Wussies

If there is a person on the planet that should abstain from lecturing military families, it's non-serving war-whore Michael Ledeen. Not that this could possibly stop him:

It's All About Me [Michael Ledeen]

Here's a primal scream that appeared in today's WaPo. It's from a woman in Arlington, Va., whose Marine son is headed for Iraq in a few weeks. She's upset, and who can blame her? She's doubly upset since she thinks the war is senseless, and I understand that. She's triply upset because she wrote a Master's thesis some years ago at Columbia about Iraqi Kurds, and there she begins to lose me. And then she tells us about the view from her old office (of Arlington Cemetery), and about her grim feelings when she hears flyovers for the funerals there. Indeed, the whole thing is not about him at all, but about her. Her feelings, her politics, her history. There's really nothing about him at all (nor about his father, for that matter), except for dark thoughts about what might become of him. He'll be changed (of course he will), maybe he'll be wounded (the odds are against it, but yes, he might. He might be killed, as he well knows). In short, both she and her Marine are victims.

Not. He chose freely, he was not compelled to join the Corps. Why did he make that choice? Surely not because his mom told him to. And surely not, as so many would have it, because he's from the underclass and has no other way to earn a living. But he, the Marine, doesn't get a word. We get her memories of his early childhood, but nothing about the current man.

Narcissus running wild as he so often does in our world.

07/08 10:00 PM

Shorter Ledeen,

"Shut up, your son ran the risk that obscene, war criminals, like Me would send him to some crazy-ass war we trumped up...

...Besides, it's not all about you, it's all about me!"