What Trump means by Make America Great Again

“It may be worth noting that during the almost exact amount of time it took to win WW II, the current administration could not build an effective web site for its health care initiative.” – Burt Rutan

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By Burt Rutan

About half  of our country is puzzled about MAGA (Make America Great Again).  The Left says we ARE great, so what is he talking about?  They think and talk without any regard for our past.

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Space:

America, from 1961 to 1969 built and flew 7 different rocket systems that launched humans into space, including going to a place we cannot access today – the moon.  America then developed only two for the next 46 years, one of them done by a team of about 40 people in a tiny desert town of Mojave, California.

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Defense:

During the 3-1/2 years of World War 2 that started with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and ended with the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, the U.S. designed and produced 22 aircraft carriers, 8 battleships, 48 cruisers, 349 destroyers, 420 destroyer escorts, 203 submarines, 34 million tons of merchant ships, 100,000 fighter aircraft, 98,000 bombers, 24,000 transport aircraft, 58,000 training aircraft, 93,000 tanks, 257,000 artillery pieces, 105,000 mortars, 3,000,000 machine guns, and 2,500,000 military trucks. The preponderance of the raw materials for these items came from within.
We put 16.1 million men in uniform in the various armed services, invaded Africa, invaded Sicily and Italy, won the battle for the Atlantic, planned and executed D-Day, marched across the Pacific and Europe, developed a deliverable atomic bomb, and ultimately achieved an unconditional surrender from Japan and Germany, two of the three of our most effective allies today.  Fortress England filled out that trilogy.  Note:  Our most effective military ally in WW II was the Soviet Union whose ground forces single handedly pushed the Germans back from the Volga, Stalingrad, Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) all the way to Berlin. Note:  They did not disarm following their blood earned victory (Soviet losses, dead or missing ~ 27 million that includes ~ 9 million military).

By way of comparison, we then spent eight years fighting a war in Vietnam, three years in Korea that ended in an armistice, not a victory, and now 15 years in the Sand Box with inconclusive results. You may want to repeat that sentence to yourself two or three times and let it settle in.

It may be worth noting that during the almost exact amount of time it took to win WW II, the current administration could not build an effective web site for its health care initiative.  Balance that with the fact that we were equipped, and prepared to fight and win, a simultaneous two-front war with China and the Soviet Union from 1947 until 1991. One need not lose sleep pondering the intuitive and self evident reasons for choosing this road to perdition:

Either the “Times they are a changing”.

Or we are.

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Thanks to Burt Rutan for this article.

Burt Rutan designed Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the globe without stopping or refueling. He also designed SpaceShipOne financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, which won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately-funded manned craft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period. Both, along with three other of his aircraft, are on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.  Burt’s recent projects include a flying car, and the Virgin GlobalFlyer which broke Voyager’s time for a non-stop solo flight around the world.

During his 46-year career, Rutan has designed 372 new types of aircraft, of which 45 have been built and taken through flight test. Right now he is designing a seaplane, just for himself.