As seen in the LA Times (with added commentary by your humble pundit),
I DON’T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.
I’m sure I’d like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you’re wandering into a recruiter’s office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.
And I’ve got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.
And, here, we have the textbook example of the mindset of a liberal pertaining to our men and women in uniform. The endeavors engaged by our military mean nothing more than something to chastise and mock.
I’m not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they’re wussy by definition. It’s as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn’t to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.
An unabashed liberal, rare indeed.
Blindly lending support to our soldiers, I fear, will keep them overseas longer by giving soft acquiescence to the hawks who sent them there — and who might one day want to send them somewhere else. Trust me, a guy who thought 50.7% was a mandate isn’t going to pick up on the subtleties of a parade for just service in an unjust war. He’s going to be looking for funnel cake.
Yet, are we to believe that military engagements by a President (Clinton) who not once won a majority vote in the popular election is justified? Where is the reconciliation?
Besides, those little yellow ribbons aren’t really for the troops. They need body armor, shorter stays and a USO show by the cast of “Laguna Beach.”
The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel for voting to send them to war and then making absolutely no sacrifices other than enduring two Wolf Blitzer shows a day. Though there should be a ribbon for that.
Such a brave, brave man is he.
I understand the guilt. We know we’re sending recruits to do our dirty work, and we want to seem grateful.
Who has guilt? And, for what?
After we’ve decided that we made a mistake, we don’t want to blame the soldiers who were ordered to fight. Or even our representatives, who were deceived by false intelligence. And certainly not ourselves, who failed to object to a war we barely understood.
It seems that there is only one side of the aisle that is having trouble ‘understanding.’ As I recall, our innocence was taken from us and we no longer enjoy the lives we led before September 10, 2001.
But blaming the president is a little too easy. The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they’re following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying. An army of people ignoring their morality, by the way, is also Jack Abramoff’s pet name for the House of Representatives.
I was wondering when this was going to take off….Halliburton, Enron, Abramoff. Better late than never, right?
I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq. I get mad when I’m tricked into clicking on a pop-up ad, so I can only imagine how they feel.
Tricked? Who was actually tricked? See, this is why liberals should not ever be trusted with the use of armed forces. No individual was tricked, but yet, we want to assert that the brave fighting men and women are somehow incapable of making decisions on their own. Why is that when liberals discuss these fine men and women, it is from the posture that their IQ levels are disproportionately lower then that of the average US citizen?
But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you’re not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you’re willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it’s Vietnam.
Of course, what were we thinking, when there is a ‘D’ behind your name, the rationale and reasoning behind a war need not fully explained since you simply turn over all abjects of authority to the United Nations. Based off those pretenses, the troops can still remain halfway around the world for a decade without any further explanation….
And sometimes, for reasons I don’t understand, you get to just hang out in Germany.
I know this is all easy to say for a guy who grew up with money, did well in school and hasn’t so much as served on jury duty for his country.
Imagine that…he has to be joking…..
But it’s really not that easy to say because anyone remotely affiliated with the military could easily beat me up, and I’m listed in the phone book.
I’m not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn’t be celebrating people for doing something we don’t think was a good idea. All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades.
Seriously, the traffic is insufferable.
Well, to be an optimist, I must say that he is one liberal that actually speaks his mind, and reveals what he truly feels. Now, if the rest of the liberal establishment would stop dancing around statements of asininity, and espouse how they truly feel, then the American people would truly know the hearts of these vitriolic pacifists.
So what we have here is just another liberal trying to sound brave by taking an unpopular position, and then patting himself on the back for doing it. Of course, he’s doing it in a country where his right to do this is guaranteed and is protected by the very troops he doesn’t support. It isn’t as though he were doing this in China or North Korea, or even Iraq prior to it’s liberation. You know, where he more than likely would have been jailed or killed.
…laughing with Michelle Malkin
Instapunk - “[Stein] specifically to provoke the reaction he’s getting.”
The Galvin Opinion weighs in.
Treacher is simply hilarious!
UPDATE-
Hat Tip - Eupohoric Reality
The following are excerpts from the Hugh Hewitt interview with the ‘honorable’ Joel Stein:
HH: We have troops in Yemen, Mongolia, Jabuti, all across the globe in the Global War On Terror. Do you support those troops?
JS: It really…uh, the straight up troops? Or do you mean like…it really depends on the activity, but no, I don’t…I don’t believe that our forces should be a police force.
HH: And so, you would withdraw from everywhere in the world?
JS: But again, I think you’ve had people on your show, and you’ve got people much smarter than me, obviously, who are against the war. I mean, just have a simple argument against the war, for the war isn’t what I mean to do with that column at all. I think that’s been hashed out over time, and…
HH: I want to make sure I quote it correctly. “I don’t support our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car.” Evidently, supporting the troops is a bumper sticker position?
JS: It’s not. Supporting the troops is. I think a lot of people have bumper stickers, and really don’t do anything else, and are against the war, and have the bumper sticker anyway.
HH: “And at the end, I’m not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after Vietnam.” That’s big of you. “But we shouldn’t be celebrating people for doing something we don’t think was a good idea.” What I’m trying to figure out is what do you think is a good idea for the military to do?
and…
HH: Let me ask you a tough question, Joel, because this is the toughest one. J.P. Blecksmith was a young Marine lieutenant, graduated from Annapolis, killed in Fallujah on November 11th, 2004. Just a tremendous human being and man. If you meet his parents on the street, what do you say to them?
JS: That I’m so, so sorry.
HH: Do you honor the service that their son did?
JS: To honor the service their son…now this is a dumb question, but what do you mean by honor? That’s a word you keep using. I’m not entirely…maybe that’s my problem. But I’m not entirely sure what you’re…
HH: Honor usually means gratitude and esteem. Are you grateful for and esteem what he did? Honestly?
JS: Honestly? I admire the bravery. I don’t…you know, I feel like he did something I could never do, so I’m kind of in awe on some level. Am I grateful, that I feel like he protected me? Um, no I don’t.
Independent Conservative - ‘What an Idiot!’
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