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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.