Mahablog: Dissing Our Troops

Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog wrote what I was going to write about the newly released details of Afghan inmates' deaths.

Maybe you're the kind of idiot who reads a story like this and has no reaction except "How dare the liberal media undermine our troops?" If so, listen up: The people responsible for this are the ones who are undermining the troops. The people who are too stupid to know that you don't do this when you're in a global battle for hearts and minds are the ones who betrayed our country.

And I'm referring less to the torturers than to the high mucketymucks who gave the go-ahead for this kind of interrogation or suggested with a nod and a wink that it was a good idea, while turning the job over to callow amateurs understandably flush with post-9/11 righteous indignation...

Speaking of idiots, this is a fairly typical rightie reaction:

... the ugly truth is that there are a lot of liberals in this country, perhaps a majority of them, who don't support the troops, who -- as one poster on the Democratic Underground put it -- look at the our troops as "Cannon fodder and killers doing what they're told to do".

Of course, since most Americans have a very high opinion of our soldiers, liberals would face enormous political ramifications if they were honest about what they thought. So instead, we get surreptitious assaults on our military.

For example, part of the reason Abu Ghraib has gotten so much attention & the press keeps churning out 2 and a 1/2 year old stories about soldiers working over prisoners is because liberals can use it to smear the troops. "See? That's what they're all like behind closed doors! Sadistic savages."

Many on the Right cling to the belief that "liberals hate the military." I believe this dates from the post-Vietnam era, when all the spitting-on-soldiers-in-airports incidents that didn't happen were being "remembered." And many righties perpetuating this myth are too young to remember the Vietnam era and never faced being drafted into a pointless war, but never mind.