ON A SLOW post-Thanksgiving Sunday, Rep. Charles Rangel wins the award for stupidest comment of the day while appearing on Fox News Sunday. Expounding on his drive to reinstate the draft, Rangel said that “no young, bright individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very high unemployment. If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life he would not be in Iraq.” John Kerry couldn’t have said it better himself.
Someone on Rangel’s staff needs to pull him aside and explain to him just how wrong he is. A recent Heritage Foundation study destroyed the notion that the poor and minorities are heavily overrepresented in the military. Highlights include the following facts: “According to the 2004 Census ACS, 75.6 per-cent of the national adult population self-identifies as belonging to the racial category white alone. In both 2004 and 2005, 73.1 percent of recruits were classified as white alone. . . . Excluding the group of a combination of two or more races, minority representation varies between being moderately proportional to extremely disproportional.” African Americans make up 12.17 percent of the population and 14.54 percent of the percentage of recruits. The study also showed that, on average, our soldiers tend to have more education than average Americans.
This Week featured an interview with Jordan’s King Abdullah, who made the bewildering claim that the only way the violence in Iraq will cease is if the United States intervenes . . . in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The priority I believe today and in the long term is the Israeli-Palestinian one because it resonates beyond the borders of Iraq, beyond the borders of the Arab and the Muslim world. . . . it is still the emotional core issue.” During the roundtable George Will scoffed at this notion, saying “When you have three problems you can’t solve, you say let’s solve them all at once with a common solution. There’s no commonality here! The king would have us believe that if, somehow, we waved a wand and there were peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Shias and the Sunnis would stop killing one another in Iraq? I don’t think so. The Shia and Sunni traditions go back to the death of Mohammad; that’s 1,374 years ago.”
Meet the Press featured an interview with the Governator, California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Tim Russert asked Schwarzenegger what it meant to be an “Arnold Republican,” he responded by saying “it’s basically being fiscally conservative, being socially moderate, and, you know, being environmentally progressive. . . . we have to show leadership in protecting our environment. . . . the science is in, we know the facts. There’s not any more debate if there is global warming or not. We have global warming. The fact is we can do something about it, we can slow it down or we can stop it.”
Of course the governor didn’t explain that while most scientists agree that some sort of global warming is occurring, the level of warming caused by man is a topic of some large dispute (although you wouldn’t know that by listening to the mainstream media). But one thing Republicans should listen to Arnold about is fiscal policy. In the face of Democratic pressure to raise taxes, Arnold fought back: “When I came into office,” Schwarzenegger said, “they said exactly the same thing. I got to raise taxes, I got to raise taxes. Please raise taxes at least $5 or $8 billion a year. And I said no. We’re going to stimulate the economy. That’s exactly what we’ve done. We have stimulated the economy–now our revenues went up $20 billion, from $76 billion to $96 billion without raising taxes. That is the way to go.”
Meet the Press‘s roundtable focused on Iraq with the House’s chairman of the armed services committee, Duncan Hunter, focusing on Iraqification. “Right now you’ve got 114 Iraqi battalions trained and equipped. We’ve spent a lot of time getting them equipment, standing them up, and of, 33 of those battalions are in provinces where there are less than one attack a day occurring. Right now, so out of 18 provinces, you got about half of them, about nine of them, that have almost no action. They’re very quiet. You have 33 Iraqi battalions in those areas. Saddle those guys up, move them into the fight.”
Sonny Bunch is an assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
