But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Attack of the lesbians

If you were not aware, there was a story a while back about the military firing some of their Arabic and Farsi translators because they were gay. I think the best piece about this was on either the Daily Show or Colbert Report. In any case, New York Democrat Congressman Ackerman was grilling Condi Rice today about the fact that the Department of Defense was short on translators, but were not hiring the ones fired by the military because they were gay. In what I would consider the greatest comment ever made, Ackerman said:

"For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they're very brave with the terrorists...If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad."


Pure genius.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Except that it is not up to the military or Rice if they fire gay people. It is up to congress since it is congress who passed the don't ask, don't tell law and president Clinton who signed it into law (10 U.S.C. S. 654). Considering Ackerman has the ability to write laws, it might make sense if he wrote a new law that changed the policy and had his fellow congressmen vote for it. The military legally has to follow the laws congress passes. Is Ackerman advocating that the military start ingoring congress when the laws are inconvenient?

Jeff said...

Sorry. I was more interested in the comedy of the quote than the argument over gays in the military. Ackerman was wondering why the Dept. of Defense didn't hire the translators fired by the military.

Having said that, I would fully expect the military to ignore the anti-gay law. It would be beneficial to their operations to do so. I mean, they ignore the law when it comes to torture, so why not keep on some gay translators?

Unknown said...

I disagree with the law, but do not think the military should ignore laws they do not like.

Unless you want another Iran-Contra, where members of the military decided not to follow another law I thought was bad.

Unknown said...

By the way I tried to post a comment a few weeks ago, but your site does not always let me. The word verification thing gives me trouble sometimes and it occassionally makes comments disappear as I try to sign in. It keeps saying that it does not allow annonymous comments even when I am signed in and do the verification thing.

Jeff said...

Yeah, I have a filter that blocks obscenely conservative opinions. Not really, its happened a few times to me. Blogger is free and I guess you get what you pay for.