Ben (who is 21 years old but apparently has no plans to enlist) doesn't think it's right that he's being called a "chickenhawk". It hurts his feelings, and he tells us all about it on the Town Hall site.

The "chickenhawk" argument is dishonest. It is dishonest because the principle of republicanism is based on freedom of choice about behavior (as long as that behavior is legal) as well as freedom of speech about political issues.

Exactly, Ben. You have the freedom to be a chickenhawk, and I have the freedom to identify you publicly as a sniveling, cowardly hypocrite who shrieks for blood from the safety of his mommy and daddy's basement.

We constantly vote on activities with which we may or may not be intimately involved. We vote on police policy, though few of us are policemen; we vote on welfare policy, though few of us either work in the welfare bureaucracy or have been on welfare; we vote on tax policy, even if some of us don't pay taxes. The list goes on and on. Representative democracy necessarily means that millions of us vote on issues with which we have had little practical experience. The "chickenhawk" argument -- which states that if you haven't served in the military, you can't have an opinion on foreign policy -- explicitly rejects basic principles of representative democracy.

I don't want to offend your delicate, 21-year-old ears, Ben, but...

Bullshit.

Don't you dare try to recast the argument. No one is claiming that "if you haven't served in the military, you can't have an opinion on foreign policy". The argument is that if you lobbied for a war, and are gung-ho for the continuation of that war because it's supposedly necessary for the continued safety of western civilization -- especially when there is a shortage of recruits for the war effort -- you have a moral responsibility to put your money where your mouth is, to lead by example. It isn't enough to cheer from the sidelines.

When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans lined up at the recruiting offices to enlist. They didn't expect others to do the fighting for them and they didn't wait around to be drafted. They saw it as their duty to enlist. "The Greatest Generation", they were called.

None of that, though, for the Wingnut Generation, with its absurd sense of entitlement. These kids can't be bothered to sacrifice anything; they spend most of their time bitching about paying taxes, for God's sake. If they think taxes are an affront to their dignity, do you think they'll risk an arm or a leg -- or their lives -- in a distant land for an abstract cause?

For his next trick, Ben trots out the "you-don't-have-to-be-a-policeman-to-support-the-police" argument. That one has been rattling around the wingnut blogosphere for a while. I don't know if they believe that any more than I do; I don't know if believing their own lies helps them sleep better at night. But let's be clear. We're not talking about putting out forest fires, and we're not talking about catching burglars. We're talking about sending our citizens to a foreign country to kill people who are trying to kill them.

Everyone is against crime. Everyone is against fires. But not everyone is in favor of this war; in fact, a majority believe the war was a mistake.

Finally, Ben pulls out the Constitution and desperately waves it at us.

The "chickenhawk" argument also explicitly rejects the Constitution itself. The Constitution provides that civilians control the military. The president of the United States is commander-in-chief, whether or not he has served in the military. Congress controls the purse strings and declares war, no matter whether any of its members have served in the military or not. For foreign policy doves to high-handedly declare that military service is a prerequisite to a hawkish foreign policy mindset is not only dangerous, but directly conflicts with the Constitution itself.

Read that paragraph over carefully and you'll see what Ben is doing here: he is retreating into a narrow, legalistic argument about the chickenhawks' constitutional obligations. But we're not talking about what they are legally required to do. We're talking about what they should to be morally compelled to do.

Remember when the wingers were thumping themselves on the chest, bragging about character, morality, duty to God and country? What happened to them?

Now that their country needs them, where did they go?