Letters to the Editor
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Proximity Warning
It's the hypocrisy of the 'chickenhawk' argument that's repellent though: it's generally made by people arguing against a point of view they'd have no respect for no matter who is holding it. It's just an opportunistic cheap shot.
Liberal hypocrite Adam Smith:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
Liberal hypocrite George Orwell:
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.
Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.
People who need to feel brave, resolute and strong by casually sending others off to war have long provoked the disgust of decent people -- long before the "chickenhawk" term or Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney existed.