Is this horse dead yet? 'Cuz I want to smack it...

Joel Stein gives voice to something many conservatives have suspected, but liberal pacifists have always denied: leftists loathe the U.S. military on both a personal and political level.

Long before this guy's pathetic mewlings, the awesome George Orwell put it best:

"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond this point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarinaism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries."

"All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty." (George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, Polemic No. 1, October 1945)

Writing after the cessation of hostilities in Europe, this was as authoritative an encapsulation of modern pacifism as you are ever likely to find. Stein provides us with the latest iteration of it in his insultingly glib 21st century L.A. column. This type of pacifism might be harder to explain to Mr. Orwell: another "minority of pacifists" who also "prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond" a certain point. And that point is their own comforting self-love and the desire to maintain fashionable opinions. Orwell might imagine a Bertie Wooster, if the latter were told anti-war sentiment was au curant, somewhat like the latest cravat. Today, it's like a desparate Maureen Dowd went to an infertility clinic and cloned her own worthless ass twenty-something years ago. The products of that conception are now given a press sinecure in LaLaLand.

You don't like the freedom won for you by men and women made of way sterner stuff than your own? Well then give it back, asshat. Start with giving back freedom of the press. No more of your stupid columns about yourself (see Truth and a million little consequences for an example of this nauseating little narcissist's trivial use of freedom of the press. "I have no clue how people are going to react to me," he gushes to himself about himself in the L.A. Times.)

Blindly lending support to our soldiers, I fear, will keep them overseas longer by giving soft acquiescence to the hawks who sent them there � and who might one day want to send them somewhere else.

Er, like maybe Iran, for example? What, exactly, are columnists at the L.A. Times recommending we do about that thorny problem? Can it be solved by "bringing home troops"? And how, exactly, are we going to fit a potential Iranian war into the Vietnam template so beloved by the left? Good thing we aren't counting on people like that to provide solutions.

I know this is all easy to say for a guy who grew up with money, did well in school and hasn't so much as served on jury duty for his country. But it's really not that easy to say because anyone remotely affiliated with the military could easily beat me up, and I'm listed in the phone book.

Somebody please look him up. Sit him down. Set him straight. Is it amazing that a guy grew up comfortable and successful and can be so callously ignorant and self-absorbed? Or is it to be expected of someone who so obviously never encountered any hardship? Regardless, our troops defend the freedoms of even idiots like this dork, who "failed to object to a war we barely understood".

Well, I submit you still don't understand it, but that doesn't stop you from objecting to it. Please try to live up to the sacrifices of better men and women than you, who have provided you this opportunity to be an idiot in comfort and freedom.