http://www.sullivan-county.com/id2/served.htm
Defend your idols december.
It’s amazing that so many who cry for war for our soldiers now thought it best that they didn’t serve.
This is too easy.
What difference does their service make? Should Bush allow the enemy to kill American civilians with impunity because he never was on active duty? What a bizarre idea. The President is the Commander in Chief. The President’s job is to protect the nation, regardless of what his or her military service may have been.
Simlarly, every member of Congress had a responsibility to vote on the Iraq war, whether they had ever served in the military or not. Should Hillary Clinton have abstained on principle? Of course not.
You deride Clinton because he used the student deferment to dodge the draft. Yet many who are pushing war today did the same thing. You support them.
Can you say…hypocrite?
I thought that you could.
You’re changing the subject, Reeder. I never said that Clinton’s lack of military service meant that he shouldn’t make war. In fact, I was disappointed that he didn’t repond more forcefully after Saddam kicked out the UN inspectors in 1998. The point is, Clinton’s responsibility was to do what was best for the nation. His personal history should have been irrelevent to his decision on how to respond, and I’m sure it was.
Maybe you should start another debate criticizing Bush for going into the reserves, rather than active duty. Or, perhaps you want to argue that someone who has served on active duty would make a better President. You might have a case with either of these assertions.
Uhhh…december…Bush didn’t go into the reserves.
So let me see. You think that “december is a hypocrite” is a Great Debate? Ah yes, the great timeless questions:
Is there a God?
Can the ends justify the means?
Is december is a hypocrite?
Just out of curiosity, can a politician call for increases in welfare and never have participated in a volunteer / community service program?
To me it seems, people who shoot their mouths off and say they want America to go to war and yet they themslelves never served a day in the military are VERY hypocritical.
John Wayne seems to top this list of hypocrites and Cecil has a great column on this -
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_004.html
Basically, it seems when it was THEIR turn to risk their life, they decided to “pussy” out. So, why in heck should some chickenshit put someone ELSE in harm’s way?
I agree completely with Reeder.
To make a vaguely valid analogy, when the Pope issues rules about birth control don’t a great many people counter by saying “if he doesn’t play the game, he shouldn’t make the rules”.
It’s not so much that they didn’t serve. Many played the draft game and their number didn’t come up. I have no problem with that. But there are those pushing war today who actively avoided serving. That ticks me off.
It makes a big difference when there is a draft (i.e. during Vietnam). If you supported the war, and avoided the draft, you are a hypocrite. In other words, you are willing to see people coerced into fighting for your beliefs, which you yourself are too cowardly to defend.
With the current volunteer military, this distinction is less meaningful, because at least the people fighting chose to join.
For me, the point has nothing to do with responding to current crises. The point is that those who supported the war but avoided the draft (without good reason) were hypocrites. In otherwords, it’s about character, something Clinton supposedly lacked. Well, at least he was on record opposing the war.
Well, yes, John Wayne was not a real soldier. What’s more, James Cagney was not a real gangster, Humphrey Bogart was not a real detective, and Bela Lugosi was not a real vampire. (Tom Mix was a real cowboy before he came to Hollywood, but this was exceptional.)
As for George W. Bush – no, he didn’t serve in the reserves, he served in the Texas Air National Guard, where he didn’t really put in the time he was supposed to, and he got in, in the first place, through family connections. Cecil did a column on it not long ago.
I agree with december that a politician’s personal history of military service or nonservice SHOULD have no bearing on his or her defense policy. But that doesn’t mean it DOES have no bearing, nor does it mean such personal history is irrelevant to a politician’s credibility when he or she calls for war. A combat veteran really knows what war is; a lifelong civilian (or noncombatant reservist or Guard member) does not.
Brain glutton, yes I know James Cagney wasn’t a REAL gangster, but John Wayne went to extremes when he carried his “war hero” film image into reality. I sometimes think he actually started to believe it himself. Did you read Cecil’s column on the subject? Gee, I wish I could spend the next war the way John Wayne did. And at some point I’m “gonna” join the military. (yeah right). And wow John Wayne got into fights during WW2 because REAL servicemen fighting a REAL war questioned why he wasn’t doing some REAL fighting too. How dare they question the “great” patriot John Wayne. To me he reminds me of the school bully who PRETENDS to be very tough but when push comes to shove, they turn into a chickenshit.
Heck I admire REAL heroes. (You know the ones who did REAL fighting in REAL wars). Audie Murphy 5’7", boyish-faced and soft-spoken was our most decorated serviceman in WW2. He is hardly remembered in the present day.
John Wayne has a US commemorativepostage stamp. Audie Murphy does not. Life sure isn’t fair is it?
That page needs to define “avoided the draft.” Does that mean they went to Canada? Did their number just not get called? I mean, the ones with student deferral I see how it could be seen that they “avoided the draft.” But most of them, it gives no real info.
