I point to Andrew Bacevich's book ad nauseum, but he really does nail down the driving forces behind the fetishization of all things military. In addition to all the gung-ho, johnson-swinging posturing, Bacevich says talking about the troops is a way of fantasizing about Leave it to Beaver 'merican values. It's the last refuge of the value-pimping scoundrels, because no one actually believes civilians are virtuous. From the book's introduction:

Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, "looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poiseand élan..."

According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the armed services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who probably couldn't make it in the real world. By the turn of the twenty-first century a different view had taken hold. Now the United States military was "a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody… looked out for each other. A place where people -- intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings." Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than the rest of us, but also more sensitive and even happier.

Contemplating the GIs advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something more than soldiers in battle. He ascertained "transcendence at work." According to Hanson, the armed services had "somehow distilled from the rest of us an elite cohort" in which virtues cherished by earlier generations of Americans continued to flourish.

Sven,

How do you sleep at night? You post is sad really. You could care less about what a soldier does or is prepared to do for you. Do you know what's even ironic, they don't care either, they just do it anyway.

I think Wayne proves Sven's point in a way that words from me probably can't...

and as much as I hate to admit it, mentalities like Wayne's are probably why the Dems passed the craptastic war funding bill last week...sucks that it's probably going to have repercussions in '08, since the Congressional Dems were elected to do something about this morass.

You could care less about what a soldier does or is prepared to do for you.

Actually, Wayne, I think you mean to say "could not care less" in that statement. You are implying that Sven has the capacity to care less than you think he does when you probably are trying to tell us that he cannot.

It's a common misuse of the phrase.

The Hill Online

I saw the first Thompson bumper sticker yesterday. It was in Clinton, on a rainy road (hooray!), on the car of some nutter following about ten feet behind the guy in front of him at about fifty mph. When we stopped for a light there it was.

The Hill Online

Yes but "things have changed", Fred says. This is to be the constant message both excusing his past and justifying the endless war policy.

from today's KNS article

"And I think the country's different. I think we have challenges now that we didn't have in 2000."