Informed Speculation

I missed this yesterday, but William Arkin, who blogs at the Washington Post, must have temporarily gone insane.  That’s the only reasonable explanation I can offer for calling our troops ‘mercenaries’:

Friday’s NBC Nightly News included a story from my colleague and friend Richard Engel, who was embedded with an active duty Army infantry battalion from Fort Lewis, Washington.

Engel relayed how “troops here say they are increasingly frustrated by American criticism of the war. Many take it personally, believing it is also criticism of what they’ve been fighting for.”

…the recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary – oops sorry, volunteer – force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

Unbelievable…now, I know a little bit of military history, and the idea of mercenary soldiers (quite prevalent in the Middle Ages, for example), and whatever our troops are (I think they are just about the best damn thing on the planet), they are definitely not ‘mercenaries’.  I happen to agree totally with this bit from Wikipedia:

The generic definition of a mercenary is a soldier who fights or engages in warfare primarily for private gain, usually with little regard for ideological, national, or political considerations. However, when the term “mercenary” is used to refer to a soldier of a national, regular army, it usually is an insult, epithet or pejorative.

Indeed, what Arkin said was indefensible…yet today, he plays the victim:

Well, one thing’s abundantly clear about who will actually defend our rights to say what we believe: It isn’t the hundreds who have written me saying they are soldiers or veterans or war supporters or real Americans — who also advise me to move to another country, to get f@##d, or to die a painful, violent death.

Cry me a river…Incredibly, Arkin ups the ante with yet another insult in the form of a mock ‘apology’:

I was dead wrong in using the word mercenary to describe the American soldier today.

These men and women are not fighting for money with little regard for the nation. The situation might be much worse than that: Evidently, far too many in uniform believe that they are the one true nation. They hide behind the constitution and the flag and then spew an anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, anti-journalism, anti-dissent, and anti-citizen message that reflects a certain contempt for the American people.

JHC, what a moron.  In any large group of people, there are going to be your fair share of idiots – why should the military be any different? But Arkin compounds his primary sin, the use of the word ‘mercenary’ with respect to our troops, with the use of the broad brush to paint the men and women who are putting their lives on the line the same shade as the few hundred imbeciles who responded with obscenities.

There are military men and women who love this president, and who hate him.  There are those who support the war, and those who think it’s a fiasco.  There are yellow-dog Democrats, and hardcore social conservatives.  They are a microcosm of society at large, as any third-grader knows.

What possessed Arkin, we’ll never know…but he should issue a real apology and not focus on the jerks who e-mailed obscenities, but rather the hundreds of thousands of good men and women he so egregiously slandered…