Maureen Dowd
A recent study found that the testosterone of American men has been dropping for 20 years, but in Republican Washington, it was running amok, and not in a good way. Men who had refused to go to an untenable war themselves were now refusing to find an end to another untenable war that they had recklessly started.
+ + +Maureen Dowd, NYTimes, writes of which she knows not.
Not for the first time.
Maybe the drop in testosterone levels are a cause of The Birth Dearth.
Most American men did serve in Vietnam, and remain pround to this day that they did.
(Lou Harris poll.)
Many military people in Iraq hae re-upped, even when they had been wounded one or more times.They, and I, do not think it is untenable. I think, over the medium term, we will prevail.
And, for sure, Ms. Dowd doesn't know that.
Ben
posted by Ben Wattenberg at 4:00 PM
2 Comments:
Many troops in Iraq believe that the situation is tenable, but a lot of them don't.
Here's just one example you can look to for some illumination: In Virginia, the military-heavy voting areas of Virginia Beach, Newport News and Norfolk tended to favor Jim Webb, who was running on the anti-Rumsfeld/anti-war platform. George Allen was the establishment candidate with unreconstructed views on Iraq. He lost.
People in the military do vote, and they are a subset of the larger voting population in America. Americans in general are unsatisfied with the way the war is going, and there's every reason to think that members of the armed forces aren't starting to get frustrated, as well. By all accounts, Donald Rumsfeld was as unpopular as he had ever been with active-duty military. The Army Times, Navy Times, AirForce Times, and Marine Corps Times all called for Rumsfeld's resignation before the election... obviously, our men and women in the armed forces have some reservations about where the war in Iraq is headed.
Did Maureen Dowd's point fly over your head? She wrote "Men who had refused to go to an untenable war themselves were now refusing to find an end to another untenable war that they had recklessly started." Your reply is: "Most American men did serve in Vietnam, and remain pround [sic] to this day that they did."
Huh?
The point Dowd was trying to make was that many of the planners of the Iraq war had no military experience. For several of them, that's absolutely true. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, none of them served in any war.
What is your response to that point? I don't like Maureen Dowd, but I do think it's a legitimate point. Can people who know nothing about war be trusted to lead the nation into war, and more importantly, have the knowhow to WIN it?
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