Hating All The Troops

John Fund reports an appalling story from the University of Washington in Seattle:

The issue before the [student] Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed “Black Sheep” squadron in the Pacific. The student senate rejected the memorial because “a Marine” is not “an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce.”
Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: “We don’t need to honor any more rich white males.” Other opponents compared Boyington’s actions during World War II with murder.
“I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution,” Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington’s history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, “Black Sheep Squadron,” a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington’s heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it’s an unusual UW student who’d be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it’s spoonfed to him by TV.
As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent.

What fools. What ingrates.

14 thoughts on “Hating All The Troops”

  2. W. State Liberals Shoot Down Boyington Memorial

    Washington State Universities Student Senate have shot down a planned memorial for WWII hero Major Gregory “Pappy� Boyington. The Senate opposed honoring the Medal of Honor recipient because as some of the students put it �why should the university h…

  3. There are few that defended this country as vigorously as Boyington. It makes me wonder if George Washington himself would garner a memorial at this university.

  4. Of course he wouldn’t. He was a slaveowner. I say this as a pretty liberal guy – if the right-wing blogosphere wants to go ballistic on these knuckleheads, by all means, knock yourselves out.

  5. Crank-
    Obviously I agre with you that these student senators are fools.
    But why the anger? Foolishness — politically or otherwise — is a time-honored tradition on student senates. These are 18-22 year olds, possessed with brains, but nary a shred of the wisdom or the experience to harness and properly use them. I expect nothing less than this.
    The Cultural Revolution, for instance, would never have been possible without the passion and participation of teenagers and youngish 20-somethings.
    Now, when folks old enough to know better say or do this kind of idiocy, then my level of shock or outrage approaches yours. The war=murder crowd is out there, and since many of them are old (and old enough to know better), they’re the ones who approach “ingrate” or even “asshole” status.

  6. The loony left hates the troops. Look at Tom Toles. His cartoon was in effect actively rooting for the so-called insurgents. I say this: if you don’t support the president, you don’t support the troops. And if you don’t support the troops, you don’t deserve their protection. The Islamofascists can burn San Francicsco to the ground. The people of that city deserve it.

  7. Leonidas-
    If you’re one of the 18-22 year-olds I implicitly defended earlier, then you get a free pass while you grow up.
    If, however, you’re old enough to take care of yourself in the world, then allow this patriotic American who unconditionally supports every man and woman who wears his nation’s uniform (and happens to think S.F. is a great city), yet exercises his Constitutional Right to express his disgust at the man who occupies the White House to say the following:
    You are un-American, and you don’t deserve any of the protections guaranteed by the Constitution or the men & women who fight, kill and die to defend it. You’re a moron, a coward, and it’s people like you that harm the United States.
    I respect your free speech and I’ll defend your right to live in my country and spew your ignorant crap. But I wish there were no people like you in this nation or any other.
    Nothing makes me ashamed to be an American, but if anything did, it’d be clowns like you just as much as “loony leftists” who hysterically apologize for every crime of those who would harm us. You both suck as far as I’m concerned.

  9. This stuff makes me angry. As a recent graduate of a nyc liberal arts college, I had to deal with the irony of “rich white kids” handing out Socialist Newspapers and trashing capitalism, and the constant protests of student groups of everything from “Free Mumia” to people actually saying that we deserved 9/11 (and this coming in nyc in the spring ’02 semester. These kids don’t get a free pass in my book b/c there are many who don’t even know what they are talking about. they just read one side of an arguement and spit it back at people pretending they know more than everyone else. The travesty is that behavior like this goes against the critical thinking point-conterpoint style that you learn during college.

  10. “the critical thinking point-conterpoint style that you learn during college”
    Speak for yourself. I learned to chug beer, work the carb, and score chicks (or at least go down tryin!).
    Those things you speak of came later during my after-graduation education.
    Youth is wasted on the young? Probably. But higher education certainly is.

  11. Yeah, I did critical thinking in high school & law school. College was about other stuff. Like learning how to crank out weekly op-ed columns and strike out with girls.

  12. Excellent points. I got caught on a bit of a high horse there. I did plenty of that, too. Judging my what Simmons says about Holy Cross, it was tough goings on the ladies.

Comments are closed.