A World Of Shit

From the Random Clippings file, I came across this brief interview with R. Lee Ermey. Although Ermey is currently plugging the, um, prequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he will forever be best known as the closet-case coach in Saving Silverman.

Supposedly he also had a small role in a little thing called Full Metal Jacket.

Anyway, because of Ermey's actual background as a Vietnam vet and Marine DI, the interviewer decided to ask him his thoughts about our current brush with density destiny.

Q: As a guy who still attracts a wide military following through Mail Call and volunteer work with wounded veterans and military families, your opinions hold lots of sway. What's your advice to commanders in Iraq?

A: Just stay the course. We're doing great. If you listen to the liberal media, you'd think we were losing the war. I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan several times, and I see great advancements every time I go back. War is war. People are going to get hurt. People are going to get killed. A lot of people don't agree with the war. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Really. So the "liberal media" is just making everything up. All the carnage and violence is just a well-coordinated illusion with a practical purpose of destabilizing the morale of the homefront. The "light at the end of the tunnel" couldn't possibly be nothing more than an oncoming train.

Maybe the nut of it is simply Ermey's basic contention that "if you listen to the liberal media, you'd think we were losing the war." Perhaps the corollary to that is that if you listen to nothing but Fox and Limbaugh and the rest of the Horst Wessel gang, you'd assume that we were winning, that the casualty rate is a mere comma in the chapter of greatness George W. Bush and like geniuses are authoring, and leaving to future administrations to figure out the ending.

But refereeing a bloody civil war is not a "course", nor is it a plan. There is an intellectually honest argument to be made that immediate withdrawal is no solution either, but this is not such an argument.

I respect Ermey's prior service, and appreciate his continued endeavors to participate and boost troop morale, seriously. But this particular Q&A was little more than a rhetorical turd in the punch bowl.



This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun.