Another reminder that having opposed the War in Iraq does not make you a liberal.

[Mass]

(once again about cohesiveness, of course).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/opinion/05mcpeak.html

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change
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By MERRILL A. McPEAK
Published: March 4, 2010

...
Seventeen years ago, the chiefs — all four of us, plus the chairman and vice chairman — concluded that allowing open homosexuality in the ranks would probably damage the cohesiveness of our combat units.

[Mass]

1. From Digby's Hullabaloo, this comment about this editorial

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/when-us-military-loses-its-gays-fault.html

When The US Military Loses, It's The Gays' Fault

by tristero

It's a free country, true, but nothing gives you the inalienable right to promote your fact-less bigotry in the New York Times. Unless you hate gays:

...

I do not see how permitting open homosexuality in these communities enhances their prospects of success in battle. Indeed, I believe repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will weaken the warrior culture at a time when we have a fight on our hands.
Got that, everyone? The reason that "permitting open homosexuality...will weaken the warrior culture" is because...because...because....well...it just will.

...
And let's face it, you just know that's gonna happen all the time. You just can't count on the openly gay guy to keep his mind focused on the bullets whizzing about him. And why, you ask, is that? Because YOU are right there and YOU ARE SOOOOOOO HOT! Because unlike normal young heterosexual men, homosexuals have only one thing on their mind: sex, sex, and more sex. Even when they're being shot at, even when they're defusing roadside bombs, even when the missiles raining on their heads are turning everyone around them into bloody, nidorous, non-cohering blobs. Don't you get it? That's a turn on! That's what get these deviants off!

Think I'm crazy? Need proof? Why, just look at what happened to the Joint Chiefs! Why, the mere IDEA of repealing DADT is so divisive that they've already started to lose their mojo. Therefore, gays shouldn't serve openly in the military. QED.

Now that's an argument that's fit to print. On the stuff that lines birdcages.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. What is this 'warrior culture' crap, anyway?

I never heard anybody mention it back in the day, when I was a Marine. I was raised on military bases as a kid, and I never heard anybody talk about our 'warrior culture'. Have things changed so much in 35-50 years that this is now just accepted?

To me, 'warrior culture' has always meant one of two things - either real warrior culture, such as that of many of the Native American nations where the individual warrior was honored for his own exploits, which made 'counting coup' far more worthy than simply killing an enemy warrior; or, the diametric opposite, the militarist culture such as that of the Prussian Junkers which I grew up understanding to be a BAD thing.

It seems to me that as our military is modeled after that of the Prussians, that when we say 'our warrior culture' that we are actually talking code for militarism and incipient fascism, not an honoring of our fighting men.