College-age people. Ah - The
all-important Youth of America.
Maybe
it's non-partisan, but it's damn sure political, all right. It's the politics of
fear-mongering - the same sort of thing that happens every four years when the
seniors are reliably informed that someone is coming to snatch away their social
security checks. After the election, one way or the other, the whole issue dries
up and goes away until the next national election four years later. Because by
then, who knows - some of those seniors last time will have gone to the clearing
at the end of the path, and there will be new replacements to frighten into the
voting booths. Don't get me started on the Problem of the
Homeless...
But I was talking about
the draft. Never mind the fact that the only person even talking about a draft
was gadfly Charlie Rangel (D-NY), who floated a bill for purely political (read:
race baiting) reasons.
There are some
interesting dynamics in play here, and I'm not sure that I'm the guy who's
qualified to tie them all together, but here goes -
First of all, it's hard to imagine
any serious military officer who thinks using draftees to fight the war on
terror is
anything
like a good idea. We've gotten used to the quality that comes with being able to
choose from among volunteers. Oh, we can cast our nets pretty broadly when it
comes to filling the broader enlistment rolls, but even then, when it comes to
choosing front line, combat arms types? We can afford to choose the nimblest of
mind and body. The folks you'd want to fight alongside, if it was you in the
trenches.
(This is not by any means
to denigrate the conscripted soldiers of previous wars - the Army of the United
States, that swelled from the US Army in World Wars I and II, as well as Korea
and Vietnam. Infantry combat in those days was chiefly a matter of density of
fire, of mass, of attrition warfare. But the combination of technology and
maneuver warfare enables a battalion these days to influence more battlespace
than a division could have in World War
II.)
After 9/11, there were lots of
kids who got off of whatever tracks they were on and volunteered to fight. Pat
Tillman was only the most famous of those who lost his life in that vein. Others
are serving still. No one made them join - they did so because they saw a threat
to their country, and wanted to be a part of stopping it. You can call that
patriotism, if the word doesn't stick in your throat. If it does, we don't have
much to talk about, you and I.
But
now it seems the sense of the Rock the Vote types is that all the college aged
kids that wanted to join have already done so, leaving the ones left behind to
frighten with cheap political stunts. I guess because in the catechism of the
left, Iraq has become a Republican war. Bush's war.
Not America's war. Certainly not
theirs.
--------------------
The
Commissar sent me past Atrios's spot today, a place I rarely ever
venture, notwithstanding the fact that it's one of the most influential spots on
the left side of the blogosphere. Atrios was unhappy (if that's the right word)
that Daniel Okrent, the Ombudsman (in all but name) of the New York Times had
the audacity to publicly attach a person's name to his his private statement to
a public newspaper. If that's a little obtuse, there's
this:
That's what a coward named
Steve Schwenk, from San Francisco, wrote to national political correspondent
Adam Nagourney several days ago because Nagourney wrote something Schwenk
considered (if such a person is capable of consideration) pro-Bush. Some women
reporters regularly receive sexual insults and threats. As nasty as critics on
the right can get (plenty nasty), the left seems to be winning the vileness
derby this year. Maybe the bloggers who encourage their readers to send this
sort of thing to The Times might want to ask them instead to say it in public. I
don't think they'd dare.
Soak all of that
in...
Some scuzz ball brings a
reporter's kids into what is nothing more or less than a political disagreement
over the way the reporter shaded an article - in the New York Times no less! -
he gets called on it by the paper's public editor. Okrent's real crime, it seems
to me, is not that he outed Mr. "Sensitivity-boy" Schwenk, it's that he said
that the left was leading in the race to degrade the public sphere of
debate.
But that's OK, it's all good.
Atrios isn't the Hardy Boys.
Just for
fun, I read down into the comments. Here's where it gets interesting. Here's
where it gets scary:
...though the deaths of some amerikan soldiers, the wounding/maiming of some
amerikan soldiers was predictable - it must be recognized that these individuals
decided to become government issue[GI's]. having made that decision, they put
themselves in the hands of the bushits of the world. lamentable, perhaps. but
they made the decision to be a gunsell for the state. and if those that they
threatened shot back, applaud the erstwhile victims of amerika who refused to
kowtow. the real criminality is what has been done to the iraqi populance by
this imperial, fascist state. for over a decade. amerikan's who put on uniforms
and have been invested and are wounded, killed, have only themselves to blame.
they elected to dance that dance. but think of the iraqi women, children, old
men, and other noncombatants who over the last 13 years have been butchered by
this country and its gunsells. why do i hear no one on this site outraged by
what we have done to these individuals? why is it that i do not hear that the
entirety of the amerikan government[demfascists and repfascists] are war
criminals? why is it that i do not hear this board demand that kerry/edwards
renounce the murdering of women and children in iraq? personally, because i was
a marine in the vietnam era (ed: I'll
bet), i don't give a rat's ass
about the lives of the agents of empire - you put on the evil empire's uniform,
you get ordered to invade another country, and the inhabitants of that country
try to kill you, what could you expect?
