i wanna kill sam cause he ain't my muthafuckin uncle
Showing just how un-hep Republicans are (and forever shall be, no matter how many movies they make with the lovely and talented Chole Sevigny), they've gone and raised the cache of MTV's lamer-than-Tiny-Tim Rock the Vote:
Via the always hep MC Joshua Micah Marshall @ the TPM:
National security and military readiness experts generally concede that it will be extremely difficult for the United States to indefinitely maintain 130-odd thousand troops in Iraq and still maintain even threshold levels of capacity to deter and/or respond to threats in other areas.
*snip*
It doesn't mean a draft is a necessity. But it does move it into the realm of serious policy possibilities the country has to face. This is particularly so when our military relies on regular recruitment of reservists who until now generally assumed that deployments in warzones were a serious possiblity as opposed to a near certainty, as they have been for the last few years. This is also the case since the administration has said very little about how it will confront this challenge.
In any case, it's a very legitimate issue. And anyone who thinks seriously about military policy issues has to see that it is one of fairly few policy options to address a looming crisis facing the US military.
Now, the youth voter participation group Rock The Vote has been pushing this issue recently, calling for an election-year debate on the topic in ways you can see if you do a quick google search with their name in it.
*snip*
This week RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie sent the group a 'cease and desist' letter threatening legal action against the group and raising the possibility of seeking the revocation of the group's status as a tax-exempt 501c3 organization if the group did not cease discussing the draft issue.
Claims that a draft is possible, Gillespie argued, are so ridiculous on their face that the group could only be acting from 'malicious intent and a reckless disregard for the truth.' (Those, of course, are catchphrases laying the groundwork for legal action.)
*snip*
This move, if you think about it, is extraordinary. In a political campaign there are very few forms of political speech -- judged by content -- that should ever be subject to legal proceedings. But to threaten legal action to squelch discussion of a subject that is obviously a very newsworthy and relevant issue -- and one the country could face in the next four years -- is simply astonishing.
Like they say in the movies, astonishing indeed.
This may be just some strong arm stuff in the last weeks of the campaign: You don't get to be Sith just by saying you Sith, it's all about how hard you can be. This is not October Surprise kinda hard, to be sure, but as JMM notes, it's not only nasty, but nastily authoritarian.
What should be obvious, however, is the gulf between what the president says and what's actually going on in the rest of the world, something that the Administration has had difficulty with since sometime in January of 2000. While the Prez has stated for now and all time he won't be drafting anyone if he's reelected, both the kinds of work the neocons have in mind for the Mid-East and the rest of the world and the mission-from-God-talk from Bush tells a few ten million or so of his closest friends doesn't really jibe in the end.
More than likely, they're just lying - of course there's going to be a draft. But if not, if ideology and short-term political gain wins the day - as it so often does with the Bushies - just how do they expect to fight the War on Terra?
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