Since I couldn’t have said it better myself, I’d like to reprint ThatGayConservative’s column in full here at GayPatriot….
-GP
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ThatGayConservative: Thoughts from the Smoker’s Porch* — The “Chickenhawk” Slur Arises Once Again.
Once again, the liberals are blast-faxing/e-mailing their minions to break out the “Chickenhawk slur again. Jim Hawkins at RightWingNews explains what a Chickenhawk is here:
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the word or who associate it with its more vulgar meaning, when the left uses the term, they are generally referring to a foreign policy hawk who has not been in the military and is not seeking to join up.
Again, the liberal left is trotting out their tired, worn out arguments of the past. They make the same old claims that Bush shouldn’t have started a war because he never served in the military. Supposedly, you can’t support a war if you’ve never been there. For added measure, they throw in the Michael Moore lies that nobody in Congress has children serving in Iraq or they use the worn out excuse that neither of Bush’s daughters are serving in the military. They’ve also rolled out the failed “Bush was AWOL” story again.
The race for the White House should be about leadership,…We do not need to divide America over who served and how….Are we now to descend, like latter-day Spiro Agnews, and play, as he did, to the worst instincts of divisiveness and reaction that still haunt America? Are we now going to create a new scarlet letter in the context of Vietnam?
John F.You Kerry 30 January, 1992
First of all, American Diplomacy notes that of the 41 presidents the U.S. has had since 1798, sixteen of them, or 39% did not have prior military service. Seven of those, including Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt who presided over both world wars, were Democrats. Most recently, President BJ Clinton deployed the military more often in 8 years than any other president in the previous 50 years while providing less funding.
The American Heritage Foundation explains the problems with that policy here. The hypocrisy here is that BJ didn’t serve. He went so far as to dodge the draft by running away to England and to Soviet Moscow. He even went so far as to send a letter to his ROTC commander that he “loathed the military”. Yet there’s nary a whimper from the liberals that BJ never served.
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