Well I Agree With One Thing, He is a Wuss

It is hard to take anything in the LA Times seriously, they publish letters by Barbara Streisand for God's sake, but this guy is a moron. I have to give him some credit though, at least he is honest. This is less duplicitious to those who pretend to support our troops as some sort of prophylactic against their judgment and patriotism being questioned.

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

And sometimes, for reasons I don't understand, you get to just hang out in Germany.

I know this is all easy to say for a guy who grew up with money, did well in school and hasn't so much as served on jury duty for his country. But it's really not that easy to say because anyone remotely affiliated with the military could easily beat me up, and I'm listed in the phone book.

I am not sure what he is trying to imply by "did well in school", believe it or not, many of the people in the military do well in school too. Despite the limosuine left stereotype we are not all illiterate high school dropouts. The guy sounds kind of lazy and spineless too, but as I said, how hard is it to get a job with the LA Times?

Update: Apparently this genius got a bunch of nasty e-mails (big surprise). It is actually rather hard to get mad at him, or feel sorry for him for that matter, since he is so clueless it is sad. One only needs to look at his biography on the LA Times link.

Joel Stein is desperate for attention. He grew up in Edison, N.J., went to Stanford and then worked for Martha Stewart for a year. After two years of fact-checking at various publications, he got hired as a sports editor at Time Out New York. Two years later he lucked into a job as a staff writer for Time magazine, where over seven and a half years he wrote a dozen cover stories on subjects such as Michael Jordan, Las Vegas, the Internet bubble and — it being Time and he being a warm body in the office — low-carb diets.

Yeah, that is a good use of a Stanford education, working for Martha Stewart and pissing off the US Army.

He also made the mistake of talking with Hugh Hewitt. In a battle of wits, it was not a fair fight.

HH: All right. Now who is your...this is a column about the troops that begins, "I don't support our troops." We'll get to the specifics in a second. But who is your closest family member or friend who is on active duty?

JS: That's an excellent question. I wouldn't say I have a very close friend. I would say only acquaintances. No family at all.

HH: Who are your acquaintances?

JS: There was a guy who works at Time, that's where I worked last, who quit to serve in the military.

HH: What's his name?

JS: (pause) You know, I'm blanking on his name. But your point is well taken that I don't have many people that I even know who are in the military.

HH: Do you have any, though, other than this guy at Time whose name you can't remember?

JS: Who are serving currently?

HH: Yeah.

JS: Or ever served?

HH: No, serving currently.

JS: Or only in Iraq?

HH: Active duty. Anywhere in the world.

JS: (pause) I'd say I've been pretty isolated from that. I mean, that's a point I made in the column.

It only gets uglier from there...