Kowabunga

Is anybody else as fed up with Congressman Charlie Rangel's repeated slurs of the American Armed Forces and constant calls for reinstating a military draft? Tim Kane on FoxNews certainly is.

Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., thinks so. He plans to hold hearings soon after the new Congress convenes in January.

For years, Rangel has been saying wealthy Americans are "absent" from the military. More recently, he dismissed any sense of duty in America's youngest generation.

"If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq," he said on "Fox News Sunday" on Nov. 26.

This is a bizarre slur on the volunteers in uniform. Class warfare rhetoric is a staple of liberals, but it is stunningly insulting when applied to the integrity of American troops engaged in real warfare. Rangel is talking about people in the profession of arms, men and women who believe it to be the most honorable path in life.

The pernicious myth that the armed forces are filled with stupid soldiers has got to stop. It spews from Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11. It slipped out in John Kerry's botched "joke." And it has been echoing around the Left unchallenged for too long.

I guess Charlie Rangel believes my cousin who is recently back from Iraq (chopper pilot) didn't have any decent career options (he did…he chose to serve his country). Sam was true about Pat Tilma, the pro-football player who enlisted in the Army after 9/11, entered the Army Rangers, and (regrettably) gave his life Afghanistan.

Every time these liberal jokers call for reinstating the draft, they claim, WRONGFULLY, that it is the poor and uneducated that end up serving. I guess that means that when I served in the Air Force I was uneducated and poor. (I was neither of these.) Rangel (and Kerry) must also believe that the same is true for every man and woman that choose to serve in the Armed Forces are just a bunch of losers. And the people who buy into this, like brainiac Matt Damon (who still lacks the cojones to put his money where his mouth is and enlist).

In 2005, some 80,000 young adults enlisted in the Army, and they came from some surprising places. From 2003 to 2005 -- i.e., after the Iraq War began -- the richest one-fifth of the population was overrepresented in the military at 23 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of recruits from the poorest neighborhoods dropped from 18 percent in 1999 to 14 percent in 2005.

Kane has covered this before for the Heritage Foundation, which has all of the data on their website. It's worth checking out.

The fact of the matter is, just as Kane points out, the "rich" people Rangel, et al., claim are not serving, are, in fact, serving at a disproportionate rate. The troops are better educated (I believe all military services have a requirement for a high school education or GED), many of the enlisted ranks enter with some college, and many more continue their education while they serve.

It doesn't seem to matter what the facts actually are to Rangel and other leftwing-nuts; when confronted with the facts, they dream up a new claim that is later also proven to be malarky.

It would be nice if these zealots would stop the BS and simply say they want to mess up the military and reduce its effectiveness by drafting a lot of people into the armed forces who would rather be someplace else.

Posted by Sqotty at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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