What a Way to Go

Two good articles today.

First, a touching story in today's Stars and Stripes/LA Times about a Special Forces Captain killed in Iraq last year who in his will bequeathed $100,000 for a party in Las Vegas for his friends and families. If worse comes to worse, I have already made similar arrangements. However, given what David's college costs will likely be in the year 2024, my friends and family will have to settle for the Denny's on Route 1 in Alexandria. In all seriousness, Captain Toczylowski sounds like he was a true hero and one hell of a guy. The Army is poorer for his passing, and our nation owes a great debt for his sacrifice.

Second, Jeff Jacoby's column from today's Boston Globe on the anti-military bigotry in San Fransisco. I can understand (although I disagree with) people who oppose the Iraq war for strategic reasons. What I have little tolerance for are those groups who harass wounded soldiers at the hospital to protest the war (i.e. Code Pink), who picket military funerals in order to promote their hateful religious beliefs (i.e. Fred Phelps and company), and those who treat the American military itself as the enemy rather than the Islamofascists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Simply put, this blind hatred of the military and associated harassment of recruiters by the Left (and their enablers) is at best pathetically juvenille and at worst undermines our national security so that these "activists" can satisfy their own moral vanity. The military as an institution is as close as we have to a pure meritocracy in this country, and often provides the best way out of poverty for thousands of the very minorities and immigrants these activists claim to support. The U.S. military also is what stands in the way of the fascism that these people like to rail about to denounce any political position with which they disagree. These people are either hypocrites for denouncing those who defend the freedom they enjoy to launch their idiotic protests (i.e. throwing blood at recruiters in New York), or are just plain ignorant of the world beyond their doors.

I hope somebody launches a boycott of San Fransisco in retaliation for this myopic decision by the San Fransisco schoolboard. (And for supporting Barry Bonds for so many years . . . but that's another story). I didn't have any plans to go there in the near future anyways, but I'd like to stick it to them somehow.