So how did they avoid the draft?
I’m not sure this is entirely fair. Certainly the BushAWOL webpage makes no pretense of being anything but narrowly partisan to the end that it is devoted to disparaging the President and his playmates. That is not to say that there is not an arguable factual basis for the abuse it puts out.
For instance, Pat Robinson, as despicable a person as some might think him, was on active duty during the Korean War. It may well be that strings were pulled to keep him out of a combat assignment, or he may have been lucky, as many thousands of others were who ended up serving in safe jobs, such as Vice President Gore, and yours truly.
That said, it seems to me that a man who wants to occupy a position of power, trust or profit with the government and to make decisions putting young Americans in harm’s way is in a very awkward position if he was not at home when his government called on the youth of the country to make real sacrifice for the benefit, or at least at the direction, of the nation. I don’t much care about decorations and awards, I don’t really care about combat service. What I want to see in candidates for public office is a demonstrated willingness to subordinate personal ambitions and convince and comfort to a sense of duty to the nation. What I don’t want to see is people running the show who are willing, even eager, to send young Americans into combat when they were not on the firing line, or close behind it, when they were of military age and there was fighting and dying to be done.
It is not a question of whether a candidate of office holder without military service should have the moral standing to send American forces to war. It is a question of weather an office holder who has no military service and who preens and struts in semi-military costume should be seen as a phony and laughed off the national stage.
.
A rhetorical and oratorical after thought:
I want this country to be governed by people who had enough regard, respect and love for the country to answer when the country called for their service. I do no want the country to be governed by people who when the country called said, “Let somebody else do the dirty work.”
This site gives a little more detail:
http://www.rackjite.com/chapter7.htm
Some people really AVOIDED the draft. John Ashcroft was exempted from military service because of his “vital” civilian job - teaching undergraduate law at Univ of Missouri. In all fairness, not one Vietcong invasion of St Louis occurred while John Ashcroft was teaching law in the “show me” state. Good work John !!
Jack Kemp was exempted from the draft because of a bad knee - but still being the true patriot he was, he was able to muster up the courage to play pro football for the Buffalo Bills. Yes in some RARE exceptions there COULD be a case where someone’s medical draft deferment still might enable them to play pro football. Then again, as my parents used to say “if you were too sick to go to school, then you are too sick to go out and play !!!”
John Engler (former Gov of Michigan) was a whopping 8 pounds overweight and couldn’t be drafted. How can we ask someone to make the imposible “sacrifice” of losing 8 pounds in order to go into the military?? That’s asking too much !!!
Think of the people who were too young to join the military but they lied about their age because they were so willing to fight. (the late Representative Joe Moakley and the actor Rod Steiger are merely 2 that I can think of). Seems Ashcroft, Kemp, Engler and many of THEIR kind were not made from the same stuff.
8 pounds overweight for the draft?
Pshaw. There’s got to be more to it than that. There just HAS to be. He must have been grotequely overweight, because you lose considerably more than 8 pounds on the fat-boy program in Basic.
While it may be personally satisfying to complain about the chickenhawks who railroaded us into the invasion of Iraq I think the other side has the best of the argument. Governing is making choices, whether you have personal experience in the area or not. Whether you purposely avoided gaining personal experience or not. It was their job to make the call and they did so. I don’t like their decision but I won’t quibble about their competence to make it. Someone has to.
Now ridiculing them is another story. In my view they have earned plenty of that and the Top Gun photo op by the Chickenhawk in Chief is simply the easiest opportunity.
I will point out that the invasion force wasn’t completely voluntary. Discharges were frozen some time before the fighting began and no one asked those whose enlistments were up whether they minded sticking around to take the chance of getting shot at.
Yes, how foolish of me to say John Engler was 8 pounds overweight. He failed his physical TWICE because he was 2 pounds overweight! Here’s the link:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/news/9605/13/watts.engler/index.shtml
Granted, today, Engler does have a serious weight problem but 2 pounds keeping you out of the draft when you are young and healthy? Come on !!!
It seems that more people should read about some of the great “sacrifices” some of these great American “heroes” made when it was their turn to do the “dirty work” as another message board poster said.
Whoa.
Stop-Loss was on, 2sense. If you didn’t know, that freezes all affected AFSCs from separations. And it’s perfectly legal, since most people don’t read the fine print when they enlist (which they should ALWAYS do), the part about two years of inactive ready reserve duty in case they need you. It’s a standard thing, and you know the deal up front, so that argument’s a non-starter from the beginning.
Besides, everyone has a choice. Do your job, or go to jail. Pretty simple if you ask me.
That just seems absurd to me. I didn’t doubt what you said, but I thought there was something else there. I guess not.