Politics & Power Quote by Kathleen Sebelius

Sebelius is stitching together a single moral fabric from jobs that usually live in different rhetorical boxes: soldiers abroad and first responders at home. The move is deliberate. By placing Iraq beside Fort Riley and the Korean Peninsula, she normalizes overseas deployment as routine duty, not an exceptional or controversial policy choice. “Stationed” is doing quiet work here: it’s bureaucratic, not bloody. It drains the sentence of battle imagery and replaces it with geography, as if war were a posting like any other.

Then she pivots to “community first responders,” a domestically beloved category that tends to poll well and resist partisan attack. Folding firefighters and EMTs into the same sentence as troops is a classic legitimacy transfer. If you’re inclined to question the mission in Iraq, the structure nudges you to keep that skepticism in check, because to doubt the frame risks sounding like you doubt the people who “serve us at home.” The phrase “serve this great nation” sets the patriotic thermostat high enough that disagreement can feel like heresy.

The subtext is about unity and insulation. She’s trying to protect public institutions from the political weather: deployments, base politics, homeland security budgets, disaster response funding. “Serve because they believe in America” shifts motive from pay, necessity, or coercion to faith - a civic creed that discourages messy talk about recruitment economics, burnout, PTSD, or policy failure. It’s aspirational language with a strategic purpose: keep the focus on devotion, and you reduce the space for arguments about whether the nation is devoting itself back.