Ad republicam | The Non Sequitur

This has to be one of the funniest responses to the chickenhawk charge:

>The caller, besides his anger, raises a point that’s brought up, out against the supporters of the war a lot and that’s the argument that if you really supported the war, you’d be fighting it. And, unfortunately, that goes against the Constitution, which gives every American the right to speak their mind, regardless of their biography or regardless of what they do, so it’s an unconstitutional argument. It’s a demeaning argument to the troops in the field because it assumes that they’re somehow victims, and that they’re not there of their own free will. We have a voluntary Army and the people serving are there of their own free will.

Whatever the merits of the chickenhawk argument–and as long as tours in Iraq get extended it certainly has some–the way to respond to it is not to hide behind the Constitution. The Constitution, Matthew Continetti ought to know, governs the legal rights of American citizens, not the kinds of arguments that can be made in a public forum.

3 thoughts on “Ad republicam”

Some thoughts…

How can you read such incredible nonsense without smashing your head between a door and its jam?

So the fact that someone points out that certain war supporters didn’t volunteer for the volunteer army somehow demeans the troops who did volunteer? I could at least think it plausible if he had argued that it demeans the war supporters, but I can’t possibly see what would cause the demeaning of the actual volunteers (using the term very loosely).

In reference to the Constitution, perhaps what was meant was that war supporters have the Constitutional right not to volunteer. But, simply because they have this legal right does nothing to excuse them from logical consistency, and it also does nothing to excuse them from the moral repercussions of their views. I also have the Constitutional right to call them cowards or moral monsters.

The college republicans video is just priceless, the college republicans don’t think that the American people can stomach confronting the “Islamo-Fascists”, except them by supporting the war, yet they cannot stomach going to war because they have more important things to do; like go to school, have a comfortable life, and so on. Talk about cognitive dissonance. The college republicans support the war, in spirit apparently, but they cannot support it with their bodies because they have better things to do such as supporting the war by sending somebody else’s body over there. I guess those over there, which joined to escape their conditions here, are more apt for the task than the college republicans. Freaking priceless.