Quote of the day: Dodging versus deferment

(Also known as the First Law of Conservation of Schmuckiness.)

If Trump is a draft-dodger for having taken a II-S (or four of them), he is among millions of "draft dodgers" and so you need to STFU because you're outnumbered.

The heel spurs letter is more interesting, mostly because of the timing.

Spurs are not permanent and, had the lottery not made it irrelevant, he'd have had to go back to confirm that they were still an issue, but, yes, he dodged the draft, based on one medical deferment. And, as Chris Britt notes, it puts him in no position to comment on other people's service.

Here's the thing: You don't have to lie to make this guy look like a schmuck, and you don't even have to lie to make him look like a draft dodger.

And you sure as hell don't have to slander the millions of us who took student deferments.

That's Mike Peterson, known to loyal p3 readers for his blog Comic Strip of the Day, clarifying an important legal and ethical distinction that seems poorly (sometimes, I suspect, willfully) misunderstood in the age of the all-volunteer army.

Eleven years ago, I found myself in the wretched position of having to defend the bloodthirsty likes of John Bolton and Dick “five deferments – count 'em, five!” Cheney, in defense of a larger principle. Or at least to make sure that they were damned for what they really are. As I wrote at the time:

Claiming a legal deferment instead of enlisting is no more "draft dodging" than taking the standard exemption on your 1040 form is "tax evasion."

On the subject of "dodging" the draft: If you don't want people to have legal ways of getting out of military service, don't create legal ways for them to get out of military service. If they avoided service legally, and you still don't like it, then your problem is with the law, not the person.

And--here's where the trouble lives--a law that's administered unequally, depending on how wealthy and connected you are, is a law worth having a problem with.

Legal ways to avoid service have always existed, often but not always tied to how much disposable income you have. The thing about Trump is that he thinks anything that doesn't benefit him first, most, and – ideally – alone, is for chumps. If, instead of a military draft, we'd had a Clinton-style national service program at the time, he'd have pulled whatever strings he could to get out of that, too. It's of a piece with his stated belief that not paying taxes makes him “smart” – he believes the opposite, that the idea of a commonwealth is stupid.


(And no one asked me, but I have to say that giving Ann Telnaes a live target would almost -- not quite, but almost -- be worth having Cheney back in the public light again.)

Forty-six years. So much for all that earnest "never forget" talk

Quote of the day: Subcontracting the wet work

If anything, Donald Atwater Segretti Cheney Trump deserves credit for having the guts to do his own dirty work instead of jobbing it out to professional ratfucking perverts like Karl Rove and Jerome Corsi.

- Driftglass, on the dubious virtue attached to Trump's now-famous attack on John McCain's POW status.

The Short-Fingered Vulgarian probably deserves some sort of credit for the previously unimaginable achievement of making McCain a sympathetic figure again, however briefly. And there was also a short moment when it looked like he'd also given his GOP rivals something they could actually attack him on without shooting themselves in the foot, but as Driftglass and his commenters note, that lasted about a day before fifteen years of Republican history caught up with them.

Hell, it's not even the first time they've pulled something like this on McCain. He should be used to getting pantsed by his fellow GOP candidates by this time.

This probably means I can no longer avoid creating a Trump tag for the blog, but I dread having to go back and find all the previous mentions of him to update them.

[Overhead camera, Nothstine shakes fist in over-the-top rage] Tru-u-u-u-u-u-mp!

Saturday late afternoon tunes: Harmony and understanding

On this date in 1969, The 5th Dimension's cover of "Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In" – one of several songs that charted from the musical "Hair" – began a six-week run at the top of the singles chart.

It's a longer story than you're going to get here, but the short version is our garage band once got drafted to be the rhythm section to accompany our high school band and choir on this medley, and I can tell you from personal experience that the bass line on this is great fun. I'd do it again tomorrow if someone offered me the chance, and I'd probably only need one run-through to have it down after all this time.

