Fred Thompson Warms Up in the Republican Bullpen Demagoging the Soldiers and Denigrating the Honorable

You don't need a patch on your arm to have honor.

- -Lt. Daniel Kaffee, A Few Good Men

HT: Volunteer Voters

UPDATE: lending more perspective on that for which soldiers die is WWII veteran J. Glenn Gray:

Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their post and rescuing themselves they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale.

Service to country is not just reducible to soldiering and soldiering seems to entail more personal, elemental reasons than merely service to country.


UPDATE: Thompson ringmaster Steve Gill does what he does best in defense of Thompson's opportunistic demagoguery by targeting a couple of lowly bloggers. Besides being a lawyer who (like Fred Thompson) never served in the military, Steege makes money off his and other people's “support for the troops,” and he profits from waving that flag on his masthead. I would call that mercenary patriotism; ergo if there were not cash-lined pockets involved, then he would not be beating that drum. He’s a war profiteer of a new sort positioning himself for payback from a Fred Thompson run. Apparently, Steege wants to move up in the rankings of the "1oo Most Powerful People in Tennessee." He's a power broker pure and simple, using patriotism cynically to further his own ambitions.