It must be difficult to be rightwinger. It seems to me that it would require a tremendous amount of mental effort to be able to navigate the logical U-turns it would take to keep on that side of the road. What was true yesterday, what you actually defended as a core principle of your political thought, is no longer true the next day. In fact, it may be that the next day, the exact opposite is true. How they manage this cognitive gear-grinding without blowing some sort of gasket is a mystery to me. I don't understand how you can operate in the world without some sort of constant. You'd think the constantly shifting realities that wingnuts expose themselves to would be hopelessly disorienting. Yet there they are, every day, believing today's truth and forgetting that they ever believed anything else.Case in point; two somewhat similar legal situations in which two radically different military personnel have made a similar choice. I give you the cases of Lt. Ehren Watada and Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook, both of the Army. In both cases, these soldiers refused to deploy, citing illegal orders. That's pretty much the entirety of the similarity.
In June of 2006, Watada refused orders to deploy to Iraq. Believing -- rightly -- that the war was illegal, Watada argued that he had the responsibility as an officer to refuse to be a party to a war crime. Watada faced a court martial, the government lost the case on what was basically a technicality, and the Justice Department, under Obama, dropped the charges against him in May of 2009. In the end, Watada's case was disappointing for observers, with the anti-war side never having tested the war's legality in court and the pro-war side never having gotten Watada behind bars.
And, boy, did they ever want him behind bars. For the right wing blog Moonbattery, Watada was a "sniveling deserter." For Michelle Malkin, he was a "coward" and the "moonbat left's new hero."... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
