We had another clarifying moment last week, which has been beat to death in the blogosphere but is worth a quick visit. Joel Stein is a columnist with the Los Angeles Times and he is, ostensibly, their humor columnist, filling the same niche that Dave Barry held for years with the Miami Herald and that James Lileks holds with the Star Tribune. He wrote a column last week that was many things, but funny is not one of them. Briefly, he wrote a piece in the Times in which he told America that he doesn't support the troops. The link is here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-stein24jan24,0,1168298.column?coll=la-news-columns
He then went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and demonstrated that, among other things, he doesn't understand what the troops do, how they think, or that he even really knows anything about the military. A transcript is here:
http://www.radioblogger.com/#001332
Mr. Stein has been visited by the furies from all over the blogosphere in the wake of this two-item parlay, but I would suggest that his honesty is yet another moment of clarity. His cheerful, even blissful ignorance allows those who are considering his arguments to accord them proper weight. There's an argument to be had about the proper role of the military, whether soldiers should be fighting in the Middle East or whether soldiers should be armed social workers who are airlifted into tsunami zones and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, to use just two recent examples. But we haven't been having that argument. Maybe we should.
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