A political candidate needs to go through basic training to learn self discipline? Is military training truly the only way a public servant can develop a good character? I don't believe that Dr. Martin Luther King ever was in the military, but surely no one doubts his honesty and integrity. Humility, honesty, hard work, and respect for others are not soley associated with military training. There are focused, self-discipled men and women in all professions. The content of a public servant's character is not shaped by whether or not he or she has completed military training. If the American people ever decide that the character of a candidate is more important than the candidate's TV-appeal, then we may have competent, focused, intelligent, unselfish men and women in our public service.

I would go one step further and require military service (or equivalent for the disabled) as a prerequisite for full ciitizenship including the right to vote in federal elections.

Have you all forgotten that Mr. Keillor is a HUMORIST? That what he posts on Salon (and elsewhere) falls under the rubric of SATIRE?

Lighten up. If you need to be so humorless and serious, go post a comment to a Cary Tennis article, you'll find yourself in good (i.e. sour) company.

MPT-

Is that a Starship Troopers reference?

Cheers,

Brad

Lets take this a step further Mr. Keillor. Instead of mandatory military service, which would be admirable, I want a President who has actually killed another human being.

Call me old fashioned, but killing is the paragon of life affirming experiences is it not?

And I'm not talking about ordering a military platoon to kill insurgents, or paying an assassin to make a hit on a South American Dictator; I mean the Presidential candidate, as a qualifying prerequisite experience, must have committed cold blooded murder himself (or herself) and watch as the victim dies. Whether its suffocating with your hands or putting a bullet right in the heart, as long as the Candidate learns and executes the art of the kill.

The kill will truly test a candidate's resolve. He or she would have no psychological qualms about strangling Osama Bin Laden with piano wire or peppering a lawyer with shotgun pellets.

And I know there will be those spoiled freshman politicians from Harvard or Stanford who will try to weasel their way out of this by saying, "Well I've tortured a detainee at a secret military base before."

NO! Torture should not count. Waterboarding and sleep depravation is for peace loving hippies of San Francisco.

Until the prospect candidate has ended a life can he or she respect the preciousness of life. Therein lies the soul of the consummate leader.

Say it with me: THE KILL MUST BE MADE IF YOU WANT TO RUN IN 2008!

...and, in the (scripted) words of a certain warrior with same actual military experience of G.K., "a load of horse puckey."

Many Europeon countries require military service from their citizens.

It's a socially levling experience, I think, which is good in and of itself.

But there's a more important factor involved. A citizen army is much less likely

to stand for the kind of unnecessary, politically inspired war like the one we

are currently fighting in Iraq.

Professional armies temd to see their own interests as distinct from the society thay are supposed to be defending. Citizen armies do not.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims that GWB went missing for three days -- not even his staff or handlers knew where he was -- at the exact time that JFK Jr.'s plane crashed. That this was his coming out party with the Skull & Bones, just as his father had been involved in the first JFK assassination. Not so far-fetched: To be a made man in the mafia, the Crips, the Bloods or the Yakuza, you have to kill someone...and since this country's run by gangsters, more or less, why wouldn't they hold their own to the same standards?

In the History of Polybius, from which so much of the US Constitution is originally derived, we find 10 years of military service as a requirement for Romans citizens to enter politics. Even after serving the statutory requirement, high-ranking senators often served in the ranks. In the battle of Cannae, which General Schwartzkopf irrelevantly harped on so much at the end of the Second Gulf War, Livy reports that 80 Romans senators (or men of senatorial rank) were among the dead. Now that's what I call commitment to your nation's fortunes. By comparison, America's political class looks a bunch of selfish cowards.

While I understand Keillor's sentiments in his article, and the military people I've known are all good folks, Keillor rings up a few things that don't quite work out.

Like soldiers from prominent families with special letters on their papers designating them as "politically important" and what-not -- even in the military, the most influential among us are generally protected from yeoman's service.

And it points to the larger peril republics face with a standing army. The Founding Fathers were afraid of standing armies, and yet we've lived with one since WWII and watched the Pentagon budget grow, fanned by fear, whether of Nazis, or Communists, or, now, terrorists. The only time there was talk of a Peace Dividend (about two weeks after the USSR collapsed, then quickly snuffed), the GOP was petrified. All that Pentagon loot being reallocated? Not on their watch! Find another bogeyman, STAT!

Never mind that our massive military didn't prevent 9/11 from happening. And, in fact, that it's no defense against terrorism at all -- as a tactic, terrorism is specifically designed when a weak party faces a strong one. Shock and awe and Gulf War II *turned* Iraq into a terrorist training ground; it didn't stop it. Our military power is like using a shotgun to shoot at flies.

More perilously, as civil institutions wane -- as guns become more valued than butter (and looking at the Bush budgetary priorities, that's not even an argument) -- the military becomes the one thing left -- the last viable insitution, the last thing everybody can agree on: "Yeah, we sure got a kickass military. Maybe *they* should be in charge." And so it goes. Enough banana republicanism, already. It's been done to death.