Insulting Our Soldiers vs. Sacrificing Them

John Kerry has once again proven himself despicable. He has insulted our fine soldiers, saying: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." That is reprehensible. And Kerry's effort to defuse the blunder by saying that it was "a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops" is ridiculous.

That said, let us bear in mind who is insulting the troops by calling them "stupid" and who is sacrificing them by sending them off to bring "freedom" to savages in the Middle East. Sticks and stones (and mortars and mines and suicide bombers) will break their bones (and kill them and ruin their homes and leave their children fatherless), but names will never hurt them.

While John Kerry is merely insulting our troops, George W. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress that supports him are sacrificing them on the altar of religious altruism by bringing democracy (i.e., unlimited majority rule) to Middle Eastern mystics who want only to vote themselves into theocracy. And Bush and company are doing this while ignoring (or befriending) our primary enemies: Iran and Saudi Arabia. In other words, as bad as all these politicians are, some are substantially worse than others.

As I said in "Notes on the Coming Election," we need to focus not on politicians' words, but on their actions and the motivations behind them.

About Craig Biddle

Craig is cofounder and editor of The Objective Standard, cofounder and director of education at Objective Standard Institute, and executive director of Prometheus Foundation. He is the author of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It; Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing; and the forthcoming Moral Truths Your Parents, Preachers, and Teachers Don’t Want You to Know. He is currently working on his fourth book, “Thinking in Principles.”

View all articles by Craig Biddle →