{"id":5121,"date":"2005-08-31T09:54:18","date_gmt":"2005-08-31T13:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5121"},"modified":"2005-08-31T09:54:18","modified_gmt":"2005-08-31T13:54:18","slug":"the-anti-military-right-wont-let-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-anti-military-right-wont-let-up\/","title":{"rendered":"The anti-military right won’t let up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fox News’ John Gibson may or may not have been kidding, but his comment<\/a> while guest hosting Bill O’Reilly’s radio show the other day says a great deal about how the far right looks at dissent and the rights of those in uniform to share their concerns. Here’s what Gibson said:<\/p>\n

“Anyway, ‘Get used to the protest, Gibson.’ This guy is in the U.S. Army. He writes to me from Tirrenia, Italy, on a U.S. army.mil [email account]. Can you imagine this? ‘Get used to the protest, Gibson. Americans are finally waking up and seeing the lies and the fallacies of the Bush administration. Fox News has done its best at bird-dogging the Iraq war.’ This guy is in the Army<\/b>. Who knows? All right, find him and arrest him<\/b>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Listening to the audio clip<\/a>, Gibson didn’t laugh when he said it; he just moved on to the next caller. For Gibson, if a man in uniform, on active duty, criticizes the president in an email, there’s no hesitation — take him down. It doesn’t matter that the soldier is putting his life on the line; as far as Gibson is concerned, he should be locked up.<\/p>\n

It reminds me again of something Digby recently wrote<\/a> about the recent trend.<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking for a while that we might be seeing the beginning of a new trend in American politics — the anti-military right. Rush is calling marines “pukes,” veterans are being called cowards and fakers, disabled vets are mocked for not having the right wounds or getting them in the right way, GOP hags are wearing cute little “purple heart” bandaids on their cheeks. People are selling busts of the president using his lack of combat experience as a selling point<\/i> saying outright that physical courage is no longer particularly worthy of conservative approbation. Being a veteran buys you no credibility and no respect in today’s Real Murika.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this sense, Gibson’s comments were just par for the course for the party known for its “patriotism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fox News’ John Gibson may or may not have been kidding, but his comment while guest hosting Bill O’Reilly’s radio show the other day says a great deal about how the far right looks at dissent and the rights of those in uniform to share their concerns. Here’s what Gibson said: “Anyway, ‘Get used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}