House of Eratosthenes

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler would like to know where the ACLU was while those soldiers, who have not been charged with anything, were shackled. You heard about this, right? Someone alleged these guys committed murder. The seven marines and one sailor were in combat. The allegations are being checked out. No trial has yet been started. Up until yesterday, the eight were in shackles, now they’re not. Good.

So on to Misha’s query: ACLU, ACLU…do you need something to do?

Michael Savage, on his radio program yesterday — just an hour or so, I understand, after the shackles came off — asked exactly the same question. Not about the ACLU, though. About former President and current humanitarian and human-rights-protester Jimmy Carter.

Yeow! Misha, your question was good. His was better.

Those who so regularly instruct me to think Carter has an abundance of redeeming qualities, often do so on the strength of the 39th-and-worst President’s stint as a Navy man. Just like Al Gore and John Kerry and Jean-Luc Picard, Carter is oh, so so incredibly smart. An engineer. And don’t forget, he served in the Navy. Wherever the defenseless labor under the oppression of tyrants and wherever injustice prevails, you don’t have long to wait before Superjimmy is on the job!

How I’d love to see someone with a camcorder and portable microphone follow Jimmy around, like Michael Moore in “Roger and Me” politely requesting this distinguished luminary to give comment about the eight soldiers in their shackles. Any plans to go down there and protest? Will you write a letter deploring the situation and expressing your personal disapproval? Any flight reservations to go check the situation over in person, as you are so famous for doing all over the world? Why not? You’ve done it before. Many times. One of the eight is a sailor, one of your own, Navy guy. Injustice is running wild!

Michael Savage’s comments go a little bit far, in my book, given how little I know about this and how little I’m able to find out. But something is bollywonkers here, and I would expect Jimmy Carter should be first in line to get things settled — and yes, with the ACLU close behind him. Odd that this is not the case.

This is a grave situation. We can get a system of oversight going, wherein marines are shackled before they are even given the benefit of a trial, on the strength of allegations alone, that the deadly force they legitimately used in combat did in fact amount to murder. We can get that massive engine of guilty-until-innocent chugging away, and then we can ask our soldiers to take the battle to the enemy, answering aggression with aggression.

Certainly, we can ask.

I just don’t know how we can expect them to.

As you study the wars in our history, the bigger the wars get, the less certain victory is while the war is being fought, and the more certainly that victory has actually been cemented when the fighting is done…the more certain it is that out of the chronicles, a hero will rise. A truly noble savage. An Achilles. A Ulysses Grant. A George Patton.

Savage, by sheer coincidence, bears the name of the central issue here. Inside the military or out, civilization has always had a tendency to rise out of noble savagery, made possible by the deeds done by the noble savage — and then pass rules against the savagery to which it owes its very existence. That appears to be what’s happened now. People like Savage, question whether we could fight World War II today, strongly implying that we could not. I think they’re right.

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