Wednesday, June 8

Hey Jenny Slater essay contest!

Those of you who follow the manly and one-hundred-percent heterosexual adventures of Gen. J.C. Christian, Patriot, may have heard about his unfortunate dishonorable discharge from the Protest Warriors recently. I feel for Gen. Christian, though I can't say I'm surprised. Back during my GWBWYPGN?! days I had a run-in with a Protest Warrior who took issue with a post I'd written about something or other; he put the blog address in a PW forum and exhorted his Warrior pals to bum-rush my blog and leave comments about what a loathsome godless military-hating anti-American bastard I was. Rather humorously, this effort resulted in a nifty spike in my site traffic for a day or two, but not much more than three or four actual comments.

Intrigued, I went so far as to go to protestwarrior.com and even registered there so I could join in on the forums. In the three or four days that this endeavor held my attention, I found that a few Protest Warriors are actually intelligent individuals who think for themselves, can explain their support for Bush and/or the Iraq war rationally and coherently, and are capable of sustaining an informed, reasonable debate. I also found that the vast majority of the rest of them were troglodytes who couldn't think their way out of the wettest of paper bags, and had furthermore deluded themselves into thinking that their "Protest Warrior" mission -- going to anti-war and other liberal-identified demonstrations and attempting to counter-protest the lefties into submission -- was on a level of heroism and importance nearly equal to that of our own soldiers' mission in Iraq. It is the second group, I'm guessing, who was the driving force in drumming poor Gen. Christian out of their ranks.

But I have an invitation for the delusions-of-grandeur Protest Warriors, the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, and anyone else who vocally supported going to war in Iraq yet has not signed up to join the military and help fight said war -- and there appear to be a lot of you, if the Army's subpar recruiting numbers are any indication: In 500 words or less, give us your reason for not having joined the Army in spite of your belief that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was of vital importance to our national security. Because our current fighting force in Iraq includes men and women who left jobs, schooling, or families behind to serve in the military, entries including "I have a job," "I'm in school," or "I have kids" will be disqualified from the contest and will be mocked mercilessly on this site. You may either post your entries in the comments thread of this post or e-mail them to paris_1968 (at) hotmail.com; deadline is one week from today, Wednesday, June 15. At that point we will pick both the most and the least convincing entries and post them on this blog, with full credit given; the writer of the most convincing essay wins a bottle of wine and any remaining post-cancellation issues of Time that find their way into my mailbox. The least convincing essay writer wins a deck of Republican "chickenhawk" playing cards. Poker night will never be the same!

So get writing, you guys. I'm really interested to hear what you have to say.

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