Friday, June 10, 2005
The competence tax. Today on NPR there was a report that concluded with the following deadpan remark (from memory): "If military recruiters continue to experience failure recruiting from urban areas — as opposed to suburban and rural areas — it can only result in one thing: the return of the draft." So now the fucked-up Iraq invasion is the cities' fault, not the fault of Dick Cheney or Donald "We-Don't-Need-No-Stinking-Troops" Rumsfeld.
Suddenly the draft is everywhere. Have you heard about the "special skills" draft? Not a real draft of Wal-Mart shoppers and Nascar dads and Fox News cheerleaders and neoconservative theorists, but a more limited draft of those with special skills: medical professionals, linguists, computer network engineers, you know, people who actually do things instead of consume them or propagandize about them.
I would wager that "special skills" candidates are disporportionately Democrats. Not being a part of the Ownership Society of tax-free dividends and frictionless inheritances or of the Ownership Society's evangelical auxiliaries, "special skills" people actually have to gain skills and do things to make a living.
Because their epic incompetence, incessant fantasizing, and lack of sacrifice has led to the desperate quagmire in Iraq and the widening military recruitment crisis, conservative Republicans want to draft only those whose competence could possibly alleviate some of the unnecessary chaos and human tragedy they have created entirely out of the miscalcuations of their overheated imaginations. The problem is that these "special skills" people are likely to be their ideological opposites.
In other words, the special skills draft is a form of Blue State slavery.
Parents, take note. If you have "special skills," your heads are on the block too. Having offspring doesn't immunize you from the "special skills" draft.*
Get all the details at TalkLeft, where you can also click on the link to the official 2003 memo, a frightening pdf file for anyone with a skill.
*It could be a good thing for parent Jonah Goldberg that he has no special skills — it may save his life from the designs of his ideological comrades.
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· Back to the top
 
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