T A B L E+T A L K Jesse Helms, Oprah Winfrey, Spice Girls and other reader choices for scumbags of the year. In Headlines. A L S O+ T O D A Y When Mr. Bono went to Washington By David Corn An embittered U.S. military is embracing hard right ideologies D A I L Y+Q U O T E Clinton, Girl Scouts and the sage Dick Morris R E C E N T L Y Is Kaczynski too crazy to be executed? By Ros Davidson Yes, if the defense can turn him into a human being (01/05/98) And the losers are ... By Andrew Ross Salon's first annual scumbags of the year awards (12/24/97) Pied Piper of the Clinton conspiracists By Gene Lyons British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks the president is guilty of everything (12/23/97) Death to Bambi! By Harry Jaffe Bah, humbug to deer. They're eating the shrubbery, bullying other animals and breeding like rabbits. (12/22/97) Holy alliance! By Todd Pitock Does Pat Robertson support labor unions? (12/19/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		The army of the right PAGE 2 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And a hatred of Clinton because he was seen as a classic draft dodger. Not just that. There is also contempt for his character, the belief that he is an adulterous liar. He doesn't uphold the values that the military really admires. Clinton is the guy who's able to talk himself out of anything, the guy who doesn't have any absolute standards. What the military really admires are absolute standards, which is why you'll find military people admiring a conscientious objector, the guy who is willing to go to jail for what he believes. What they can't admire is the guy who sidesteps the draft through quibbling, through letters, through playing footsie with the ROTC and then withdrawing, as Clinton did. His attempt to have it both ways to preserve his political viability just turned the stomachs of military people. And after one week in office, he pushes for gays in the military. Actually, he brought it up earlier, when he met with Gen. Powell at Blair House before the inauguration. And had Clinton said at that point, "Gen. Powell, I know you disagree with this, but I'm giving you an order here. Figure out a way to get this done and move out smartly," Powell would have done it. But Clinton wanted the military to go along without making him push them. So they pushed back hard, and had allies in Congress. And that set the stage for a military that went off the reservation. Haven't soldiers always been to the right of center, politically? Some interesting numbers have come out in the last couple months on this. Ole Holsti, a professor at Duke University, has been polling military officers on their political views as part of a larger poll of members of American elites for the past 20 years. In 1976, the senior military officers he polled were one-third Republican. Today, it's two-thirds. Liberals have all but evaporated. You go from a conservative-to-liberal ratio among senior ranks of 4-to-1 in 1976 to a ratio of 23-to-1 in 1996. That's even with the injection of females and minorities into the senior ranks. That tells me that the white male officer corps is about 95 percent Republican. Apart from gays in the military, what effect has the issue of women in the military had on this politicization? It's made for considerable confusion about what the culture of the military should be. There was an Army colonel heading up the leadership department at West Point who was fired, among other reasons, because he talked about combat too much. The charge was that this was exclusionary against women since women are not allowed in combat, and therefore it amounted to sexual harassment. I'm beginning to understand why the military has drifted over to the Republicans. Absolutely. The gender issue really is splitting the U.S. military -- far more than gays in the military ever will. It's the dividing line, much more than rank or race. I remember I was looking at Charlie Company, 10th Forward Support Battalion in the 10th Mountain Division, a unit that deploys frequently overseas, and the issue was women who became pregnant. One officer who was complaining to me about the number of pregnancies said there had to be an agreement with the women that if they came into this unit, they couldn't become pregnant. Now that kind of rule produces all kinds of lawsuits -- a woman's right to chose, to become pregnant and so on. These women get to say they can't deploy, so goodbye. So what you have is somebody who went through all the rehearsals, but on game day, they were busy. And that really antagonized a lot of males in the unit. What are some of the other gender issues that are aggravating the military's rightward drift? The feeling that women are held to less rigorous physical standards than men are. And the belief that, ultimately, this is going to result in people getting killed. Recently, the Army instituted "equal effort" physical testing, which stipulates, for example, that if a man of a certain age and physical size can carry 100 pounds, his female counterpart should be able to lift only 65 pounds. And that 65 pounds amounts to an effort equal to the guy who lifts 100. Well, on the battlefield, "equal effort" doesn't matter. If, in the heat of battle, a woman is needed to carry a .50-caliber machine gun and she can't, all of her "equal effort" isn't going to stop the enemy. Ultimately, combat effectiveness should be the test of a military, and it really upsets people when the test isn't combat effectiveness but some politically correct formula. What about sex? When you put men and women together in units, they are going to have sex. And when that happens, the cohesion of units declines. Those soldiers who haven't hooked up with a woman are resentful and bring charges against those who have. These guys then get busted, and often the unit loses an effective leader because of a regulation involving women, and then there's more resentment. And the tendency of the men is to seek comfort in right-wing politics. They feel right wingers like Rush Limbaugh are the only ones out there who sympathize with them on these issues. Is there a racial element to this politicization? Not really. You have to acknowledge that the military has done better than civilian society in addressing the issues of race. At the same time, I have to say that a hard-right military is not a comfortable place for many black and female officers. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E+| A coup in the offing?