And yes, in the video clips from the 1979 film version, directed by Milos Forman and choreographed by Twyla Tharp, that is John Savage (who'd just come off of "The Dear Hunter"), and that is Treat Williams, and that is in fact Beverly "Ellen Griswold" D'Angelo. And I'm pretty sure there's a quick glimpse of Nell Carter in there, too. Don't sit there gaping. Go watch it. Yes, of course it's dated. In fact, the 1979 film itself was already some distance from the 1968 stage musical. Why is this necessarily a deal-killer? If it was an exact and precise depiction of the way things are today, what would be the point?

Quote of the day: Moses

Updated below.

I've made it through the first chapter of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge, the third of his four-book history of the modern conservative movement. (The first two were Before the Storm and Nixonland.) I'm already amazed at how much I had forgotten about what an evil, manipulative, sadistic bastard spiteful bastard Nixon was.

As someone said, in a quote from an article about Nixon's funeral that I still can't find, even in death, Nixon brings out the worst in us.

General Taylor had once been a favorite general of Kennedy-era liberals. Robert F. Kennedy had called him "relentless in his determination to get at the truth," and name one of his sons after him. Now Maxwell Taylor was a tribune of the other tribe, the one that found another lesson to be self-evident: never break faith with God's chosen nation, especially in time of war – truth be damned.

This was Richard Nixon's tribe. The one that, by Election Day 1980, would end up prevailing in the presidential election. Though Richard Nixon, like Moses, would not be the one who led them to the promised land.

And the amazing thing is, Nixon scarcely appears in that chapter. But his influence – the politics of resentment that he created and perfected – was lasting.

Update: On reflection, it's clear that it wasn't really fair to call Nixon sadistic. Sure, he liked to see his enemies suffer – I mean, who can make it to the Oval Office without feeling that way a little, amiright? – but it wasn't that he specifically did the things he did because he enjoyed seeing his enemies suffer. He just wanted them crushed, and if that could be done for the same price without suffering, that was fine. Dubya was the sadist. Everyone here at p3 regrets the error.

 

Saturday morning tunes: I ain't no senator's son

Via Roy Edroso and many others comes the story of rightwing bloggers, most of whom came of age after the Vietnam War ended the second time, and after the military draft, who were deeply, deeply offended that Bruce Springsteen, David Grohl, Zac Brown, and other musicians used the Veterans Day concert on the National Mall – called Concert for Valor so that no one would mistake it for a mattress sale event – to perform the CCR classic "Fortunate Son."

Contrary to their fervid belief, the song "Fortunate Son" was not written to disrespect veterans, nor was it written in opposition to war, strictly speaking. It was written in opposition to the cheap tub-thumpers for war who remain secure in the knowledge that neither they nor their children will ever have to go anywhere near a war zone. 

People like this:

And this:

And, of course, this:

Oh, and definitely this:

You want to see some serious vet disrespecting, start there.

In the little Indiana town where I grew up during the Vietnam era, there were families with connections at the county seat (where the draft board sat) whose sons never saw military service, let alone went into harm's way. It was a source of genuine irritation to my father, not so much for my sake, I think, as for the daily indignation of a being Democrat in a Republican county. As it turned out, I didn't serve either, although that was far more a matter of dumbass luck than anything remotely resembling political connections.

Part of the current problem, of course, is that Republicans have a long history of appropriating rock songs they haven't listened to all the way through. And that's what's happening here; ask John.

So here's the original:

Oh, and by the way:

Saturday morning spoken-word tunes: Ain't no pardon in the ghetto

Thirty-nine years ago today, the House Judiciary Committee approved the first of three articles of impeachment directed at Richard Nixon, asserting that Nixon

acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Now, let's see. How did that turn out? Oh yeah:

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here. 

(And, by the way, as Pierce points out, impeaching Nixon for Watergate was like busting Al Capone for income tax evasion.)

Oh yeah. And this was 43 years ago today.

Funny how, when guys like this talk about taking up arms to defend themselves against the government, they never seem to be thinking of things like this.

Eight years ago today on p3: Vietnam, deferments, and the Bush administration

Two years into the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq, I looked at the question of what those two now-extinct phenomena -- the draft, and draft deferments -- really meant forty years after the Vietnam War hit its peak.

