Darfur, though, is a more serious issue. I think the difference there is, there is no organized, serious effort to go provide assistance. Our government is not doing it. Our military is not doing it. There are precious few resources devoted to supporting the people who are over there trying to help. If i join the army to go fight in Iraq, i get training, combat pay, support from my government and military….if i wanted to go to Darfur, i’d be on my own.

Historically, there were a number of Americans who did go to Spain to join the opposition to the Fascists, without the support of their government. Lefties, all. But they were joining something organized and real, not just hopping on a plane to a country where they don’t speak the language and throwing themselves at a problem they are in no way equipped to deal with, on their own and without support.

In our current situation, there is no draft. The president has promised that there will not be one, that we will prevail with an all volunteer military. And yet, there is a serious shortage of people volunteering. So, in our current situation, there is a real need for people willing to sign up, but the people on the right who so vociferously support the war abstain from actually fighting in it…why is that? Feel like it is for someone else to do the hard work? Why is it for someone else? Why is it that people who do not support the war are nevertheless expected to sign up for it, while people who do support the war are given a free pass to support if from their bedroom desk? For if the war’s own supporters won’t sign up…who will? who is left?

The president and the warmongers of the right support a war in Iran. They need more men even to fight the war they currently have, but they want more war. This must inevitably lead to one of two outcomes: defeat, or a draft. A War supporter who does not sign up necessarily supports either defeat or a draft. If defeat, wtf is that? If a draft….then again, they support the notion of someone else fighting the war they so ardently believe in, and in fact, they believe in forcing someone else to fight it. Our last experience with a draft shows how ably the chickenhawk leaders are able to avoid serving. I’m sure some chickenhawks would get called up, but i’m equally sure many of them would have pilondial cysts, children on the way, bad knees, or “other priorities.”

(I wonder whether this comment will be approved.)

That is a very interesting point. As a corollary, I suspect that if you ran a survey asking people to think of two people outside family and friends who have served in Iraq, the names ‘Jessica Lynch’ and ‘Lynndie England’ would feature prominently.

The VOCHAS ( victims of chichen hawk angst syndrome ) by embracing their PTSD for having valiantly fought at home are not merely continuing their degradation of those who are serving, but are, ironically attacking themselves openly – since ideologically there is suppose to be NO PTSD, since that is merely the Evil of the Evil Liberal Media….

so the levels of irony and brutality here are just pathetically amusing – hopefully americans will finally find a cure for the VOCHAS so that they can find some way to safely try to mainstream themselves back into society. Why Shucks, they might start by stop attacking the Troops! They might decide that supporting the Actual Troops who are Actually Dealing with PTSD would be a good form of penance…

After that, who knows, maybe they can find a way to forgive themselves for the years of hatred of americans that they have spewed up and at the veterans community…

along the way, who knows, maybe the VOCHAS will even be able to forgive themselves their lack of moral fortitude…

The first point is obvious enough, but the second:

When I was growing up, in the 1970s, kids didn’t paly with toy soldiers. Toy guns were hard to find in the stores. Movies and and Tv shows with military or quasi-military heroes were rare, or at least much rarer than before or since. Vietnam had produced a real revulsion in the public toward the military and military values.

It was also in the 1970s that the most successful strands of the New Left—the women’s rights and gay rights movements—had their real flowering and consolidated their gains. There is no question that the shift away from patriarchal values and male supremacy (old phrases but not inaccurate ones) was intimately connected with the discrediting of the military ethos. Force and hierarchy had lost appeal as solutions to life’s problems.

I don’t wish harm on anyone serving in Iraq—in the past six months, a guy I went to church with growing up and a guy I went to grad school with were both killed over there. But I do wish harm on the military as an institution. I do hope it cracks up and melts down. It has an almost wholly pernicious influcence on American life.

So space, it won’t do to say that people like roger and abb1 and I don’t exist. And frankly, I am more than a little tired of liberals like you trying to establish their bona fides by refusing to engage with anyone to their left.

Wow. You are REALLY ignorant. The word ‘neo-conservative’ distinguishes those conservatives who think the US should vigorously (and militarily) work to spread its values from those who think the US should generally keep itself to itself. There is more to it than that of course, but the Republican party is largely neo-conservative in outlook now. The ‘former Trotskyite’ background is only true of a small number.

If you don’t know that, what the hell do you know about anything? This is about as elementary as a concept as exists in politics.

Let’s face it: the only monkey here is you.

Apparently the good doctor’s PhD isn’t in psychology.