Best…lead…ever

October 7, 2005

One has to wonder if Knight Ridder’s Joseph Galloway was giggling when he wrote this lead earlier in the week:

Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey and vice chief of staff Gen. Richard Cody said Monday that the Army was using looser Defense Department rules that permitted it to sign up more high school dropouts and people who score lower on mental-qualification tests, but they denied that this meant it was lowering standards.

Classic. Lower standards? Of course not; all we’re doing is making it easier for the Army to accept young recruits who don’t have a high school degree and who fail mental-qualification tests, who would have otherwise been rejected under the yardsticks used in recent years.

What makes anyone think this would be an example of lower standards?

Now, please! I am sure this is actually a raising of admission standards that allows for acceptance of
people who test poorly. 😉

  • I’m beginning to comprehend the hidden depths of the “Military Intelligence is an oxymoron” joke. What seemed so obvious has hidden subterranean depths.

    I’m thinking that perhaps boot camp is a way of lowering one’s mental-qualification test scores…

  • This seems part and parcel of the strange nature of national discourse that Gore commented on: the Orwellian statements that many in the military and the current Administration (and Congress) make with a straight face. It’s almost as though they were daring the listener to object. One wants to shout, “The emperor has no clothes!”

  • First it was the poor who couldn’t afford to go to college; now they’re targeting people who just don’t have the capacity to know any better.

    Be all that you can be, indeed.

    • Comments are closed.