Writing For The NY Times = Loosing your Mind

Leave it to the NY Times to continue to bash the military on Memorial Day Weekend. What complete %$#@& idiots and partisan hacks their editorial writers are.

Today’s headline reads ”The Death Spiral of The Volunteer Army.”

“Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld likes to talk about transforming America's military. But the main transformation he may leave behind is a catastrophic falloff in recruitment for the country's vital ground fighting forces: the Army and the Marine Corps. The recruitment chain that has given the United States highly qualified, highly skilled and highly motivated ground forces for the three decades since the government abandoned the draft has started to break down.

This is astonishing, even allowing for the administration's failure to prepare Americans honestly for how long and difficult the occupation of Iraq would be. There are over 60 million American men and women between 18 and 35, the age group sought by Army recruiters. Getting the 80,000 or so new volunteers the Army needs to enlist each year ought not to be such a daunting challenge. There are obvious attractions to joining the world's most powerful, prestigious and best-equipped ground fighting forces, and in so doing qualifying for valuable benefits like college tuition aid.”


So think about this story with me for a minute…

What exactly would the NY Times propose that the military do to improve their image?

Would they have the Army stop fighting “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time “and start collecting money for “defense funding” while handing out boxes of doughnuts wearing funny hats with the Shriners on urban streets every weekend?

Should the Marines start building houses for the homeless with Habitat for Humanity?

Maybe providing a free tire rotation and oil change at local recruitment centers would help?

If they can’t improve their image and get recruiting numbers up, is the Times suggesting that they restart the draft? Remember last fall when the media was full of rumors that Bush and the mean old Republicans were going to start drafting again?

I say that the media has been conducting a conscious campaign against the US military, and this article, posing with fake concern asking serious questions about recruitment efforts, is actually a smirking declaration of their preliminary victory in their private “war” against the war-making powers of our government.

Finally, the Times inadvertently takes credit for the recruiting problem with this paragraph:

“Why this is happening is no mystery. Two years of hearing about too few troops on the ground, inadequate armor, extended tours of duty and accelerated rotations back into combat have taken their toll, discouraging potential enlistees and their parents. The citizen-soldiers of the Guard and Reserves have suddenly become full-time warriors. Nor has it helped that when abuse scandals have erupted, the Pentagon has seemed quicker to punish lower-ranking soldiers than top commanders and policy makers. This negative cycle now threatens to feed on itself. Fewer recruits will mean more stress on those now in uniform and more grim reports reaching hometowns across America.”


They’re damn right that “two years of hearing about too few troops on the ground, inadequate armor…” might be having some effect on recruiting. The media has become professional armchair quarterbacks, injecting their opinions into every detail of the war on terrorism—enjoying the reporting of each and every road-side bombing and jubilantly reporting every injury and death with a pompus “we told you so attitude.”

They revel in screaming “oh my gosh, the Reserves and National Guard are actually having to go out and fight” rather than sit at home collecting their generous part-time paychecks to do a couple weeks of time in the summer and one weekend each month.

Yes, the current deployment schedule is tough, but at no place in any of these type articles do they ever bother to mention that the reduction in our armed forces occurred during Bill Clinton’s eight years of service as Commander-in-Chief, a reduction from 1.8 million down to 1.2 million soldiers—accompanied by parallel cuts in spending for not so insignificant things like armor, is the reason that we are where we are today.

I place the low troop levels and supposed inadequate armoring squarely on the shoulders of the pantyhose-commander-in-chief Bill Clinton, not George Bush.

What Partisan, Lying Idiots...