Yes, I'm Still Ranting

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)

Comments

[Michael J. Totten]

I have a friend who really needs to be yelled at by you.

[baldilocks]

Send him/her this way. I'll hook him/her up.

[Susan Kilmer]

YOU GO GIRL.....Geez, my blood pressure went up just reading this post! My father is retired Air Force and is one of the most intelligent men on earth! (Yea, I am probably prejudiced, but so what?)

[mark]

What a bunch of nimrods. I wonder if any of the ijits understand Absent With Out Leave? Just like a moonbat to make up facts.

great blog, I came here via Kim and I'm glad.

Maybe when they're looking up AWOL in the dictionary they can find the meening of FOAD too.

[Becky]

Keep on ranting...as an Army brat with a father w/ a bronze star for service in Vietnam...I agree with you and your rants!

[Geoffrey]

I've had this discussion several times on my blog, and I've yet to have anyone throw up any "evidence" worthy of mention. Every single time it's ended with a crying liberal retreating back to the safety of internet anonymity.

[baldilocks]

On another blog that mentined the Big Lie, I linked to this post. The blogger called it amatter of semantics, then listed all of the other allegedly questionable items in GWB's military career. We'll see what comes of it. I may post something about it here, may not. The blogger is a nice, reasonable person and I don't necessarily want to unleash the "Dogs of War" upon her. :-)

[hln]

Nicely, nicely done.

My favorite:

"the Left, in pretending that it actually cares about military members, consistently insults our collective intelligence."

Now, take "military members" out and put any group of people in, and what do you have? A big dog pattern. And it fits.

hln

[Mr. E.]

Fascinating.

I'm a veteran, and a military contractor in Iraq. I agree with your assesment of the situation, other than the possible addition of the caveat that these detractors mayalso believe, in addition to the stupidity factor, that there is this population of brave but silent patriots that are in Iraq against their will, through a combination of their legal obligation and various "gag orders" that prevent outcry. Personally, I see no evidence of this, any more than I see indications of an inability to bring themselves in from the rain.

Don't get me wrong, there is no lack of stupidity, it just isn't the kind of stupidity to which these detractors refer. This an ordinary kind of stupidity, rather like the whole Army beret thing. That kind of stupid may cost you money, and eventually personnel, but doesn't indicate that you will blindly wander into the line of fire and need some well-meaning group of "Superior Beings" to tell you that you are better off standing somewhere that people aren't blowing things up.

Either way, though, it is insulting to the courage, fidelity, and patriotism of those out here.

[bruce]

blahblahblah... and the right wants to nuke the arabs and turn the Middle East into a police state for with miles and miles of golf courses...

(sarcasm off)

you see its easy to construct an imaginary enemy then denounce them, I could go on, but since you already know what other people think its just not neccesary is it? It must be nice to define your opposition with falsehoods and downright lies. Makes it easy to tear them down. As long as you have a nice group that wants to believe in your false characterizations you'll get cheers and support.

[Aakash]

As I've indicated before, it is troubling about the false dichotomy and 'straw man' tactic that some people - like many of those who are not looking at the issues of war and foreign policy from a political science and philosophical perspective - are using, and believing.

The war issue is not a conservative vs. liberal issue... I have been trying to debunk this myth over the past year in my blog entries, comment posts at other blogs, and other writings.

I see that this blog entry is related to one of Michael Totten's entries. In an update to one of my recent blog entries, I linked to a couple of Mr. Totten's articles. Like several other major liberal or left-leaning bloggers (as well as some liberal commentators, and others), Mr. Totten has been firmly supporting the war against Iraq.

As Mr. Totten has correctly pointed out (like in those articles listed in that aforementioned blog entry of mine), this type of war corresponds with the liberal and Democratic philosophy. Even some National Review editors have acknowledged that much of what our government is doing in Iraq is leftist, or at least is worthy of left-wing support. (I recently updated that same aforementioned blog entry with links to the relevant material regarding that - I provided links to one of Jonah Goldberg's latest columns, and to one of Rich Lowry's.)

As for the military issue, it is true that many liberals do not care about our brave servicemen and women, or about our nation's veterans.

But many conservatives and libertarians do. And that is one reason that many conservatives, including many current and former U.S. military generals, as well as many of our heroic veterans, and some Republicans, including members of the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, opposed the Iraq war, and oppose the way that Rumsfeld and the Bush administration are currently handling the situation in Iraq right now. (I have written a lot about these facts in my current and past blog entries, and in other writings.) Even some war supporters have been strongly criticizing the way that the administration has handled post-war Iraq - Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, libertarians, and others.

The sentiments that are being attributed by some war supporters to "the liberals" - Some sentiments related to those [but different, in that they are well-intended, and truly express support for our soldiers] have actually been expressed by many conservatives and Republicans over the past decade. As I pointed out in this guest blog entry (at another conservative's website), much of the opposition to military intervention and deployments overseas during the past decade has come from our military, or from pro-soldier and military-related groups, leaders, and organizations. And as you can see at that guest entry, the same was true for the recent war in Iraq. There was a great deal of opposition to this war from conservatives commentators and conservative organizations, as well as conservatives who are connected to the military.

This is the first time that I've commented at this weblog... It seems like a very popular site, and it looks pretty good. Keep up the good work.