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I won’t fall into my first impulse which is to attack him.  I won’t question his patriotism.  I won’t call him a traitor or a coward.

I will ask him why he is an officer in the Army and what his oath means to him?

In his defense, he has offered to resign his commission.  But I do wonder why he enlisted and became commissioned in the first place?  He enlisted the summer of 2003 so he knew war was a possibility. 

When you enlist, I don’t care how you feel about war.  You make an oath to obey orders and you have to have that in consideration.  It is a gut check all active duty people make in enlisting and or reenlisting.

Fort Lewis Soldier Says He’ll Refuse To Go To Iraq

As thousands of Fort Lewis Army troops prepare to head back to Iraq, one of their officers is making a stand.

A lieutenant says he is going to refuse to go, saying it’s an unjust war. Anti-war groups are rallying to his defense.

Lt. Ehren Watada of the Stryker Brigade writes, "I refuse to be silent any longer. I refuse to watch families torn apart, while the President tells us to ‘stay the course.’ I refuse to be party to an illegal and immoral war against people who did nothing to deserve our aggression.

"I wanted to be there for my fellow troops. But the best way was not to help drop artillery and cause more death and destruction. It is to help oppose this war and end it so that all soldiers can come home." - signed LT.

His name had been kept a secret until now, but Lt. Watada’s father confirms that his son is taking this bold step and told the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper that he’s proud of his son.

Fort Lewis says since the lieutenant hasn’t done anything official yet, there’s no violation. But should he decide to go ahead with this, he could be charged with ‘desertion’ or more likely with ‘missing the movement’ of his unit.

She is testy, harsh and unapologetic.  She is the uncontested queen of invective and vitriol.  And she is likely the focal point of a hatred that is unparalleled by the left… a point which she is really unconcerned with.

Her comments and statements are often frustrating to me because when you dissect them from their sarcasm and grandstanding, there are some serious, real points that need to be made and debated.  Those points, however, are often totally ignore because of the arguments that result from her style and her use of caustic humour.

Take this exchange.  She went toe to toe today with Matt Lauer over her new book, Godless.

The whole interview is interesting if a bit cringing, but there is a point in it I have noted before, that is worthy of a little time here, and nicely illustrates my point.

Ann Coulter Attacks 9/11 Widows, Matt Lauer Thanks Her for the ‘Fun’ of It

LAUER: Do you believe everything in the book or do you put some things in there just to cater to your base?

Note, right out of the chute, he is being a bit biased but never mind.

ANN: No, of course I believe everything.

LAUER: On the 9-11 widows, an in particular a group that had been critical of the administration: “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing bush was part of the closure process.”

And this part is the part I really need to talk to you about: “These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.” Because they dare to speak out?

Pat wants to be treated just like one of the poor folk. 

Treat me like I’m black, sez Teddy’s son

Fresh from rehab, Rep. Patrick Kennedy said yesterday he wants to be treated like an African-American from Washington if and when he gets charged for crashing his car on Capitol Hill.

Ok, start by blaming the cops for racial profiling you, like Rep Cynthia McKinney…. 

Denying that he was drunk and or that he asked the Capitol Police for preferential treatment, Kennedy, a Rhode Island congressman, said he’s prepared "in terms of bookings, in terms of mug shots, fingerprints, whatever they might have me do."

"It’s what anyone else would have done to them if they were an African-American in Anacostia," Kennedy said in a shaky voice, referring to the mostly minority neighborhood in southeastern Washington.

And what about the whites in Anacostia? 

Later, Kennedy fretted that "there are probably people who want to throw the book at me a little more to prove that they’re not treating me special."

Well since it does look like you got preferential treatment, duh!

It’s still not clear whether Kennedy will be called to account for smashing his Ford Mustang into a barrier near the Capitol building at 2:45 a.m. on May 4. He was driving without headlights and nearly collided with a police cruiser.

Perfectly rational.  A chip off the old block.

"The attorney general is still reviewing the events of that night," said Traci Hughes, a spokeswoman for the D.C. attorney general’s office. "I can assure you that if any charges are brought in this case, he will be treated the same as anyone else in similar circumstances."

Right, just like any member of Congress who screws up and gets a free ride home. 

The son of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) was given a ride home after the wreck by Capitol Police and charged with three minor traffic violations. But he wasn’t given a sobriety test, angering some police who complained he was getting kid-glove treatment.

The practice of private advocacy groups funding travel for members of Congres is legal, unless there is an issue of bribary attached to it.  But the subjective nature of that makes any such travel open to scrutiny by ethics observers.  Indeed, in the wake of the Abramhoff scandals, any gift or hint of one is now fair game for speculation, and this includes travel.

So how do our local members of Congress rate when Congressional travel was examined? Not so hot. 

They apparently love to travel, especially when it’s on someone else’s dime.

98 trips by McDermott led way for the state

Lawmakers from Washington state — especially Rep. Jim McDermott — as well as their spouses and staff spend a lot of time in airplanes, and not just because their districts are a continent away from Capitol Hill.

A study released Monday by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity found that Washington state lawmakers, their spouses and staff accepted 443 privately funded trips over the last 5 1/2 years to places as exotic as Casablanca, India, Paris and China and as mundane as Yakima, Kalispell, Mont., and the North Slope of Alaska.

The cost of those trips, according to the study, was $990,263.

The biggest traveler — by far — from Washington state was McDermott and his highflying staff, which accepted 98 trips over the period ending in 2005. The Seattle Democrat alone accounted for 41 trips, visiting such places as Baden Baden, Germany; Puerto Rico; Nigeria; India; Stockholm; Tokyo; China and Haiti.

On seven of the trips McDermott was accompanied by his wife, according to disclosure reports assembled by the Center for Public Integrity. On four other trips he took his son.

McDermott’s spokesman Mike DeCesare defended the travel, saying the knowledge gained from the trips is essential given Seattle’s international stature and McDermott’s deep involvement in such issues as AIDS prevention and combating global hunger. DeCesare added that decisions on whether — and where — to travel are carefully reviewed and considered.

62 years ago 140,000 soldiers using 6900 ships and 12,000 aircraft launched an invasion against the German forces in France.  We simply remember it as D-Day.

The month long campaign had a heavy toll: hundreds of thousands dead or missing on both sides.

The sheer magnitude of what they did is staggering.  Men were killed before they even touched the beach.  Saving Private Ryan makes a strong case at realism in recreating it, but I personally think the brutality cannot be imagined.  We live in a sanitized version of war.  Precision bombing takes a lot of the personal element out of war for us.  We haven’t stormed too many beachheads in Iraq, and nothing even close to the concentrated carnage of Normandy.

Our media makes the headline scream at the death of any soldier in Iraq.  Imagine seeing 10,00 names from a single battle appear (heck 3,000 just from Ohama Beach alone) on the cover your morning e-paper.

Truly we are wimps. We have totally forgotten what it was like in those days, to truly be a country at war.  It was a different world then.

To many people now, D-Day is a video game, not a battle where real people died.

Now the peace activists march at the drop of a hat, and the politicians politic the events in Iraq to suit their campaign strategies.  And in some ways, the enemy we face now is more dangerous.  Then, the juggernaut of Nazi fascism was a visible tangible threat.  Now,  the Islamic fascism is a cancer, nebulous and hard to contain.

So also is our resolve to fight it hard to discern sometimes.  Our country is divided, and in many ways it is the divisive acts of our leaders that have divided us.  But we must not fail, or the world we leave our children will be just as dark and stained by evil as the one that Hitler envisioned. 

Some D-Day quotes: