Please fight gently and don't win.

Myths about the US military, past and present are a mainstay of the steady flow of lies leftists churn out. Brittle egos tend to persistently accept any argument supporting a falsehood in spite of a raft of evidence to the contrary because they don’t have to think that they were ever wrong. This isn’t just at the center of non-impirical thought, but a feature of intellectual laziness. It’s as if ANY kind of wishful thinking is license to not reason at all, especially when it comes to using their stance on the military to their political ends, and getting fast and loose with the truth.

«"Well, I didn't serve with any bums. The guys I served with were the cream of the crop, and a lot of them came from Ivy League schools. I realized very quickly I didn't have a fundraising problem, I had a public-relations problem," he said. Burkett decided to find the root of the problem, and called the Department of Labor to find employment statistics for Vietnam Veterans.

"Four months later the study came out. The unemployment rate in the economy at the time among all males was 6%," he said. "But among the men who went to Vietnam it was 3.9%--the lowest unemployment rate of any major group in America. Burkett looked into the apparently high suicide rate among Vietnam veterans and found it was not even remotely true.

"Vietnam veterans have one of the lowest suicide rates in America. The two years after the war there was a slightly elevated rate that was only modestly higher then our peers who never went into the military. It fell off dramatically after that," he said.

Widespread Vietnam Veteran homelessness is another myth.
"Back, around the late 70's Teddy Kennedy had a $10 million government grant to have a building in Boston for all the homeless Vietnam veterans. Several of guys gave testimonies about how they ended up on the street after Vietnam, but I got the military records of those individuals and virtually none of them were Vietnam veterans," he said.

Burkett said other investigations have shown that very few "homeless veterans" were in the military.»

The Heritage Foundation has more on income and military service.

«In summary, we found that, on average, 1999 recruits were more highly educated than the equivalent general population, more rural and less urban in origin, and of similar income status. We did not find evidence of minority racial exploitation (by race or by race-weighted ZIP code areas). We did find evidence of a “Southern military tradition” in that some states, notably in the South and West, provide a much higher proportion of enlisted troops by population.

The household income of recruits generally matches the income distribution of the American population. There are slightly higher proportions of recruits from the middle class and slightly lower proportions from low-income brackets. However, the proportion of high-income recruits rose to a disproportionately high level after the war on terrorism began, as did the proportion of highly educated enlistees. All of the demographic evidence that we analyzed contradicts the pro-draft case.»

But CommonDreams©® won’t ever admit to that, not initially. At first it would make them wince to think about it, then it might appear on the business end of another hate arguments about the military being disproportionately wealthy.
As Ray and David point out, that hasn't stopped the lazy and vulgar German magazine media from exciting as much hatred about the US population and its’ military as is possible. They also make every effort to not notice the dragon in the room, China, her human rights practices, and her thirst for oil, monopoly, and power.

Lacking much in the way of fact, Spiegel went back 30 years to the Vietnam war:

«"The Vietnam War divided the USA in the seventies - and the nation is still dealing with it. American historians have now found out that tricks and cover-ups already played a big role at the beginning - a parallel to the Iraq war."»

No supporting facts, no larger explanatory notions, just a retelling of their received truths which they attempt to fit into a thesis. If it fits, it must be true, right?

It's as if Europe's left is saying to the U.S.: please fight gently and don't win, you're making us feel ineffectual. They want the US to just stand there and take it, because they need to keep hating something. It gives them something to live for, I guess. Also on that point, Scott points out that the ultra-authoritarians at the Indy also want the US to do it without weapons and to make any civilian settlement a victim and a safehaven for anyone with terror on their agenda for the evening. I suppose since they believe bin Laden's line about ANY infidel or non-fundamentalist being fair game, that some people are less human than others.

In the game of post-70’s perpetual guilt many in the west, (it’s socialist side, that is,) have an irrefutable trait. I see how Al-Qaida would form a war plan to exploit their inability to differentiate their PC-views of cultures world-wide and the wrongness of certain acts.