UPDATED: Speeching with "the Enemy"

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.