The Larry Craig scandal has kind of sucked the air out of the room in Idaho politics lately, but behind all that hoopla there are signs that Idaho-- or at least parts of it-- is not as blindly loyal to the Bushies as one might think.
Idaho has two Republican Senators and two Republican Representatives. It is a deeply red state.
Yet an editorial titled "Resume the draft and tax the profiteers" in this morning's Idaho Mountain Express, which serves the Sun Valley/Ketchum region, had this to say:
President Bush's be-merry, don't-worry message 16 days after 9/11 effectively sent a message that no sacrifice is needed at home. "Get down to Disney World. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed," he said.
Americans are pain-free bystanders, isolated from the harsh reality of Iraq except through press reports. Bush's ban on photos of flag-draped caskets bearing bodies of American GIs adds another layer of insulation from the war's horrors.
The editorial goes on to present a case for getting American citizens involved by reconstituing the draft (with no loopholes to allow the Cheneys of the world a way out), enact a "war tax" to help offset the horrendous debt (especially targeting war profiteers), and even forcing Detroit to sacrifice by demanding greater fuel efficiency in the cars it produces.
The thrust of it is that all Americans should share in the sacrifice now borne almost exclusively by service families, whether or not the goal is to get out of Iraq now or to stay there for the foreseeable future. Mouthing platitudes and putting yellow ribbon bumper stickers on your car won't cut it.
The editorial rationalizes the call for a draft thusly:
A draft would create a new pool of manpower to relieve the stretched-thin all-volunteer force that now is recycled and redeployed to Iraq three and four times and is exhausted. Required military service for American men and women would bring home the human costs of war and spread sacrifice fairly to more families.
Congress, however, must write a Selective Service law that eliminates the exemptions that allowed so many sons to avoid service—as Dick Cheney did five times, claiming exemptions as a student and then as a husband and soon-to-be father. Marriage and parenthood don't exempt thousands of troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I personally don't like the idea of a draft. I want us OUT, and out NOW; I don't even want the Republican chicken hawks to have to participate in that illegitimate conflict. But there is something to be said for the author of that editorial's premise that sacrifice not shared is no sacrifice at all.
Bill Sali became the Congressman for the 1st Congressional District in the 2006 elections. He is an idiot, as noted in a MyDD article during the campaign, and needs to be replaced.
The state's Senators are Larry E. Craig (of course) and Mike Crapo. You can find Crapo's Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
I don't know if The Mountain Express has leaned left or right over the lifetime of its publication, and I don't live in Idaho. But I found it encouraging to see such a strongly worded editorial in its pages. The writer is obviously angry about the state of affairs, and this might be a good sign that there are rumblings of discontent even in deep red states like Idaho.
Do read it! http://www.mtexpress.com/...