Dartblog

A few days back the Berkeley City Council approved a measure asking military recruiters to leave their city. “If recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders,” the Council declared. The measure has been variously decried as an abuse of power, a sickening gesture, and a disrespect to our national security.

The issue is not that a bunch of geriatric former-hippies don’t like the military, rather that taxpayer money is going towards this town who will not in turn allow the government to take steps to defend them. Thomas Sowell puts it thusly:

It is a shame that Berkeley is not on some island in the South Pacific, because then they could be given their independence and left to defend themselves.

As it is, members of our armed forces who put their lives on the line to defend America are also defending people like too many in Berkeley for whom the very word America, and the American flag, bring only sneers.

On military issues and beyond, Sowell writes that liberal media and academia preaches open-mindedness but in fact has little or no tolerance for ideas with which they disagree. “A professor at Harvard who put an American flag on his car after 9-11 provoked looks of astonishment from his colleagues. They wondered what was wrong with him.” There is widespread hostility to ROTC among many college administrations (See this insightful column for how Dartmouth could include ROTC in the incredible and incredibly generous financial aid programs that this great college offers). The media routinely exaggerates military failures and ignores facts tending towards victory and acts of heroism, “when the military surge was followed by things going right, the Iraq war was suddenly no longer front page news.”