Right. What next: the draft, and then increasing the applicable age to around 50 years old. What a mess.

Let me quote DOD, Pentagon, MEDCOM & Army officers,

Quote " We are surprised, we had no idea this sort of thing was happening!" Unquote

Earyout civil service retiree!

They only have to hold out for another 21 months and it will be up to Democrats to either re-instate the draft or reverse their Party's original support for this war and be accused of "cutting and running", then receive the blame of several millions of five-minute American attention spans for the resulting disaster in the Middle-East and subsequent energy crisis in America.

Dems should've opposed the war loud and proud when they had the chance. The fact that they didn't attests to a far worse cowardice than an eventual change of military strategy.

Am I allowed to say "Third Party" in the Salon forum?

for armed rebellion. Get your guns and ammunition. The elected democrates can and will do nothing.

Now injured people who cannot carry 50 lbs being ordered back. Medical records are being altered. This is a crime.

I guess this is what it means to support the troops.

There has already been a private mercenary army created by the monied elites for just such an occasion.

Instead, a Third Party is needed in American politics, due right about yesterday. An overhauling of the establishment structure into a more Parliamentary-style system that would make the Parties themselves accountable for their platforms, rather than being able to scapegoat "maverick" individual politicians, would also help.

When the Dems are forced to make the next inexorably bad decision regarding Iraq (military draft or "cut-and-run") after Bush leaves office, it will do nothing but set the stage for the next generation of Republican Frat Kids to take over sometime around 2012. We all recognize that this is a revolving door of bloated plutocracy dressed up as a binary and representative system, when it is neither. And we should all know what happens if we ignore that fact...every Empire crumbles eventually.

Read all of it, including the fine print. Otherwise it's like buying a car & not understanding that someone can repo it when you don't pay.

And I think more and more of the general population is getting sick of contractual fine print being used as an excuse for lacking basic human decency.

Not curiouser and curiouser, insaner and insaner.

My blood boiled when I read that headline. Please Salon, follow up on this thoroughly and quickly. If this is indeed a trend (or even a large incident) I will personally lead a column of last-strawed Americans to Washington to kick these two maniacs out: Cheney with his Halliburton thumbprint on Walter Reed Hospital, and new corporate offices in Iraq/Iran-adjacent Dubai; W sniffing his butt.

Take care of these soldiers - take care of us! We need leadership, desperately. Get rid of those that would make a soldier, or a nation, suffer for their private profit and criminal malfeasance. I don't care if the damned dog ends up president - what the hell's the difference at this point?! Gloves off, now.

What an outrage. I am physically ill over this story. Can't somebody please stop this kind of thing?

But I can't. Because I'm not. Just another example of the fish rotting from the head down.

Impeach!

When are people going to stop enlisting in the military? What has to happen before people decide that the military is a shitty deal? Unfortunately, PT Barnum (or whoever said it) may have been right... there IS a sucker born every minute... and those suckers join the military.

The military voted overwhelmingly for Bush in 2004.

They had a chance to vote in a Vietnam War veteran, but they didn't.

They got what they voted for.

A pretend military pilot, a pretend cowboy, a pretend president.

If the rest of us have to live with the result of military votes, then why shouldn't the military? We told them. Michael Moore, reviled by the military, showed the military and everyone else who and what Bush was in living color; Moore showed what is really happening in Iraq and why. And he showed how military recruiters seek out the kids with the least chance in life. It was all there for everyone to see. All you had to do was look at it.

I'm no genius and I could see through Bush's playacting and Rove's marketing techniques. Bush is a man who has cheated all of his life. He let 9/11 happen. He did not act on warnings. He let bin Laden get away. He deliberately set about tying 9/11 to Iraq, but in sneaky language, so he could later say "Oh no, I never said Saddam was responsible for 9/11."

This reminds me of workers who cry because they're being mistreated by management, yet they repeatedly vote down union representation, they vote for candidates who are against minimum wage increases and who are for deregulating workplaces.

I paid attention during the 2004 election campaigns. It's not my fault that the military didn't.

Deal with it, guys. The rest of us have to -- so do you.

"They" voted "they wrong way", so "they" deserve to have their commitment to military service exploited until they are crippled and psychotic. And naturally, all the enlightened civilians who voted "the right way"- for a billionaire Senator who helped write Bush the blank check to invade and occupy Iraq in the first place -shouldn't give a damn.

You should be proud of your determined disaffectation, USERNAME. We all need to do our part to stop caring for political "enemies" like 19 year-old grunts trying to pay for college. (that's a little sarcasm, by the way).

Let's see...they're "unfit" but being forced to fight anyway...Let The Catch-22 Jokes Begin!

Of course, it's not really a joke, is it...

They" voted for Bush.

"They" got him.

'kay?

Don't give me this boo-hoo-hoo "The military is so different from everyone else because they can get hurt." We can all get hurt and we all need to use our heads. And we all need to live with the consequences of our actions. If you -- or THEY or ANYBODY -- voted for Bush, they got him.

They voted for ENDLESS WAR. There was no exit strategy. Ever. Did the military see an exit strategy? Nope. Because it was never there. I repeatedly heard military voters say they were voting for Bush "so we can finish the job in Iraq." Did they ever ask Bush how he intended to leave Iraq, after no WMDs were found, after Saddam was captured, after elections were held over there? No? Too bad. It would have been a good question to pay attention to, instead of reviling the Vietnam COMBAT VETERAN that the military refused to vote for. By 2004, everyone knew Bush had no plan to leave Iraq. And they knew Bush was standing by Rumsfeld.

Yes, Sergeant Blotter, people have to take responsibility for their own actions. We tried to warn people repeatedly and we were told we are traitors, that we are unpatriotic, that we are supporters of the people who knocked down the Trade Center. We weren't any of those things, we were people who used our heads for 5 minutes, who thought things though instead of listening to the sloganeering of smug, highly-paid rightwing entertainers and pundits. We warned and warned and warned and "they" who voted for Bush didn't listen; they knew better; now they're crashing and there isn't a damn thing most of us can do about it. We tried-- we tried when it mattered, before the war-- and we were demonized. We were only trying to help then.

But you can't stop people from doing what they want to do. You can put seatbelts in cars, but you can't make people wear them. When the crash comes, the result is based on, among other things, what you did before the wreck happened.