Right-wing buffoon Rush Limbaugh takes a swipe at Iraq veterans who oppose the war... who can defend themselves quite nicely, if they even feel inclined to respond to this kind of schoolyard boy-baiting.
Democrat flaks jump on this like ducks on a June-bug, and in the process themselves reproduce the sick militarism of this culture that automatically valorizes anyone who wears a uniform. How dare you insult a soldier! Like its some sacred calling instead of an imperial employment program steeped in the culture of machismo and misogyny. (And you can gasp as theatrically as you want... I spent more than two decades wearing a uniform... that is exactly what it is.)
How is it that a pill-popping nitwit like Limbaugh can be the punching bag for these ritual displays of opportunistic nationalism, and there is no outrage from the same quarters about the fact that the Democratic majority in Congress now has it within its collective power to stop this war right goddamn now... and refuses to do so?
The Washington Post released a poll today, conspicuously absent from this site, showing that four out of five Democrats in the US want the war defunded -- defunding the war is an action that is not vulnerable to a Presidential veto, so that bogus little hidey-hole just closed -- yet Democratic members of Congress are deaf to their constituents (holding their hands over their ears is more accurate).
This is exactly the reason we have to take all the risks attendant in 2008 of allowing this edifice of perfidy and political irrelevance to crumble.
Any Democrat who votes to give another dime to this bloody, cynical criminal enterprise in Iraq should automatically be handed a defeat by people of conscience who have voted for them in the past... by withholding that vote. Until we exercise this one power we have right now, we will be subordinated to the good cop - bad cop system of Democrat versus Republican.