During his 2008 campaign for the presidency, when Barack Obama kept talking about “fundamentally transforming” our nation, he wasn’t kidding.

At the time, many Americans figured it for little more than a clever campaign slogan. They shrugged off his emergence from the notoriously corrupt Chicago machine, his connections to radicals such as Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, and his ranked status as the most liberal of all 100 U.S. senators. What harm could he really do? they thought.

Well, plenty — just as we repeatedly warned throughout 2008.

Take the military, for example, which even today is feeling the effects of Obama’s massive purge of its senior leadership. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized back in 2013, “What the president calls ‘my military’ is being cleansed of any officer suspected of disloyalty to or disagreement with the administration on matters of policy or force structure, leaving the compliant and fearful. … What has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture.”

It’s strange how socialists like to talk about “asking” “the rich” to pay “their fair share” so we can have “free” healthcare for everyone, but they rarely talk about things like gutting our military, which, when Obama and Joe Biden came to office, was tough, battle-hardened, and fresh off a remarkable “surge” victory in Iraq.

And yet there they were, hell-bent on fundamentally transforming that most vaunted of American institutions to the point where, less than a year into his second term, nearly 200 flag and general officers had been relieved of duty for weak or trumped-up reasons, such as “loss of confidence in command ability,” “mishandling of funds,” “inappropriate relationships,” “inappropriate behavior,” and “low morale in troops commanded.”

One wonders how many of Obama’s cabinet members and their underlings could’ve been cashiered for similar reasons.

Unfortunately, the political purge of our military leadership and the extensive damaged it caused isn’t the end of this story. As Stu Cvrk reports, “[Obama’s] second ignominious action taken was the 2011 Executive Order 13583 directing ‘government-wide diversity and inclusion training,’ which, by 2020, included the implementation of Marxist critical race theory training in all federal agencies including the US military services.”

The executive order itself begins with a faulty but universally applied talking point from the Left: “Our Nation derives strength from the diversity of its population and from its commitment to equal opportunity for all. We are at our best when we draw on the talents of all parts of our society, and our greatest accomplishments are achieved when diverse perspectives are brought to bear to overcome our greatest challenges.”

It sounds good, sure, but is it really true? Where’s the science behind the claim that our diversity is a strength rather than a source of strife and division to be cynically exploited by the Left? And where’s the science behind the implied claim that we don’t derive strength when we make color-blind, performance-based personnel decisions that seek only to hire or promote the best available person for the job?

How well, for example, might an NBA or NFL team perform if its foremost goal wasn’t to win as many games as possible but rather to “draw on the talents of all parts of our society”? Why should one standard apply to LeBron James’s Los Angeles Lakers while another standard entirely is applied to our military and indeed our entire federal government?

As Cvrk sums things up, “The rot resulting from Obama’s executive order and the firings of senior military officers has wrought extensive damage to military good order, discipline, readiness, and training — and ultimately to the nation’s national defense capabilities. The political corruption in the military needs to be reversed and the hyper-partisans purged from the ranks. Start at the top, Mr. President!”