Richard Cohen Lies

Richard Cohen wrote a column for the Washington Post today lamenting the lack of blue-blood New Englanders in the military, and how sad it is that the Ruling Class can have the Country Class fight for it, because if there were more blue-blood New Englanders in the military, we wouldn't have gone to war. The blue-blood New Englanders would've protested and stop the war. And isn't that sad.

That's my summary.

Here's the article, decide for yourself:
How Little The US Knows of War

Perhaps most importantly, here's the second sentence of the article:

The U.S. Army that fought the Vietnam War was reviled, not spit upon (that's a myth) but not much admired, either.

It is not a myth. Richard Cohen, you are a liar.

Here's some documentation for you - there are dozens upon dozens of incidents:
http://www.military-money-matters.com/real-facts-about-vietnam-veterans.html
http://www.military-money-matters.com/vietnam-veterans-spit-on-part-2.html
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2007/01/they_want_it_le.html

Here's one:

Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize winner and former assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, writes in his book, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966 of Captain Tom Carhart's return from Vietnam, pp. 324-5:

"Still in uniform, he was strolling through the O'Hare terminal in search of a telephone when a group of hippie girls darted up and spat on him. The shock and pain could have been no more intense if they had slashed him with knives. Reeling with surprise and uncertain what to do, he did nothing. His assailants scampered off through the airport crush as Tom wiped the saliva from his face, now aflame with humiliation. That night he got into an argument about the war with his friends' daughter, who was home from college. This is great, he told himself sardonically. I'm back less than twenty-four hours, I get spat on, then I get hassled by my countrymen over a cause for which I got myself shot twice. Welcome home, Johnny."

As to the "substance" of your column after the lie - Mr. Cohen, just because you live in a bubble isolated from the military doesn't mean everyone else does. I'd bet you don't know any truck drivers, machinists, or farmers, either; and likely no beat cops or firefighters. What you are writing about is the break between the Ruling Class - of which you are a part - and the Country Class - of which I, JBH, and 95% of the nation are. The culture you represent rejects the military and refuses to join - perhaps if you weren't busy celebrating the denouement and "no great songs", you'd get a clue. Also, there have been some great songs. They just belong to genres you don't listen to. On this you are simply ignorant.

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These are for people who've earned them.

This one's for all you guys who aren't short yet, but want to be (you'll miss it when you're out and forget about police call and being drunk in morning formation - til then suck it up - time is on your side):

And for those who are staying in, but who aren't super-motivated:

And for genuine motivators like SSgt Hyatt, who had more legitimate motivation in his little finger than most Marines ever have, the kind of sergeant that made Hollywood sergeants:

Yes, it's a bit motarded. But at least it's not Taliban Bodies...

Okay, sure, here's Taliban Bodies, for all you motards*!

Is it a war song? Was Surfin' Bird?

I could do a year's worth of posts on music influenced by OIF & OEF, from Dixie Chicks' release of Travelin' Soldier in 2002 to Bad Religion's Let Them Eat War in 2004 to Toby Keith's Angry American/Courtesy of the Red White & Blue to John Michael Montgomery's Letters From Home in 2004 to... screw it, we got some room for more motivation by 3 Doors Down - Citizen Soldier (Nat Guard extended version):


*Motard: Combination of motivation and retard. Implies an individual who's motivated to a stupid level. Mindless, obnoxious motivation.

The Ruling Class vs. The Country Class

Angelo M. Codevilla has written an excellent piece over at American Spectator entitled
America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution. It's an excellent read, though a bit long.

He divides the nation into two classes - a ruling class and a country class. The ruling class, is by and large, blue state-oriented, govt.-oriented, non-producers who believe they know what's best for everyone, and they should rule. The country class, is by and large, red-state oriented, private enterprise-oriented, producers who believe that individuals know what's best for themselves, and that individuals should rule themselves. The ruling class desires authority, the country class desires autonomy.

From Codevilla's piece:
Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct.
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The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.
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2004 - both major candidates for president were members. Was there a conspiracy? No. They're just members of the same ruling class. The secret society is a coincidental symptom, the ruling class is the disease. Unless you're Alex Jones. Then they're all reptilians.

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Caroll Quigley, historian and professor, who had an influence on Bill Clinton and his Rhodes Scholarship:

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."

Quigley may have brought this up as part of his belief in conspiracy theories... or may have brought it up as a model of what an individual political party should do (as in the rapidly evolving idea that Obama's weaknesses are going to be exploited by Hillary Clinton in 2012, to the effect of unelecting Obama's overt radical leftism and electing Hillary's not-as-overt radical leftism). It ties in with the idea that there is a ruling class - a class that rules by patronage and pull.

It also backs up the idea that there isn't a dimes worth of difference between the two parties in the US, much less branches of those parties. With RINOs on one side and democrats on the other, it's a convincing case. With the illegal immigration debate in 2007 - where the ruling class of republicans and democrats were united against the country class - the people - it was made pretty apparent.

It's also why the media selected a RINO candidate for pres in 2008 - by choosing the one the ruling class approved of. McCain was and is a member of the ruling class. Thompson, Tancredo, Hunter, and especially Ron Paul, were not.

It's important to note that the media itself is part of the ruling class. Consider NPR's griping about the "Tyranny Of Constituency".

The NPR poll shows why individual House members wind up being more loyal to their own jigsaw piece of the national puzzle than to the national puzzle itself. Only their own micro-constituency can vote for them (or against them).

NPR considers it terrible when representatives actually represent the people who elected them, rather than go along with the national ruling (leftist) class.

National Public Radio promotional still from a telathon. Seen with sunglasses.

Unless you're Alex Jones, then this is pretty much all you see everywhere. Without the sunglasses.

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But individuals with principles who adhere to them aren't rulers. Originialist judges don't rule on a whim. Constitutionalist legislators don't write things because they feel like it.

And there is a simple way to tell apart the ruling class from the country class.

I use what former Texas State Representative Dr. Suzanna Hupp said:

"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual... as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of."

It's a litmus test for whether a politician is part of the ruling class. If they don't trust you with your own security, and if they don't trust you with physical power, they're ruling class. If they trust you, they're country class who work for you, the citizen. Even if they harbor some ambitions of the ruling class, they're still someone you can reason with, because at the basic physical level they believe in self-determination and individual autonomy.