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• Tuesday, February 21, 2006 07:37 PM

  Bad idea

  Wasn't Hitler also an impressive war vet with combat experience? Many European WWI vets returned from the trenches feeling entitled to rule the countries for which they had fought and bled. Their political participation didn’t necesarily result in better-run democracies. In some places it lead to fascism and WWII.

  I don’t want to detract anything from all those Democratic candidates for public office that are running for the ’06 elections who are recently back from Iraq. I think their hearts, values and ideals are in the right place (some of whom I will be donating money to). And the other side of the coin is someone like Eisenhower, a military man with combat experience who was also a great democratic leader.

  But I am very uncomfortable with the idea that someone’s citizenship is somehow less meaningful because they didn’t serve in the military. I'd like to say that militarism is un-American, but I'm not sure that that is true anymore.

  By contrast, I'm sure the Republicans would not hesitate to embrace war vets willing to play their games, transforming them into an unreproachable class of special citizens entitled to lord it over the rest of us.

  —Johnalive Read Johnalive's other letters
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