Not you too, Terry

I like Terry Prone. This week, however, she leaves me a little cold. She's talking about Michael Moore's A Liberal's Pledge to Disheartened Conservatives. Prone describes Moore's letter as

gently-written, in stark contrast to the bulk of his previous tub-thumping rhetoric. It nonetheless manages to deliver digs and reproaches, wrapped up in positives.

She is so wrong about this as Moore's letter is nothing other than a big "Up Yours" to conservatives. {Sorry, I couldn't think of a non-crude alternative for that.}

However, that's not what bothers me about Prone's column. Prone repeats what I believe is a near universally accepted truth in Ireland - that those who are in the US military are uneducated dupes, people who are not really capable of making responsible decisions for themselves.

Referring to Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 she says that it made

the point [John] Kerry recently and critically failed to make: that it’s the under-educated underclass in America who are dying in large numbers in Iraq.

Today's New York Times Editorial on Representative Rangel's proposal to reinstate the draft explains that

the volunteer force in Iraq has been a truer cross section of America than the force created under the last draft, which ended in 1973, before the end of the Vietnam War.

In fact, those in the military are not that much different than the average for all people of the relevant age across America.

The slight dif­ferences are that wartime U.S. mil­itary enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on aver­age than their civilian peers.

Recruits have a higher percent­age of high school graduates and representation from Southern and rural areas. No evidence indicates exploitation of racial minorities (either by race or by race-weighted ZIP code areas). Finally, the distri­bution of household income of recruits is noticeably higher than that of the entire youth population.