Monday, April 14, 2003
Welfare defense budgets
As WILD week (which our CRs have dubbed "Wackos in Love With Dictators") week commences at St. Cloud State, it's worth understanding how we get to this point of supporting the troops but opposing the war. That point is covered in this piece in OpinionJournal, in which the author suggests that the Left views the Defense Department as an extension of the welfare budget.
To the antiwar left, then, the military is a social program that went awry. As long as it was giving and not taking, the idea of national defense was tolerable. Indeed, what other purpose could national defense serve besides job creation, since America's enemies were figments of the right's imagination? So the idea has been for Americans to get an income and training, but not, God forbid, actually to serve in combat.
