…So writes Allah, who gets off the best line of the month while responding in exasperation to Jake Tapper’s “Nightline” interview with Kos—who, it seems, may in fact have joined the army back in the late 80s just so he could trot out the chickenhawk argument 15 years later.
Which kind of reminds me of that “Seinfeld” episode where Jerry suspects his dentist has converted to Judaism just so he can get away with telling Jew jokes—only in this case, the dentist is actually a manipulative political operative who’s made himself rich raising money for failed candidates (who, should they be elected, would push programs advocating the redistribution of wealth), and the Jews are neocon warmongers. Or, you know—Jews.
Of course, the real question that nobody seems to be asking—but which I will, being the brave independent-minded CITIZEN JOURNALIST that I am—is this: what in the name of the baby Jesus was “Nightline” doing interviewing Markos Moulitsas in the first place?
Beats the hell out of me. But who knows, maybe Tapper got himself a free palm reading out of the deal—or at the very least some stock tips based on erratic planetoid orbits through the Kuiper Belt. Which, as a Jew, I can certainly appreciate. Their being free and all.
Anyway, Jim Geraghty has more.
When are these yahoos going to realize that the “logic” of the Chickenhawk argument cuts both ways? That is, someone lacking military experience has no more standing to advocate the anti-war cause than the pro-war cause?
Don’t laugh. I could be a wealthy retiree if I had bet against them in TradeSports.
Wow, do I feel foolish. I mean, I enlisted 21+ years ago because I loved my country and wanted to defend it. And I still do. Boy, does my position lack nuance or what?
1989 to 1992 – Gulf War era? I wonder where he was stationed. Oh wait . . . he was in Vietnam . . . in a swiftboat.
First: how scary is it that someone would join the military for that reason? “Well, I’m 17, and somewhere down the road, I might be involved in politics, so I’d better polish my resume …”
At the age of 17? Is that really your priority at that age?
Second: if we believe the chickenhawk argument, then we must condemn all those who want intervention in the Sudan, because, well, you know.
Chickhawk: a stupid argument made by stupid people.
Oh, and Major John: thank you for doing the right thing for the right reason. From all of us in the 101st Chairborn.
If a chickenhawk is a foot-stompin’, rhet’ric-slingin’, keyboard-poundin’ militarist with no experience of the blood, sweat and tears shed by the workaday grunts who have actually worn the uniform, wouldn’t it be fair to say that a chickendove is a latte-sipping, tear-streaked, keyboard-caressing nihilist with no experience of the blood, sweat, tears, body parts and lives shed by innocent women, children and babies who remain undefended by those who have actually worn the uniform?
With apologies to Herbert Woolston:
Red and yellow, black and white
They ain’t precious in their sight
Why do chickendoves hate the children so?
So I s’pose in order to become an anthropologist, one must have been a savage?
– Hmmm….Like maybe trying to get as much face time as possible to sort of bolster the Connecticut Senatoral race “thing”. I’m betting Kos got as many zings in at Leiberman as poossible. Your Liberal MSM hard at work. Kos is something like 0 and 30 for backed candidates, so they need a win desperately to gain some power with Democratic leadership.
I wonder if the same scrutiny will apply amongst the ultra-libs when Michael Moore releases his anti-HMO movie. Last time I checked, he wasn’t in the health care industry!
Which is interesting he (Kos) has no respect or room for your opinion, isn’t it? I mean you’ve earned the right to comment, according to his terms, and yet he regards his opinion as superior to veterans who support the war.
I’m sure someone could articulate this point better than I, but it’s funny how the logic works.
And I second Jay, and just thank you, Major.
Maybe Markos ”Screw them” Moulitsas Zuniga is angling for a media career.
Lots of people are gonna change the channel if that happens but, hey screw them.
If it worked for George Snuffalufagus…
So in order for me to hate the Red Sox, I’d have to have been one?
I refer you to the Honorable Senator John F. Kerry (D-MA), who I am lead to believe was once in Vietnam.
Since Kos has never held elective office, he lacks the moral authority to criticize any politician.
And none of us have the moral authority to leave comments on blogs unless we are bloggers ourselves.
Finally, none of you have the moral authority to read this comment unless you wrote it yourself.
The Real Jeff,
And because of JFK’s swift boat experiance we could have avoided the middle east conflict completely.
To bad I would have loved to move to Isreal to sell kites the all the kids.
– In perousing various Lefttard sites, I’m seeing a paucity of postings on the ME mess. What is there are generally the same old, same old, Bush bashing crappola, the usual snipes at the Jooos, but almost no discussion or idea’s. They do seem to be clueless, even in just the basic’s, which I assume they avoid like the plague since they weren’t covered in poli-sci 101. The only thing we keep hearing, amplified by idiots like Dennis Kucinich today on TV, is “we have to rush right over there and negotiate and get a cease fire”.
