(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Most Americans old enough to remember the Jimmy Carter Administration would agree that the catastrophic and humiliating failure of Operation Eagle Claw on April 24-25, 1980, marked the 20th Century nadir both of America's self-confidence at home and the respect America inspired abroad. I was a third-year law student then, and I vividly remember watching and listening to President Carter's grim disclosure of the results:

Late yesterday, I canceled a carefully planned operation which was underway in Iran to position our rescue team for later withdrawal of American hostages, who have been held captive there since November 4[, 1979]. Equipment failure in the rescue helicopters made it necessary to end the mission.

As our team was withdrawing, after my order to do so, two of our American aircraft collided on the ground following a refueling operation in a remote desert location in Iran....

There was no fighting; there was no combat. But to my deep regret, eight of the crewmen of the two aircraft which collided were killed, and several other Americans were hurt in the accident.

This was by no means the result of a lack of courage and daring on the part of our military forces. But the heavily Democratic Congress — despite a rear-guard resistance fought by the Nixon and Ford Administrations — had cut military funding almost in half between 1970 and 1979 (as measured by percentage of GDP). During the Carter Administration, our military forces' international capacities suffered badly, and our forces were further demoralized both by widespread perceptions that we'd been defeated in Vietnam and by a corresponding lack of support among significant portions of the American public.

Thus, after the international diplomatic humiliation the Carter Administration had guaranteed by its ineffective non-military response to the Iranian Hostage Crisis for many months, the parallel decline of American military power and self-confidence seemed to be summed up by a heartbreaking picture of wreckage left behind in the Iranian desert at a site called simply "Desert One."

Thankfully, however, Ronald Reagan decisively reversed those trends, restoring our military's — and indeed, our entire nation's — capabilities and self-confidence.

Americans who've come of age since the mid-1980s have lived in a world in which America's military preeminence has been unquestionable, our all-volunteer forces' morale high, and our capabilities increasingly global, lethal, and lightning-fast. It's all too easy to take our military and the safety they guarantee for us for granted — at least until one contemplates the prospect of another young, untested, over-confident Democratic POTUS, one who's convinced (as was Jimmy Carter) that the brilliance and justice inherent in his righteous oratory can part the waters and cause the lion to lie down with the lamb.

Barack Obama mouths appropriate platitudes about keeping America strong and safe. So did Jimmy Carter. But to the extent Obama has offered any explanation for how he plans to pay for more than $4.3 trillion in promised additional spending over the course of his Administration, he's already pointing to (a) increased taxes and (b) decreased military spending. And Obama's allies and proxies in Congress aren't even bothering to conceal this:

After the November election, Democrats will push for a second economic stimulus package that includes money for the states' stalled infrastructure projects, along with help paying for healthcare expenses, food stamps and extended unemployment benefits, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said Thursday.

In a meeting with the editorial board of The Standard-Times, Rep. Frank, D-Mass., also called for a 25 percent cut in military spending, saying the Pentagon has to start choosing from its many weapons programs, and that upper-income taxpayers are going to see an increase in what they are asked to pay.

The military cuts also mean getting out of Iraq sooner, he said.

It requires willful ignorance of history to blind oneself to the fact that Obama, Frank, and their party are setting a course that will inevitably cause history to repeat itself — with vastly more dismaying results for the United States of America. They are sowing the bitter seeds today for the Desert One of tomorrow, and the only question is whether a sufficient number of Americans remember this history well enough to prevent them from repeating it by denying them their votes.