Judging a person by the enemies he accumulates

And George McGovern, who died early today at age 90, had some to be proud of, from both directions.

The [1972 presidential] campaign was the backdrop to the burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, and by the Nixon organization’s shady fund-raising practices and sabotage operations, later known as “dirty tricks,” which were not disclosed until after the election.

The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and outside the mainstream of American thought. Fair or not, he never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.”

Screening Liberally/PDX Left Side presents: "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert McNamara"

This month's PDX Left Side/Screening Liberally pick is director Errol Morris' critically acclaimed 2003 documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara."

"Fog of War" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was screened out of competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

Join everyone Sunday at 7pm at Ringo's Bar and Grill, 12300 SW Broadway (across from the Beaverton Bakery) in Beaverton.

Here's an excerpt from Roger Ebert's review:

Morris is uncanny in his ability to bring life to the abstract, and here he uses graphics, charts, moving titles and visual effects in counterpoint to what McNamara is saying. There's also a lot of historical footage, including some shots of Curtis LeMay with his cigar clenched between his teeth -- images that describe whatever McNamara neglected to say about him. There are tape recordings of Oval Office discussions involving McNamara, Kennedy and Johnson. And archival footage of McNamara's years at Ford (he is proud of introducing seat belts). Underneath all of them, uneasily urging the movie along, is the Philip Glass' score, which sounds -- what? Mournful, urgent, melancholy, driven?

Why the rise of modern conservatism is like 'Star Wars'

And it has nothing to do with Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative."

This has been my Summer of Cold War Reading. I haven't written up all I've read, and I haven't done it in order, and I've taken some liberties with the whole concept of cold-war fiction.

It began with my decision to finally work through the canonic Ian Flemming/James Bond novels and short stories and -- here's the tough part -- in order. That means that I've been hanging out for a while waiting for 'Diamonds Are Forever' to come in on interlibrary loan.

It's in, but right now I'm in the middle of Rick Perlstein's history of the modern conservative movement -- Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. It's good, although it needs an editor (like me); it jumps around just enough that you can't be sure if you're in, say, late 1966 or early 1966 and, believe me, that makes all the difference. And its index is kind of spotty too, which is only a problem because he likes to spring now-well-known names on you in the context before they were well known, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. (I don't have either book in front of me, so the examples I've bookmarked will have to wait for another post.)

Both "Before the Storm" and "Nixonland" are good reads; Perlstein has a somewhat Tom Wolfe-ish gift for letting his narrative voice occasionally lapse into that of one of his historical objects, at which point the prose usually lets slip what you guessed the characters are thinking anyway.

But the experience of reading them now is a lot like re-watching "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back" (I refuse to use either "A New Hope" or any Roman numerals to refer to them; there's "the three good ones," and "the three crappy ones," and that's it).

"Before the Storm" is like "Star Wars:" Even though Vader (Nixon?) is able to escape the destruction of the Death Star (the 1964 apparent rout of the Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan/Birchite conservative movement?) at the last moment, it still looks pretty upbeat. Johnson wins by a landslide. The punditocracy declares the conservative wing of the Republican party dead as a doornail. The Princess and the leaders of the Rebellion give medals to Han, Luke, and Chewy, and you can leave the theater humming John Williams music with a bounce in your step.

Then comes "Nixonland," the "Empire Strikes Back" of the narrative arc. The story-telling is still fun, but you know where this one's going to wind up: the Revolution's been dealt a crippling blow, Han's encased in carbonite, Luke's got the whole lost-a-hand-gained-a-father thing to deal with, and Nixon's going to narrowly win in '68, and win big in '72. I'm only about 100 pages in, the chronology is in early 1969, and yet there is already, one might say, a sense of impending doom.

More later, including thoughts on the birth of the "liberal elites think they're smarter than you" meme.  (Hint: They did. They do.  It didn't help, and it still doesn't.)

War. Huh.

Kos asks, Why the hell are we in Afghanistan again?

Good question.

40 years and counting

Sites all over the web are posting videos of CSN&Y performing "Ohio" today, and rightly so.

