
Leading the pack back in 2002 was Joseph Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut, who had his hero-worshiping nose up the ass of John McCain, and so infuriated Chuck Hagel (senator from Nebraska and a wounded and decorated Vietnam Vet), at a hearing that Hagel looked like he wanted to reach across the table and strangle the pencil-neck, who I doubt in his youthful prime could get through the first week of basic training.
Now Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina and running for President as the only candidate wanting to put massive troops in the Middle East, who shamelessly refers to himself as a veteran when as a joke he is an Air Force lawyer in the reserves, has replaced Lieberman as McCain’s new saber-rattling sycophant.
That’s what these warmongering cowards do—latch onto a true hero, a genuine fire-eating fearless tough guy like McCain, like the cowardly but ambitious kids you knew in early school years who talked big while hiding behind the big tough guys, emulating the toy poodle behind a fence barking viciously at a passing Rottweiler.
Fox News is full of these guys, led by the rough and tumble William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, a draft-dodging supporter of the Vietnam war, whose solution to any vestige of a threat to his beloved country he never served is to place hundreds of thousands of troops wherever they are supposedly needed and bomb the smithereens out of whomever deserves American military power.
Meanwhile, Billy boy, nobody in your family has ever gone to war, you along with the Bret Stephens’s and the Glenn Beck’s and their brethren’s patriotism and tearful admiration for the guys who serve and suffer and die, flag-waving sentimentalists in love with the troops. It goes on an on, just check the military records of Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq War who was deadest on putting Chalabi in as Iraqi puppet President. John Bolton, who hid out in the guard during Vietnam while supporting the war, of course, and Paul Wolfowitz, who turned green and looked for the first place to hide when a building he was inspecting in Iraq had a bomb go off a few floors down, poor little quivering pansy.
These chicken hawks all came from the finest sheltered backgrounds and prestigious colleges and were characterized by Dick Armitage and Colin Powell (two decorated vets in Bush’s cabinet, who were wary of going into Iraq and lied to about WMD), after a war cabinet meeting with this quote: “The trouble with those guys is they’ve never been in a good bar fight.”
Having been lucky enough to serve three years in the army as an enlisted man and gotten out just as Nam was heating up, I can at least boast that I’ve participated in some pretty bloody bar fights and gotten my nose broken to prove it.
There’s a certain swagger and sense of pride one feels if he devoted three years of his life to the military, serving your country, filling a job role in the great institution, learning first hand what it’s like to be on the same level with those drafted after college graduation and those with 8th grade educations who joined because there was nothing else in America for them, were as ignorant as sin but somehow showed more balls than you ever conceived of possessing.
You shared the hard times, the incessant harassment, the dirt and filth and stink and noise and harsh elements and barracks life You bitched and boozed and whored and fought among your buddies, and were essentially the lowest form of life and reveled in it, an existence certainly alien and possibly terrifying to the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, the entire rabble of Bush’s cabinet, and especially Dick Cheney, who found more ways to get out of the army than anybody in the country but wore a cowboy hat to show his Wyoming toughness and shot a fellow human as a big game hunter with his rifle and is still defending his lying warmongering policies and is still allowed to speak before all these same foundations beating the drums to war as a congregation of pussies cheer him on.
Every one of these guys, including the Sean Hannity’s, the Douglas Feiths’s, the Elliot Abrams’s, the whole chest-thumping lot need to be forced to complete the basic training 40 yard crawl, where a lanky mean-as mean-can-be Tennessean sergeant who was a teenager at Pork Chop Hill in the Korean War slaps their butt with a clipboard and calls them a “goddam sniveling faggot piece of reeking dogshit.” The same sergeant who on the rifle range and during bayonet training growls, “You better learn this shit, cuz it’s about kill or be killed in the jungle, troop!”
There will be a terrorist attack. These pasty-faced white guys are all licking their chops, waiting for it to happen, so they can call Obama a weakling and John Kerry, who served and was wounded in Vietnam, soft, and Hillary, of course, a woman who has no business leading a nation to all out war when in reserve you have Bush’s old crew to climb onto the bandwagon of a barking poodle named Marco Rubio, or another draft dodging tough guy named Donald Trump, or the weak-kneed brother of George Bush, Jeb Bush, or the witch doctor Carson who thinks it’s no problem kicking a little ass in Syria and Iraq.
They’ll start making mean faces at press conferences or debates as they spread the paranoia and xenophobic demagoguery and scare the hell out of us and beat those war drums so those with nothing and nothing to lose and less to look forward to fight their wars. And all those with a lot to lose who don’t have to fight will wave their flags and put ribbons on their cars and cheer the troops and praise them as heroes when they come home in several pieces.