but i do care about the
lives of the citizens of iraq that we are shooting
up. just as we shot them up in
vietnam. free fire zones, for instance. totally illegal. yet, since 1991 this
gangster country[united states of amerika+ united kingdom] targeted virtually
the entirety of iraq as a free fire zone (ed:
just those parts that were shooting at us - this I know about from personal
experience). kerry, despite his
opposition to amerikan actions in indochina, has been silent in condemning this
evil empire's similarly homicidal activities in iraq. i can only conclude that
he is a moral opportunist. as is his opponent. don't weep over the loss of
amerikan soldiers' lives.... (ed: more ravings
that don't materially advance the point)
you should be able to understand,
now, why it would be that any proud iraqi would do anything in his/her power to
exterminate the invading cockroaches (ed: he
means American soldiers).
whatever you think you know about saddam hussein, consider that it was all an
invention of the amerikan propaganda machine. venceremos
(ed: we will win, I believe. Not quite sure who
he means.)
albert
champion | Email
| Homepage | 10.11.04 - 12:52
am
Emphasis added, just that one
time.
That's pretty good stuff, yah?
Gunsells and empire. Amerika, with a "k". Caring about the Iraqis we're shooting
up there in Iraq, and those we shot up in Vietnam. Don't know how they got
there, but anyway...
demfascists and
repfascists.
But here's the next
best thing - keep reading down the comments list, if you can. Look for the part
where someone in that milieu, anyone, rebukes albert champion for his tone or
tenor. Look hard.
This stuff is
stomach churning to me. It's like stumbling into some horrible den of iniquity
and vice. It's fucking crazy, pardon my language, but what does it have to be
before even a southern gentleman loses his grip on
civility?
These are the folks who
think it's Bush's war. Not theirs. Who are starting to think that if the
military cannot be suborned for their political message,
then they must be minimized and suppressed. Labeled "cockroaches." Who send
scare emails to college age
students.
Psst. Hey - anyone who got
scared about that draft card in their email box? Anyone who takes that to mean
that they've got to vote one way or another in the upcoming election? Thanks for
breathing our air, but don't worry about it - stay away from the lines - we
would not choose to die in your
company.
---------------------------
It's
a strange pass, the volunteer military has brought to us, in a time of war.
There are people who are reflexively against war, because they believe in a sort
of wooly-headed way that violence is a bad thing, and don't think it through any
further. There are, to be fair, thoughtful people, people of nuance, who believe
that taking the fight to the enemy just creates more enemies. They know what
they wouldn't do, but are sort of short on what they would do. They'd like to
put it all back the way it used to be. When it was just a nuisance. (Lileks of course, is wonderful on this as
well:
When I
asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a
much less apocalyptic worldview. "We have to get back to the place we were,
where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry
said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end
prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to
reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't
threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you
continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your
life."
Tony Soprano
doesn’t take over schools and shoot kids in the back. The doxies of the
Bunny Ranch don’t train at flight schools to ram brothels into
skyscrapers.
A
nuisance?
A nuisance?
I don’t want the definition of success of terrorism to be “it
isn’t on the rise.” I want the definition of success to be
“free democratic states in the Middle East and the cessation of support of
those governments and fascist states we haven’t gotten around to kicking
in the ass yet.” I want the definition of success to mean a free Lebanon
and free Iran and a Saudi Arabia that realizes there’s no point in funding
the fundies. An Egypt that stops pouring out the Jew-hatred as a form of
political novacaine to keep the citizens from turning their ire on their own
government. I want the definition of success to mean that Europe takes a stand
against the Islamicist radicals in their midst before the Wahabbi poison is the
only acceptable strain on the continent. Mosquito bites are a nuisance. Cable
outages are a nuisance. Someone shooting up a school in Montana or California or
Maine on behalf of the brave martyrs of Fallujah isn't a nuisance. It's war.
But that's not the
key phrase. This matters: We have to get back to the place we
were.
But when we were
there we were blind. When we were there we losing. When we were there we died.
We have to get back to the place we were. We have to get back to 9/10? We have
to get back to the place we were. So we can go through it all again? We have to
get back to the place we were. And forget all we’ve learned and done? We
have to get back to the place we were. No. I don’t want to go back there.
Planes into towers. That changed the terms. I am remarkably disinterested in
returning to a place where such things are unimaginable. Where our nighmares are
their dreams.
We have
to get back to the place we
were.
No. We have to
go the place where they are.
------------------
Then
I think there are people who believe that the War is a great political
opportunity, a chance to seize the levers of government, move the ball forward
on health care, or social security, or the environment or whatever it is the
left is energized about these days aside from notBush. I can even understand
people like this, even when I can't agree with them - it is at least
comprehensible, coherent.
But then
there are those like Mr. Champion, who's clearly on the other side. Him I don't
get. I mean, dude: what's the alternative vision?
And why is it that no one on the
Atrios site thought it worth a moment's effort to even glancingly disassociate
themselves from all of that?
Is
winning the election really more important that winning the War on Terror?
Really?
-------------------
Crazy
post, couldn't tie it all together, tired of trying.
What a
mess.
Posted @
06:33 PM
|
Posted in
""
|
Sendit
|
Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
