Politics & Power Quote by Kit Bond

Bond’s line tries to do two jobs at once: praise the National Guard as indispensable while laundering a policy failure into patriotic sacrifice. The 40 percent figure is a blunt instrument of legitimacy. If the Guard is nearly half the “boots on the ground,” the war sounds broadly shouldered, almost consensual. It also quietly normalizes a post-9/11 shift: citizen-soldiers, marketed as a domestic safety net, becoming a routine lever for overseas occupation.

Then comes the rhetorical sleight of hand: “as I think everybody knows.” That phrase isn’t information; it’s social pressure. It frames skepticism as ignorance and wraps contested claims in the warm blanket of common sense. The language of “national security service” similarly smooths the jagged edge of involuntary activation. “Called up” reads procedural, not disruptive; it downplays the family and workplace upheaval embedded in Guard deployments.

The most revealing word is “short.” “Short of equipment” is a polite euphemism for underprepared and underprotected. Bond acknowledges the scandal without naming responsibility, converting logistical neglect into a backdrop for valor rather than a target for accountability. It’s the politics of gratitude: honor the troops loudly enough that questions about planning, procurement, and leadership feel almost impolite.

The context matters, too. In the mid-2000s, Iraq was grinding into a long war, and the National Guard’s overstretch and gear gaps were increasingly visible. Bond’s use of “Islamofascism” attempts to revive moral clarity by grafting WWII-era certainty onto a messy insurgency. It’s a label designed to end argument, not invite it.