Justin Doolittle; Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Islandofmisfittoys sends us a link to Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard report on a Salon article by Justin Doolittle entitled “Stop thanking the troops for me: No, they don’t “protect our freedoms!”. Yes, it’s exactly what you’d expect from Salon. Doolittle looks in his trousers and finds himself woefully unprepared for life.

The corollary to the claim that our freedom exists only at the pleasure of the military, of course, is that the same military can revoke said freedom if it so desires. Indeed, as Hibbert so bluntly put it, “obviously we wouldn’t have freedom without them.” This widely held belief, that our freedom is bestowed on us by soldiers, has obvious implications for how the public views the military. One such implication of the ubiquity of this myth is that people will feel they owe boundless gratitude to the military as an institution and all the men and women who serve in it.

Yeah, well, Justin, your corollary doesn’t hold up, because, while it’s true that they we would be less free if our military shirked their collective duty, they are required by their oaths and their personal commitment to the Constitution to do otherwise. The military can’t “revoke said freedom” on a whim. And Americans have faith in the fact that they won’t. It takes a special, unselfish person to defend our freedoms. And the only reason that you can express your vacuous opinion is because they stand in the breach for you.

The root of your complaint is that they’ve never failed to stand in the breach, and so you really don’t appreciate the fact that they protect your freedoms. You don’t even realize that they have secured your freedom for centuries before you were even conceived.

We need not thank the troops for every breath we take. When we do, we reduce our entire existence as free people to something that only exists at the whim of the U.S. military, and suffocate critical thought about the military and what it’s actually doing in the world.

Yeah, well, we had a sample of what you think is “critical thought” following the Vietnam War and veterans and servicemembers were ostracized and denigrated by your ilk. They did their jobs when their country called, but I’m thinking Doolittle wouldn’t lift a finger to defend this country and what it stands for in the world if it meant a measure of discomfort on his part. But he’d be the first to demand that someone save him if he was threatened.

I get the impression that Doolittle thinks that somehow it’s lawyers and judges that protect his freedoms. In a world jammed-packed with terrorists and nuclear rogues, that’s more that just little naive. And if you can’t take one day out the rest of the year to thank folks for something you don’t fully understand, you’re a self-centered little prick.

Category: Shitbags