But I need something more upbeat today.

"A contagion of courage"

When Kissinger was playing Iago to President Nixon's Richard III, all the elements proper to a royal drama were present. But Kissinger wasn't simply the paragon of something past. He also used the modern techniques [of manipulating rational, bureaucratic structure] with a determined and narrow genius.

What isn't clear is whether he ever believed he would be serving the public interest. We don't know what went through his mind during his first months as President Nixon's National Security Council Advisor. Perhaps he underwent a sudden private revelation that he craved power and had the manipulative talents to gain it. Perhaps, in the adrenaline rush of that revelation, he forgot about the nature of public service.

John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards:
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

With thanks to DL buddy Nick, without whose nudging I would have let the opportunity pass, last night I saw the "The Most Dangerous Man in America," the documentary on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, at Cinema 21 in Portland, and listened to Ellsberg himself in a Q&A session with the audience afterward.

It was an amazing experience, if by "amazing" we mean: "likely to make you feel like you're wasting oxygen that better people than you could be putting to use right now."

Or: "likely to make you realize that even people who are really smart and have pretty clear values don't have all the answers and can't always make everything have a happy ending."

There's a story Ellsberg tells in the film (it's also in his 2003 book Secrets) about a meeting he had with Henry Kissinger not long before Richard Nixon took office. Kissinger would be Nixon's National Security Advisor, and Ellsberg at that time held a high-security clearance position in the State Department. Ellsberg explained to Kissinger the cycle of reactions he would experience as he gained access to highly classified government secrets. First, said Ellsberg, you feel elation: You're now privy to the most closely guarded secrets the government holds. Apart from the ego gratification of that, there's the content itself--the things you'll now know that you didn't, and couldn't, before.

That leads to the second stage: You'll feel foolish, embarrassed to realize how naïve you had been, how many things you had recently believed that you now know simply aren't so.

Finally, Ellsberg told Kissinger, you'll come to feel that the American people are the foolish ones, since they aren't in the know like you and your cohort. Inevitably, you'll feel contempt for the people you're supposed to be serving.

Ellsberg notes that Kissinger originally favored a quick diplomatic end to the Vietnam war--essentially giving the US a "decent interval" by which to save diplomatic face and get our troops out. But the thought of anything other than unambiguous victory in Vietnam (whatever that might be) was anathema to Nixon, and Kissinger (who would later famously remark that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac") was more interested in the power that came from manipulating the President than in preventing a wider war in Indochina.

You may remember the results.

In the Q & A session after the film, several audience members raised variations of the same question: Why do our leaders sacrifice thousands upon thousands of (others') lives pursuing treasury-breaking wars with no connection to our national interest--and why are we so helpless to stop it?

Ellsberg, a Marine officer in the early 1960s, noted that courage--the willingness to take risk when the stakes are extraordinarily high--is not all that unusual on the battlefield, but much rarer when those soldiers return to serve their country civilian life. He specifically and unflatteringly referred to Colin Powell as one of those who were unable to break free of the cult of the secret and the pursuit of insider power through palace intrigues.

In fact, he wasn't terribly charitable to any of the players on the national stage right now: Not White House advisors; not the Congress charged with constitutional responsibilities of oversight; not the news media which, except for a rare interval lasting from the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the NYTimes and over a dozen other papers in defiance of the Nixon administration's efforts to invoke prior restraint, to the investigation and coverage of Watergate, has always been much more comfortable with access journalism than adversarial journalism.

And not the American public who, said Ellsberg, "must have the courage to face responsibly what we're doing in the world."

It was a very mixed experience: Ellsberg seemed genuinely appreciative of the chance to talk with people about the issues he has given himself to for forty years. (There were two moments, one in the film and one during Ellsberg's remarks, when the local audience reacted warmly to praise for Oregon's Senator Wayne Morse.) His own determination to continue his own political activism was evident and inspiring. But it would be impossible to miss his distinct lack of optimism about the future. He voted for Obama, and assumed he would do so again--at a couple of points he referred to Obama's re-election in 2012 as if it were a fait accompli. And yet he expressed little hope that Obama would end the war in Afghanistan--indeed he predicted an escalation of US troop involvement. Although he added somewhat wistfully, almost as an afterthought, that it's still early in Obama's first term; perhaps there's time for him to change direction.

