It's funny how any utterance in the political arena becomes a kind of a Rorschach Test for the different ideologies. Today, both liberals and conservatives are up in arms because MSNBC's Chris Matthews wondered out loud whether President Obama was speaking in "the enemy camp" by giving his Afghanistan speech to cadets at West Point.
Liberals were outraged at the implication that Obama and the military are natural enemies; maybe some conservatives think maybe it's that elite-liberal-Volvo-driving-elitist Matthews himself who sees Army cadets as "an enemy." What was he really trying to say? If you've ever watched "Hardball," you'd know that even Matthews himself doesn't really know what he's trying to say a lot of the time. The dude just says stuff. Stupid stuff, on frequent occasions.
There's irony that I haven't seen many point out, which is the myth being perpetrated here -- that the military is uniformly hard-core anti-Obama or anti-Democrat -- is patently false. Check this out from the 2008 election:
In the past two election cycles, Democrats have added ten new Democratic veterans to Congress. Last week, President-elect Barack Obama helped close the gap among military voters, winning 44 percent of veterans as opposed to John F. Kerry’s 41 percent in 2004.
That's among veterans -- there's every reason to think Obama did as well or better among the rank-and-file active-duty military, since the groups in which candidate Obama performed the best -- young people, African-Americans, Latinos -- are also overrepresented among the enlisted troops. It would not shock me if Obama even got close to half the votes in a place like West Point, even though he was running against a service-academy graduate in John McCain. After all, military personnel serving overseas gave more money to Obama than to McCain -- by a 6-1 ratio.
People need to start getting real. Especially people with a megaphone like Chris Matthews.
UPDATE: Chris Matthews apologizes.
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Chris Matthews is nothing more than an amusing a@@hole, so typical of the "progressives" in America. Than God only left wing fools pay him any mind.— ocjones- Comment removed.
- Oh, oh. that should read,THANK God that only left wing fools pay Matthews any mind. Sorry.— ocjones
"That's among veterans -- there's every reason to think Obama did as well or better among the rank-and-file active-duty military, since the groups in which candidate Obama performed the best -- young people, African-Americans, Latinos -- are also overrepresented among the enlisted troops." One would expect the young would be 'overrepresented' among the troops, by the very definition of military age - but the left loves the myth that minorities are overrepresented, which is not true: http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/cda08-05.cfm As reported in Table 2, the percentage of white active-duty recruits with no prior military service was 65.3 percent in 2006 and 65.5 percent in 2007. Based on calculations from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), almost 62 percent of the U.S. male population ages 18 to 24 classified themselves as white in 2006.[8] The troop-to-populaÂtion ratio in these years was 1.05, indicating that the representation of whites in the military is similar to, although slightly above, their representation in the overall population.[9]— db_cooper- Comment removed.
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- President Sarah Heath Palin can not come soon enough, and like Malcolm Little used to say, by any means necessary.— WriteWinger
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- Liberals/ Democrats are lost. The guy they worshipped- "Hope/ Change guy" turns out to be an empty siut who could read from a Teleprompter like no other........It must be embarrassing to have voted for an inexperienced community organizer- who is now the laughing stock of the world.....— Manny Trillo
"..a company that employs the likes of Keith "the nazi salute is funny" Olbermann has no credibility." . . . . is batty our resident Franz Liebkind?
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
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