– That seems to be the sum and total of the vaunted Liberal “shuttle diplomacy”, that no doubt saved countless shuttles lives in the Clinton years.
– I thought for awhile the Left had hit bottom, but the Israeli conflict seems to have given them opportunity for a fresh new round of anti-American fecklessness.
Voice of Reason
Actually, by his own admission, in the rear with the gear – somewhere in Germany.
Hmmm, are conscientious objectors in the military? Do they have more inherent moral authority than the brown-hating Bushbots?
Reminds me of the nativity scene in a tough Irish neighborhood skit on Saturday Night Live with Rosie O’Donnell.
An argument starts over the manger scene and the skit ends with O’Donnell hauling off and punting the neighbors baby Jesus… funniest thing I’ve seen from O’Donnell. I’m Christian, but never really worried about stuff like that (If God is who we think He is then He’s bigger than my petty sacreligious nonsense).
I am very concerned though abvout writing a post featuring Rosie O’Donnell that follows one where someone is “in the rear with the gear”…
Does anyone know if this was the United States Army he claims to have been in?
So…..I can’t make Jew jokes?
Kos, 2004, Bostonia Magazine Interview:
Kos’s Army Duty, Version 1.0
Getting money to pay for college is certainly a jim-dandy reason to enlist in the military. However, I will question Kos’s patriotism then if he’s going to now use that as the basis for his call to service at age 17.
Kos, you’ve got a story out there and it’s a fine one. Enisted out of high school, money for college, changed political orientation from republican to democrat based on what you saw, you got out because, et cetera, et cetera.
Stick with it.
Cheers.
.
and, yes, I served too.
They are until the shooting starts. Then all of a sudden they’re fucking Amish or something.
yours/
peter.
I find that the most astonishing thing of all. He joins the Army, and – in time of war – finds he may actually be sent to fight! Well, of course that would lead him to become an anti-war Democrat.
Has he ever been taxed with this marvelous little quote before?
Wonderful—now we’re going to be up to our armpits in Amish.
Since there’s no condoms in the Bible…
Kerry also served in Hanoi and Paris. But that’s another story.
Verc, “brown-hating Bushbots.” First of all, I don’t really know of any Bushbots. Most people on this site and other “right-wing” sites have no problem criticizing Bush on say, education, welfare, prescription drug entitlements, SCOTUS nominations, immigration, stem cell research, subsidies, capitulating to liberals. Godamighty we could go on for quite a while on all the different ways we don’t like Bush.
It’s just, you see, while we think he’s not terribly competent and maybe not super bright, we think liberal / left ideas are somewhere between catastrophically asinine and downright evil. YMMV, of course.
As far as brown-hating, as a half-Vietnamese right-leaning libertarian, I, and pretty much most of the Asian people I know (which would number in the high hundreds) are more comfortable around blood-thirsty right wingers than wet-diaper liberals. We remember what lefty ideas did to 30 million Chinese, 2 million Cambodians and are still doing to 80 million Vietnamese even unto today. That kid in front of the tank means something to us.
In all the years I’ve volunteered to help Asian immigrants and refugees, by far the most common group of caucasians I met helping were straight-up Republican-voting ex-military white guys. It wasn’t your ex-hippie, smart-ass latte-sipping Peace Corps types who are so fond of helping out Marxists in Africa and Latin America. Sorry.
Filipinos like Michelle Malkin are welcome on the right, too, by the way. I can’t remember the last time a “brown-hating” rightwinger ever referred to an Asian as a “slant-eyed whore” like you hear all the time on the left.
We love Condi not because she’s black and we’re supposed to (like, say, Obama, Sharpton, McKinney, Jackson…). But because she’s brilliant, believes much of the same things we believe and wears sexy, knee-high leather boots on junkets visiting our fighting brothers overseas.
The right is, generally and ideologically, meritocratic. That means it’s what you do – not who you are (race, class, gender) that counts. We’re about the right side of the hyphen, not the left.
McGehee, you may be up to your armpits in Amish, but you won’t ever hear from them, except by maybe carrier pigeon or such. No Internet access.
Things were so much simpler when I was a lad. They had this draft thing, but I would have joined anyway. It’s just something adults did.
It’s like going to a picnic and everybody (almost everybody) kicks in to buy beer. You know there are some people who won’t do their share. Somebody with no money, hard times, whatever, nobody minds covering them. But there’s always the few who never do their share. Everybody knows they are the ones you can’t count on. Nobody makes a big deal of it, but you know.
Nobody was surprised that we might have to go to war. That’s what the military does. You went to college or you went in the military. Or you stayed home and married your high school sweetheart and worked at some dead end job. Think 30 years of grinding radiator cores.
Anyway, I went and looked at my DD-214 and I couldn’t find a damn thing in it about moral authority. If I wanted moral authority, I’d have joined the Seminary, not the Marines.
