Obama Snubs Marine Just Before Memorial Day Weekend

by Tim Brown

As Barack Obama prepared to board Marine One for the Naval Academy graduation on Friday in Annapolis, Maryland, he snubbed the Marine posted at the helicopter by failing to return a salute.

While he did return shortly down the stairs and shake the Marines hand and speak to him, he continued back up the stairs following the brief words and faint smile of the Marine without returning the salute.

One would think that a Commander-in-chief would have the decency to give the proper salute leading up to the long Memorial Day weekend. However, it seems typical for Obama to treat Marines as his servants rather than those men who lay their lives on the line in order to protect and defend the Constitution as he so aptly demonstrated a little over a week ago when he ordered Marines to hold umbrellas over him and an Islamist at the White House.

While Presidents are not specifically required to salute, Liz Klimas at the Blaze writes, “In 2008, David Alexander with Reuters reported that presidents saluting is actually a ‘thorny debate.’ Alexander wrote that the military has long had a practice of saluting the commander in chief, but the president saluting back didn’t start until President Ronald Reagan.”

“Dwight Eisenhower, a former five-star general, did not return military salutes while president. Nor had other presidents,” Alexander noted.

Smithsonian magazine editor and former marine Carey Winfrey wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in 2009 in which he identified the salutes as a recent phenomenon:

… whenever I saw a president stepping off a helicopter and bringing hand to brow, my drill instructor’s unambiguous words came back to me with much of their original force.

Then there were the salutes themselves, which ranged from halfhearted to jaunty. None of them fulfilled the characteristically succinct prescription that Capt. Jack O’Donnell of the Marine Corps delivered, in 1963, to my platoon of freshly minted second lieutenants at basic school in Quantico, Va.: “Your salute,” he pronounced, “must be impeccable …

Presidents have long been saluted, but they began returning salutes relatively recently. Ronald Reagan was thought to be the first, in 1981.

Winfrey points out that Reagan sought the advice of Gen. Robert Barrow, commandant of the Marine Corps, as to whether he should return the salutes. Winfrey wrote, “According to John Kline, then Mr. Reagan’s military aide and today a member of Congress from Minnesota, General Barrow told the president that as commander in chief he could salute anybody he wished. And so it began.”

David Alexander noted historian John Lukacs writing in 2003 that the president saluting “represents an exaggeration of the president’s military role.”

I’ll just point out that Obama wanted us to look at him that way didn’t he? When he came to office, he couldn’t stop talking about how he was the Commander-in-chief. When there was the declaration that Osama bin Laden was killed, he took immense credit for making that “military” decision. Alexander is way off base here if you ask me.

While Obama has saluted Marines in the past, it seems that he does have a history of being disrespectful. For instance, does anyone recall this little episode?

Or who can forget Michelle Obama’s comment “All this over a damn flag” and her husband’s subsequent approval of her comment.

On this Memorial Day, I want to remind our veterans of the one who has usurped the office of Commander-in-chief, that he is a real despiser not only of our military and veterans, but of America in general.