So a couple days ago Captain Ed posted his brilliant
rebuttal to our prods that war mongers who take on no risk to themselves or loved ones are "chickenhawks," followed by Roger Ailes shooting it down in
flames.
But it got me thinking, that while Ailes did point out the hilarious absurdity of claiming that a revolutionary leader could be a chickenhawk at all (seeing as the King had a penchant for hanging people just for speaking out against him), nevermind not doing your homework to note that Patrick Henry himself had been in combat, that Ailes had missed something.
What he missed is that Chickenhawks are elitist snobs, who think they're too smart and valuable to be wasted in combat like common people.
See, the subtext of Ed's statement in particular is that Patrick Henry is a hero even though he wasn't heavily involved in personal risk, because he was
more valuable out of combat than in it. Well, connecting those dots, I read: "Patrick Henry is just too freaking smart to be freezing to death in Washington's army, he's much too important for that."
Read it in his update/rebuttal to Ailes:
[Henry] used his best skills to the fullest extent to perform great work. That isn't validated by his presence at one single engagement just as it isn't invalidated by his resignation of his commission after the war started -- as I argued.
Is anyone else offended by the elitism and arrogance of this line of thinking? Republican chickenhawks don't just avoid military service out of cowardice, they do it because they believe they're too valuable for it. After all, I really doubt many of them wake up in the morning and say, "I'd love to join the army but I'm really a pathetic sad-sack of a man who would be sobbing by the end of the first day of basic" - no, the self-rationalization functions of the brain like to find ego-bolstering reasons to avoid risky behaviour. Being too smart, and more valuable as a sidelines cheerleader fits in quite nicely.
Hoping I was wrong, I did some reading on Redstate, and basically found that they rarely admit this as openly as Ed did, usually they just argue that they're not needed since recruiting is going so well. That's when they don't engage in appeals to extremes, saying "What if every Bush voter had to join the army?" as if that's really what we're saying when we call them chickenhawks.
Well, good news conservatives, recruiting is only meeting their goals by lowering standards (great article, recommended BTW) and recruiting ever dumber and dumber soldiers. So, instead of needing to challenge chickenhawks in their self-perception of being too valuable to waste in combat, here is the clarion call of duty for all above-average intellects! No wonder there have been so many deaths, if only some more really smart conservatives joined the army to run the war properly, tragedies like that would not happen. The research even shows that smart people waste less money in the military:
For this particular task, since each Patriot missile costs about $2 million, [the lowest intellect soldiers] also chewed up $8 million more of the Army's procurement budget.
So, wise and lucid conservative Iraq war Hawks, time to enlist. Who better to help the President stay-the-course in Iraq then a cadre of brilliant true-believers who can bolster morale, outsmart the terrorists and cut costs. It's win-win-win for Republicans.
Don't like that? Well drop the memes about "Ivory tower liberals," and the "media elite" you harp on so often. The saying goes that the average person thinks they aren't, and in that regard you're definitely no better than us. At least we aren't pushing for a war we're unwilling to personally support and we definitely don't routinely question the patriotism of those that oppose us. That's the real point of the chickenhawk slur, as the most suitable response to being called a traitor just for opposing war.