True. But I’ve never understood why they insist on driving horse-rawn carriages, since cars are obviously in the Bible. It says the apostles were all in one Accord, and that Jesus drove the moneylenders out of the temple in a Fury.
Because God knows, we need something to make the Fifth Monkee Stephanopolous look butch
Let’s see if I can get the chronology right on this:
In 1989, at age 17, Kos enlists because of the following logic:
Grenada was 1983. Libya was 1986. Do the math.
Then he is shocked to learn that he may have to go to war in 1990-91.
He makes “I voted for it before I voted against it” read like a well-reasoned Publius argument in The Federalist Papers.
For the record, I, like Major John, joined because it was a good thing to do.
If my brother-in-law served then was imprisoned and tortured for four years, can I comment? I don’t have to go to war and “serve” to know what the hell is going on. Homo sapiens make me sick, thank the Lord (or whomever you believe in) for the human beings fighting to defend us all from the insane!!
Could have volunteered as a lay-reader, like I did MarkD. I joined the Marines to become a choir boy? WTF?
sue, we’ve addressed this before, you get a quarter of a commenting point, unless of course you have more relatives in the military, then you can accumulate more points. for example, i get one point for my husband, quarter each for my brother in law, father in law, and three grandfathers (one mine, two my husband’s, Korea and WWII respectively) so get digging into that family tree!!! oh, also, we’ll need a blood sample for all involved.
Verc, your service entitles you to replace John Bolton at the UN. Major John’s can probably get him elected President; as a Democrat, even.
Not to nitpick, but the Amish can use condomes, provided they are diesel-powered.
I have no idea why I joined the Army in 1972. Vietnam was winding down; the draft was still in effect. I had dropped out of college after one semester (too much pot), wasn’t working, still at home. Seemed like a way to get out on my own. Of course, I ended up defending the Fulda Gap, so I potentially could have seen combat.
A couple of my buddies did get seriously injured, one lost an arm in a helicopter crash, the other shot himself in the shoulder while on guard duty. Another was beat up by the bouncers at Crazy Sexy in Frankfurt. And another by the polizei for selling acid at a concert.
So, even though I didn’t intend it, it’s kinda cool that I have moral authority to root for the US bombing the shit out of anyone!
Well said, grayson, well said. I’d like to see the “progressive” response to your post.
TW: alone. “They” are becoming more and more alone.
Where does the Coast Guard enter into this? They are considered part of the service, but do they only get an opinion on issues that happen within a few miles of the U.S. coastline?
And if Kos follows his “logic” – ahem – and we formally adopt “you have to be in the military to have an opinion on a war,” how do we handle rear echelon people vs. guys and gals who actually got shot at? Do the combat vets get their opnion weighted twice as much? Three times? Is there an algorithm involved?
I mean, if I join the Marines and Uncle Sam, in his infinite wisdom, sticks me on embassy duty in Australia, does that mean my opinion gets weighed less? That doesn’t seem particularly fair.
REMF’s are credited with 1/4 point [see maggie’s post, above] and DFAC Goblins get 1/2 point.
Well, there are degrees of REMFs. For example, being stationed in Kuwait (no beer, sex against the regs, 1/2 point) versus Qatar (beer, sex against the regs, 1/4 point). Or then we have the US Embassy in Australia (beer and sex, 1/256th of a point).
T/W: couple.
Oops! Revised values, as per Charlie:
Kuwait: 1/4 point
Qatar: 1/8 point
Australia: 1/512th of a point.
My bad!
Not to nitpick, but the Amish can use condomes, provided they are diesel-powered.
What everyone is overlooking is the corollary to the Chickenhawk “moral authority” equation: If those of us who did serve in combat now don’t take an “anti-war” stance, then we were obviously brainwashed by our time in the dehumanizing military machine and therefore have no moral authority either. It’s a lose/lose proposition!
Slart – what did I ever do to you to deserve such a punishment?
Major John, everyone knows that the only vets currently running are Dems. so, uh, you’re stuck with it. interesting corrolary, rto claims to be a democrat, but we all know better.
I rather like this chickenhawk argument as the Left puts it forth. You see, if only the military or veterans have the right to put forth any argument for the war, that means that the bombing will commence in five minutes.
Us military folks are rather straightforward like that. And since I’m currently in the Army, rather than a veteran with no combat service such as Kos, that means that my argument trumps his since I’m still in the line of fire, and I can tell him to shut the hell up whenever I feel like it.
THAT is the credibility that the “chickenhawk” meme gives me over slimy nutjobs like Kos. So keep it up, I say!
TW: does
Does this mean that Kos will finally shut up? Probably not.
by this logic, could someone criticize the president, having never been elected to that office? Also, why chickendoves, why not chickensh*t?
Did anyone catch this tidbit from Markos?
Being a resident of Connecticut, I can tell you it just doesn’t get more disingenuous than that.
If he can cynically spout a lie like that with a straight face, how can anyone believe anything else Mr. Screw Them says about his motives?