Ellsberg nurtures no great expectations for the anti-war movement in connection with Iraq and Afghanistan (and as audience members noted, there's no draft and no Vietnam-equivalent daily media coverage to provide the added push this time around), yet he considers it necessary work. The anti-war movement, he pointed out, finally prevailed in the case of the Vietnam war . . . but it took ten years.

We need, he said, "a contagion of courage." And that's where things were left hanging.

(Ellsberg will be present for Q & A sessions with the audience after both showings tonight, and the film will be at Cinema 21 through next week.)

"If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost Middle America"

Forty years, almost to the day, after his coverage of the Apollo XI landing on the Sea of Tranquility, perhaps the last of his several iconic moments as a newscaster, we lost Walter Cronkite.

But he's best remembered, and rightly so, for this editorial (excerpt), responding to the Tet Offensive and the pointlessness of American escalation in its aftermath, on February 27, 1968.

It's impossible to imagine a pretty-haired TV news reporter today with the integrity, let alone the gravitas, to publicly call out an Administration for a failed war.

Robert McNamara: "An American tragedy, our tragedy."

In one of the very first posts on p3, I compared former Defense Secretary McNamara to the title character in Graham Green's urtext of Vietnam fiction The Quiet American, whom the narrator described as "a leper without a bell."

McNamara, perhaps because his sense of American rightness remained tone-deaf to the end, died over Independence Day weekend.

But, as Will Bunch observes:

The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy -- because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed "best and brightest" in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our policy-makers knew nothing or cared little about the long history and convoluted ethnic and religious politics of Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no plan for the proper military follow-up to a period of "shock and awe" bombing. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we totally misjudged the "nationalism" of the people who lived there and how they would react to a long American occupation. And perhaps most importantly, In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no real "public debate" as we marched headlong and foolishly into the 2003 -- with way too many "unexamined assumptions," "unasked questions," and "readily dismissed alternatives."

I didn't have much sympathy for McNamara's suffering; I grew up at the wrong time for that. But, as Bunch suggests, perhaps it was his penance to live so long, so aware of the consequences of the evil he'd helped set in motion even if he remained unable to grasp the fundamental cause of his error.

If that's the way it works, I suppose we have no choice but to wish a long, healthy, and lucid life to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, George W. Bush, et al.

But I'm not that optimistic.

"They made a desert, and called it peace."

For many Americans, arguing that Iraq is--or isn't--another Vietnam has been to genuine thoughtfulness about our foreign policy as chewing gum is to a balanced meal. It's become a substitute for thinking.

(I was astonished, for example, when I first read The Best and the Brightest, to learn how much time and energy was spent during the Kennedy Administration arguing that Vietnam was--or wasn't--going to be "another Korea." Turns out it wasn't, of course; it was a Vietnam. Every bad war is bad in its own special way. But I digress.)

That being said, kudos to Les AuCoin for posting this meditation and reminder, regarding a speech Bobby Kennedy delivered during his 1968 presidential campaign:

I am concerned--as I believe most Americans are concerned--that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned--as I believe most Americans are concerned--that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: "They made a desert, and called it peace."

The proper question is not, "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" The proper question is, "How much longer will it take this time to rein in yet another administration whose foreign policy is driven by arrogance, short-sightedness, and a misguided national pride?"

Read the whole thing.

On the transmigration of Republican operatives' souls

Note: For proper effect, you should read this post while listening to eerie-sounding Theremin music--like this.


Prologue:

On Tuesday, January 24, 2007, convicted Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt died in Miami.

Hunt, a former CIA officer and author of numerous spy thrillers, had expressed bitterness that he spent 33 months in federal prison for his part in the Watergate scandal, used as a scapegoat while Nixon was allowed to resign with full pension and benefits.

