Fighting the Good Fight

I spotted this interesting little tidbit, and thought I’d share it.

“With supreme guts and righteousness, President Bush went into Iraq,” Gov. Pataki told the Republican National Convention last August. The place erupted with applause. It was all very stirring.

Almost one year later, Pataki’s son Teddy is, with supreme guts and righteousness, seeking a three-year law school deferment from the Marines, which last week commissioned the recent Yale grad as a second lieutenant.

The governor, who himself received a medical deferment during the Vietnam War because of poor eyesight, has said he hopes his son is granted the deferment. Of course he does. No doubt all the parents of New York’s nearly 100 war dead also wish their children could have gotten deferments. But they couldn’t. They got killed instead. (source)

This prompted a response from Sheryl McCarthy, a columnist for Newsday to write a piece called “Ship young Pataki straight to Iraq”.

The governor, who proudly announced last week that his son has been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines, also noted that Teddy Pataki hopes to defer his military service for three years until he finishes law school.

Coming only days after 20-year-old Marine Cpl. Ramona Valdez of the Bronx was killed by a suicide bomber in Fallujah, to suggest that Lt. Pataki be allowed to pass the next three years studying torts and contracts seemed positively obscene.

It was another example of how politicians wage war but expect other people’s children to fight them.

She’s right. It’s not fair to the other men and women fighting in Iraq. Actually, that’s not strong enough. Fair isn’t the right word. What he’s trying to do is despicable. I could see a deferment if we weren’t at war and if we didn’t have a President shoving this war in Iraq down our throats. And to top that off, Governor George Pataki was right there with the President and other Republicans telling all of us that the war in Iraq was a just war and for the good of America, to “fight terrorism”.

Well fine. I will accept that argument. I don’t personally believe that, but I can accept that someone else would believe it. But, when someone turns around and says, (paraphrasing) “Yes, I believe in sending other people’s sons and daughters off to war to die in a foreign land, but when it comes to my child, I hope he gets a deferment for three years. Hopefully, the war will be over by then.”

Yes indeed, it is apparently true that the job of politicians is to wage war - war that other people’s children should fight.