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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (67686)	1/22/2003 12:30:47 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Not to belabor uw's civil and polite outburst, but it roused me to go look up this amusing snippet from the Prince of Darkness himself. Ben Wattenberg: You and some of your colleagues have been under attack. One for being chicken hawks. Here¹s the Nation magazine. They¹re not very good caricatures. The idea being that you and some of your colleagues who now take a hawkish position did not serve in the military. How do you respond to that? Richard Perle: Well, I haven¹t seen any reference to chicken doves, so I assume that it¹s only if you take a hawkish position that the fact that you did not serve in the military is held against you. I think it¹s an intimidating McCarthyite tactic. It tries to de-legitimize the views of people on an entirely irrelevant measure. It is true that I did not serve in the armed forces. It¹s in part because I was a student at a time when student deferments were a normal thing, and then I was married. And they weren¹t taking married men into the Army, so I didn¹t serve. I was not opposed in any way to service, but the notion that I¹m not entitled to a view or at least not entitled to a view that somebody decides is hawkish because I didn¹t serve is just monstrously unfair. pbs.org Right. If that line cuts the wrong way, "it¹s an intimidating McCarthyite tactic. It tries to de-legitimize the views of people on an entirely irrelevant measure." Not to mention "monstrously unfair". But if that particular banner is self-righteously raised on the war cheerleading front, it's something else entirely. It all seems sort of postmodern to me, or something.