Und auch bei der dritten Debatte ist es wohl ein einziger Ausdruck, der vom außenpolitischen Diskurs Obama vs. Romney übrig bleibt: „klar, wir haben heute weniger Pferde und Bajonette, aber …“
Nach den Romey-Patzern Big Bird und den „Binders ful of women“ sind es nun also Pferde und Bajonette, die von der Netzwelt ausgegriffen und zum Internet-Gag (Meme) gamacht werden. Diesesmal kommen die entscheidenden Worte jedoch von Barack Obama, der ein Argument von Mitt Romney geschickt retourniert und den Punkt macht:
Mitt Romney:
Our Navy is older our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now down to 285. We’re headed down to the to the low 200s if we go through with sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me. I want to make sure that we have the ships that are required by our Navy.
Our Air Force is older and smaller than any time since it was founded in 1947. We’ve changed for the first time since FDR. We — since FDR we had the — we’ve always had the strategy of saying we could fight in two conflicts at once. Now we’re changing to one conflict.
Look, this, in my view, is the highest responsibility of the president of the United States, which is to maintain the safety of the American people. And I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is the combination of the budget cuts that the president has as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making our future less certain and less secure. I won’t do it.
Barack Obama
(…) I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.
And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships. It’s — it’s what are our capabilities.
Genau darauf hatten die Beobachter gelautert:
https://twitter.com/w0ng/status/260557134071230465
Innerhalb von Minuten lief der Begriff #horsesandbayonets bei Twitter heiß, entstand ein tumblr-Blog, wurden die ersten Fotos und gifs montiert (via Buzzfeed): 