Hunt planned the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Campaign Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel. The break-in team, whose actions were coordinated with Nixon's re-election committee and the White House, was looking for evidence of a desperately sought money connection between Nixon foreign policy bête noire Fidel Castro and 1972 anti-war Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.

The link was non-existent, and no evidence was found.

The break-in was one of several covert actions taken by the White House to discredit perceived threats to its Vietnam war policies and to Nixon's re-election.

The Watergate story was ignored by reporters from most news media until persistent reporting by the Washington Post finally drew widespread attention to the unfolding scandal.


Dissolve to:

Meanwhile, some 1500 miles north, in the Washington DC courtroom where Scooter Libby was on trial for perjury in connection with his part in the White House organized effort to reveal Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative to several DC reporters, curtains rustled on a windless day, a chill passed over those present in the courtroom, a cloud moved in front of the sun, a dog howled on a distant moor, the clock struck thirteen, and a raven landed on the transom of the courtroom door.

On the same day Hunt died, January 24, 2007, the attorney for Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney and author of a thriller novel, claimed that Libby was being scapegoated, set up to take the fall by a White House desperate to conceal Karl Rove's involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame to several reporters in DC.

Plame's exposure was part of a coordinated effort by a Bush White House desperate to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he challenged Bush's State of the Union speech reference to a link between Bush foreign policy bête noire Saddam Hussein and a plot to purchase nuclear materials from Niger.

The link was non-existent, and no evidence was found.

The Plame incident was one of several covert actions taken by the White House to discredit perceived threats to its Iraq war policies and to Bush's re-election.

The Plame information was ignored by most of the reporters that the White House shopped it to, until it was picked up by Robert Novak in his syndicated column and appeared in the Washington Post.


So--if you've ever had the feeling that they're like the undead, that they seem to keep coming back no matter what, I can't deny you may be onto something.

One more reason to be worried about Dick Cheney's bad ticker.

(Sound clip via obsolete.com; polish via Sam.)

2-S, 1-S, 1-A, 1-H: When numbers get serious

This evening I was listening to Janeane Garofolo and Sam Seder's "Majority Report" on Air America. In connection with the 30-year anniversary this week of the fall of Saigon, they were whaling on the eminently whale-able John Bolton, this time for his decision to enlist in the National Guard in 1970 rather than "to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy, " as he put it several years later.

There are so many good, juicy reasons to disrespect Bolton, but I'm not sure enlisting in the Guard, by itself, is really one of them.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, a friend forwarded to me this blurb from American Progress (although it was picked up and widely re-circulated on the internet):

MILITARY – THE DEFERMENT OF THE HAWKS: In the September 2004 Vanity Fair, which hit newsstand shelves yesterday, respected journalist David Halberstam examines the discrepancy between the administration's hawks and their personal military records. "To the new superhawks, an America engaged in a worthy war of self-defense and a new imperial America engaged in a war that is a significant miscalculation of policy are the same thing." Halberstam adds, "Their new poster boy is the vice president himself, a man of great certitude, not just about Vietnam but about Iraq as well – his confidence and certitude hardly born of a life experience." Instead of going to war, "Richard Cheney received five – yes, five – deferments, a record that would make most men modest about speaking out on Vietnam and related subjects." And he's not even the Bush administration's deferment king: That (dis)honor goes to "that singular American patriot, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who got seven. Yes, seven."

I like Halberstam, and I certainly enjoy an occasional bit of Bush/Cheney bashing as much as the next man-jack, but I think the whole "five--yes, five!" bit is a bit thick. (I saw him going through it on C-SPAN during a tie-in promotional speaking engagement at about the same time, too.)

If you look at it that way, I had three--yes, three!--deferments myself during the Vietnam war, all without doing anything ingenious or disreputable.

First my Selective Service classification was 2-S (a student deferment). Then I was reclassified 1-S (also a student deferment, but for some reason not exactly the same; I never understood why). Then student deferments were done away with and I was 1-A. (Years later, I found my draft card listing me as 1-A. "Uh-oh," I joked to a friend, "I wonder what it was I burned?")

Then, somewhere in the gap between the Tet Offensive and the fall of Saigon, I was reclassified one last time: 1-H (high enough lottery number), and that was that.

