Campus scare tactic
I’m just relaying an experience here. After Mike discredits this, I’m not going to come back and rebut him. So know now that I’m a lying right-wing inconsistent blah blah blah, and ignore the following. Do your own homework and prove this wrong.
I got a very worried email from my Godson last week, pointing me to House Bill HR163. He got an email telling him about the secret plans that the Bush administration has to reinstate the draft as early as Spring of 2005… after the election. The new draft offers no college deferment, and includes men and women between the ages of 18 and 26. Dodging the draft would be a lot harder, too. It was a dire warning… those evil Republicans! How DARE they? His school was in an uproar over it. The email seems to have made the rounds, and the resulting fear and indignation is predictable. I remember hearing a sound bite last week where Edwards promised that if Kerry is elected there will be no draft.
So I started digging. I’d heard and read a bit about this earlier in the year, but surely this couldn’t be the same bill.
Sure enough, the bill is real - and there is a corresponding Senate bill - S89.
Who is sponsoring these bills? Democrats. Only. Oops.
Here are the sponsors of HR163:
Introduced last year by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.)
14 co-sponsors, including Reps. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Donna M. Christensen (D-Va.), John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.), John Lewis (D-Ga.), James P. Moran (D-Va.), Fortney “Pete” Stark (D-Calif.) Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas.), Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), and Nydia M. Velazquez (D-N.Y.).
Senator Hollings introduced S89. Care to venture a guess as to his party?
What’s the deal? Why are the DEMOCRATS, that ever-loving party that is promising to protect me and my children from cradle to grave, threatening to take my kids off to military service whether they choose to serve or not?
Get off you high-horse Pete - I’ll only discredit things that you say when I think they are wrong or extreme.
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| What’s the deal? Why are the DEMOCRATS, that ever-loving party that is promising to protect me and my children from cradle to grave, threatening to take my kids off to military service whether they choose to serve or not? |
The draft is a sticky issue. Michael Moore’s film F 9/11 presents a good argument for re-instating the draft, i.e., so only poor/middle class kids won’t be the ones fighting our wars. So this is totally consistent with the Democratic viewpoint, i.e., people from all economic levels should serve in the military.
However, have you considered the Democrats may have presented this legislation as a ruse, i.e., to force the Republicans to take a stand on it. After all, the Republicans did that last week with the vote about limiting the Supreme Court/gay marriage (I think that was what the vote was about).
I agree that Kerry/Edwards are making this a political issue. And they may be disagreeing w/ their fellow Democrats. Well - it’s an election year isn’t it.
Cheney is trying to scare us in a much worse way, i.e., we’ll get hit & hit hard if Kerry is elected. What BS this is.
I personally don’t think we should have a draft because if they instate one, they’ll have provisions in it so rich kids will be able to be exempt anyways. So it’s the less of 2 evils - keep it a voluntary army.
Oh yes you do!
Rangel said he did this because he wanted Republican legislators to think about what it would mean to send their own children, IIRC. I was very interested to hear President Bush say explicitly in the debate last night that he would not reinstitute the draft. I don’t entirely believe that, since many of the people who have been most influential in the present adminstration are more favorably disposed to a draft - that is, the PNAC people. Perhaps Bush himself right now really and truly believes in his heart that it won’t happen, but the PNAC people explicitly said they were going to pursue an expansion of military activity that would force increases in troop numbers, and that’s pretty much where things are now. “It is deeply regrettable, but the volunteer approach has not worked, and for the safety of the US we need to increase drastically the number of men and women in uniform, so I support reinstituting the draft…” Create a scenario in which it is forced on us, and then there’s no one to blame but the forces of evil combined against us. I dunno if it will ever play out this way, chances are against it in the short run I think, but in the long run? And the ultra conservative wing that has taken control of the repubs thinks in the very long run. I do know that there are some close to the president who wouldn’t mind a draft at all.
It used to be called “management by crisis” I think. 
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