Yeah, so Ron Paul thinks he can resonate among the anti-war turds by calling Newt Gingrich a “chickenhawk”, meaning that Gingrich avoided the draft during Vietnam, but supports a robust military and somehow supported the wars in the Middle East, even though Gingrich was out of of office since the 90s. From CNN;
“He’s probably as aggressive with the military as anybody,” Paul said on Fox News. “He supports all the wars in the Middle East a thousand times more than I would. But you know in the nineteen-sixties when I was drafted in the military, he got several deferments. He chose not to go. Now he’ll send our kids to war.”/
That “when I was drafted” line is troubling. Paul served in the Air Force and as Steve Bussey points out, the Air Force has never had a draft. So, what is Paul trying to say, that he was drafted but enlisted in the Air Force to avoid the Army? That was fairly common practice, for those of you who may not know…people even enlisted in the Army and took a three year hitch in order to get the job they wanted rather than take a crap shoot with the draft.
Regardless, Paul was in the military during the sixties, hs record said he did a two-year hitch from 1963 until 1965. Johnson first sent combat formations to Vietnam in 1965, so Paul missed Vietnam and sat it out in a Reserve unit until he was discharged in 1968. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that – until he uses that to assume some sort of moral authority in the discussion.
I thought all of that draft dodger, chickenhawk shit was dead after we elected Bill Clinton who took such extreme measures to avoid being drafted that he lied about his intentions and preferred study behind the Iron Curtain to military service. And we now have a President who never considered military service. Bill Clinton ramped up operations in Somalia without giving the troops what they needed to win there. He fired off cruise missiles like the Fourth of July at anything moved and got us involved in Kosovo and Bosnia. So where was the chickenhawk label? The current president is doing the same with drones and can’t even bring himself to salute properly.
The same people who called George W Bush a “chickenhawk” for his service in the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War are now applauding Ron Paul’s assertion that everyone is a draft dodger except him, and Paul spent his Vietnam years in the Reserves. Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with serving in the reserve forces during Vietnam…if you did, you were in uniform which is a damn sight better than the last two Democrat presidents could bring themselves to accomplish, but don’t try to make it sound like you faced down the Viet Cong Tet Offensive all by your lonesome when the only thing you defended was Fort Living Room and Firebase Refrigerator.
Thanks to melony for the link to Bussey’s blog.