At least Ted Rall is honest about how he feels about American troops.
After posting my rant about the GWB-AWOL crock of feces, I began to flesh out why the repetition of this Lie gets me so wound up and it’s this: the Left, in pretending that it actually cares about military members, consistently insults our collective intelligence.
The Left, with its continuous assertion that President Bush “dodged the draft” in the seventies, has this as its goal: to drive a wedge between the president and his natural constituency, the military. Implicit in this goal is the assumption that the military is populated by ignoramuses who don’t read, don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the world, and are as obsessed by “class warfare” as the Left is.
It does this by counting on several facts:
• A good portion of military personnel come from hardworking, blue-collar families
• Suggesting that the president, a member of a rich family, may have received perks due to his connections sits very hard on the average military member
• Few Active Duty military members know how service in the Guard and Reserve works (I didn’t when I switched from AD to Reserve)
• Even fewer civilians know the foregoing
But what really torqued me off was this: in their eagerness to discredit the president’s service record, no one on the Left even bothered to do their homework on Guard/Reserve service regulations. All the Left wanted to do is make the president appear to have bypassed the rules, using the perception of favoritism.
“See? He’s really not one of you. He thinks he’s better than you are. He’ll send you out to die, but he wouldn’t do it himself.” As if the Left actually gave a rat’s hairy behind about the average grunt doing the fighting and dying. As if their actual and ideological parents didn’t refer to Vietnam vets as baby-killers upon the vets’ homecoming. As if they wouldn’t do it today too if the specter of a citizen-led beat down didn’t loom on the horizon.
After seeing the bogus AWOL assertion twice here on my blog, I finally got tired of it.
*****
Oh, and this crap:
“We want the troops to come home where they’ll be safe.” If we wanted to be safe, we would have stayed home in South Central LA (snort) or stayed home and gotten one of those nice jobs in one of those nice tall office buildings in Lower Manhattan.
Leaving aside that 9/11 resoundingly disproved the assertion that one is “safe” here, this last is the most condescending, hypocritical crap that I’ve heard said about American troops in Iraq. Since the abolition of the Draft a generation ago, American military personnel have volunteered to fight America’s wars. It’s called free will. But the Left thinks the military is populated by people too stupid to choose how to live their own lives.
I guess many members of the Left think the military is made up of barely literate yokels from Middle and Southern America or barely literate thugs/thugettes from America’s inner cities. Us dumb “rednecks” and “darkies” couldn’t possibly have a handle on the intricacies of Fascism, Imperialism, and Nazism, since all we read are comic books.
We couldn’t possibly have joined up or stayed in the military as a result of informed, principled decision making, made after a detailed evaluation of history and/or present day world events. We couldn’t possibly have been well-informed and come to a conclusion that is different from that of the Left. We all must be dumb and/or ignorant.
Well here’s a dumb/ignorant suggestion I have for those on the Left who keep attempting to play military personnel for suckers: BITE ME! And after you do that, you can go back to your regularly scheduled spewing of new Big Lies, whatever they may be. It's your right to do so.
(Thanks to Michael J. Totten, among others)
