fooled last week.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.