There are two things about the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory that bother me:
(1) Why do conservatives get to denigrate our American military service members this way
Why do they "get to"? There's this thing called 'free speech' here in the United States. (At least for the time being...)
It's the same principle that allowed the left to ceaselessly denigrate the military and its members, from the Vietnam era through the G.W. Bush administration. 'Instruments of imperialism' and 'mass murderers', so the rhetoric went.
Today the exact same thing is being done to the nation's police, as the left try to suggest that the nation's police forces and their officers are brutal racist killers. That line has been shamelessly pushed by the mass media as the nation's headline story for months now.
I don't believe that "conservatives" have any interest in "denigrating" the military services and their members. They are the ones with the history of supporting the military.
Worries about Jade Helm seem to me to be twofold.
First, there's the practical local aspect. If a massive counter-insurgency (or whatever it's supposed to be) training exercise is planned for their communities, how will that impact the lives of local residents? If the streets of their communities are filled with armored vehicles and special-forces operators bristling with automatic weapons, won't their activities put those communities under what amounts to de-facto martial law? I think that's a very real and entirely rational concern. If the military proposed holding massive exercises in my town, I'd have similar worries.
In the Jade Helm instance, the Army assures people that the exercises will take place on private property, with the property owners' consent. They insist that there will be minimal impact on local communities. I'm inclined to believe them.
But I don't see anything wrong with the Governor of Texas ordering state monitors to observe the exercises to help ensure that the assurances are met and that local residents' civil liberties aren't infringed. That's the right thing to do and I applaud him for doing it. In fact, I don't know of any convincing argument against it.
The other worry about Jade Helm is more philosophical. The point that I want to make is that your opposite numbers on the right, those you hate so passionately and feel such scorn for, don't think any more highly of the left. They are no more willing to treat the left's ideas seriously than the left is to heed them. Both sides' perception of the other are insulting caricatures. Both sides are convinced that they are are the good people and that their opposite numbers represent crazy evil. That chasm in American culture is deepening daily, it may already be unbridgeable, and it likely will doom the nation.
That's the context into which Jade Helm inserts itself. The fact that it seems geographically focused on parts of the United States most alienated from the ruling elites creates the suspicion in some quarters that it is a domestic counter-insurgency training exercise/show of force directed at the little people grasping tightly to their religion and to their guns, who the NY-Washington elites fear might someday mount a popular insurrection.
I personally doubt very much whether those planning the Jade Helm exercise had anything like that in mind.
But that's the fear. It isn't totally unreasonable given the kind of hatred that's being directed at anyone who expresses any uneasiness at all about this thing. This has obviously become something much more than a mere military exercise, it's begun to symbolize larger issues to both sides.
Maybe Obama has a point. Maybe the best way to address black America's alienation from the police is to listen seriously to black America's concerns about the police. And similarly, maybe the best way to address the growing alienation of half the US population from the Washington elites is to listen seriously to their concerns. Reducing them to caricatures and then trying to ridicule them into oblivion will only be counterproductive.