It's quite a memory, for anyone Of A Certain Age: You remember where you were when you heard that Kennedy was shot, or that King was shot, or that another Kennedy was shot, or that Armstrong landed on the moon, or that John Lennon was shot. And you men sure as hell remember where you were when you heard what your draft lottery number was--sitting at the dinner table at home, or in your dorm room, or in a car pulled off at the side of the road, listening to the radio as they pulled up three hundred sixty-five markers, one at a time like calling bingo, each one with a date of the year on it. The sooner your birth date was picked, the lower your lottery number and the more likely you'd be called to report for induction. By the time I was 19, the number of inductions had dropped almost by half for each of the last two or three years. My lottery number, to my great relief, was one fifty-something, and they didn't reach above the nineties that year.

So, strictly speaking, like many people my age, I didn't "dodge" the draft; I submitted myself to it, and when I wasn't inducted I didn't enlist. A better metaphor is to say I stood still and the draft swerved around me. Claiming a legal deferment instead of enlisting is no more "draft dodging" than taking the mortgage deduction  on your 1040 form is "tax evasion."

I can't say my lack of desire to serve was based on a carefully worked-out and principled critique of the war, or of war in general. Today, I'm a good deal smarter than I was then, and I'm pretty much anti-war, although not completely so across the board. I can still imagine a war worth waging--although I admit I don't see any around at the moment. But I am definitely anti-illegal war, though, and anti-wars-that-they-have-to-lie-to-us-to-be-able-to-start, and anti-wars-fought-by-the-poor, and anti-wars-ginned-up-so-corporations-can-make-a-profit. Yeah, I'm against those.

On the subject of "dodging" the draft: If you don't want people to have legal ways of getting out of military service, don't create legal ways for them to get out of military service. If they avoided service legally, and you still don't like it, then your problem is with the law, not the person.

And--here's where the trouble lives--a law that's administered unequally, depending on how wealthy and connected you are, is a law worth having a problem with. Marriage was at least theoretically available as an out whether you were rich or poor, but going to college certainly wasn't. And jumping to the head of the line for National Guard enrollment most definitely wasn't (even for those who jumped to the head of the line and then actually completed their National Guard service).

Halberstam was right about one thing: If you weren't inducted and you didn't enlist--if you didn't serve--you probably ought to show a little humility on the subject. You're still a citizen, so your opinion about war and peace, what's worth living for and what's worth dying for, is still important. You do need to maintain a certain amount of humbleness on the subject but, allowing for that, you have no less right or responsibility to speak out than the vet or the soldier standing beside you.

My objection is not to people who had deferments available and used them--especially in a war like Vietnam had obviously become--it's to people who are dishonest and self-righteous about it years later, when they've become much too comfortable placing other people's necks on the line, not their own. Certainly in the case of Cheney and Bush, I'm not aware that either avoided service because of moral objections to the war. Bush was, in fact, energetically pro-war--as long as he didn't have to go near it himself.

My objection is that, for people like Cheney and Bush--and now I think we can throw Bolton back into the mix, too--the distinction is very clear: Declaring war is great fun, but actually serving in war is for chumps. And the Bush/Cheney World is divided into two groups:

them and their friends--you know, their families, business connections, high-dollar supporters, and the people on Karl Rove's speed-dialer

and everyone else--you know, the chumps

Halberstam made a gesture in this direction, when he talked about "a record that would make most men modest about speaking out on Vietnam and related subjects," but if that's his point, he's buried it.

For me, the best moment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may have been when Michael Moore parked himself on the sidewalk outside the Capitol and invited members of Congress to have their own children enlist in the military to serve in Iraq. They ran from him like he was a leper.

Many people avoided the draft in those days, but I think most have the integrity to admit now that we're not terribly comfortable with everything that entails--even if we'd do nothing different if we could do it over. Other people avoided the draft, but also avoided learning the lesson. That's the distinction that needs to be remembered when the term "chickenhawk" flies, and that's the kind of admission I'd like to hear, even once, from Bush, or Cheney, or the rest.