Tancredo

As a Vietnam era draftee who eventually became pretty anti to the Vietnam war, I reserve a special scorn for the chickenhawks - the draftdodgers and draft avoiders who cheered the war from the safety of their own deferments. One of the scandals of Vietnam was the way deferments were handed out like Halloween candy to the priviledged and connected. Jack Kemp, later a Republican Congressman and Vice Presidential nominee, was too crippled to be drafted but not too crippled to play eight more years in the NFL.

This list of the deferred seems to include every Neocon nutbag and Republican: Abrams, Alito, Allard, Ashcroft, Bauer, Bennett, Bloomberg, Blunt and don't get me started on Bush. And that's just some of the A's and B's. Of course Cheney, Delay, Frist, Will and a swarm of others are on the list too. There are Democrats too, like Al Gore - though he enlisted and served in Vietnam, and Bill Bradley.

In World War II the privileged mostly served and sometimes died with the rest of us - think of the Kennedy children and Bush Sr., for example. In Vietnam they mostly got a pass, and now, military service is done by hired professionals and volunteers, making the country more and more detached from the reality of war.

Anyway, it pleased me a lot to see Markos Moulitsas (of Daily Kos) chase chickenhawk congressman and anti-immigrant windbag Tom Tancredo off the set of MSNBC's The ED Show.