Monday, June 2, 2008

Who's that squawking?


As Colin McEnroe points out, William Kristol's criticism of Barack Obama's Wesleyan commencement speech, is a tad disingenuous.

Kristol lambastes Obama for not including "military service" in his list of ways that graduates could give back to their country, and their fellow citizens. Kristol, born the same year I was, certainly had the opportunity to enlist for Viet Nam (though he would have had to drop out of school to do so), but even after graduation, it was not a path he followed). My draft number was 76 and if the war had not ended before my graduation in 1974, I would surely have been drafted.

As McEnroe points out, Kristol is amongst a large group of chickenhawks who will gladly send the sons and daughters of other parents to fight their wars. One person McEnroe left off his list was his WTIC colleague Jim Vicevich, who likes to play soldier on the air, but never made it into any branch of service (Vicevich too, is in the right age group to have fought in Viet Nam).

Besides, at a time when military recruiters are having enormous difficulty recruiting earnest, naive, gullible young men and woman to enlist to fight in an unpopular, immoral war, why would any thinkng person suggest such a thing to a group of college graduates, who are smart enough to find another way to change the world. Which raises the larger question - why are the young, the patriotic, the desperate, the poor and the uneducated the ones we ask to fight our dirty wars?

Besides, if Obama had suggested military service, the right wingers would surely have excoriated him for asking others to do what he hadn't done.

BTW, Kristol, who has been having his share of difficulty with facts lately, published this column today, a full week after the right-wing bloggers started suggesting the exact same thing. To associate himself with lunatic bloggers, and to steal an idea which is a week old, demonstrates the quality of his thinking, not to mention his writing. Not only is he associating himself with a palpably ridiculous notion, he's doing it well after it's common parlance with the bloodhounds on the right.

No comments: