Everyone’s favorite opera buff, the National Review’s John Derbyshire, demonstrates the kind of support for our troops that the right likes to get so charged up about:
Once again, it’s me and Ralph Peters on the same wavelength, deploring the cowardice of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by Iran. When it happened, I said I hoped the ones who’d shamed their country would be court-martialed on return to Blighty, and given dishonorable discharges after a couple years breaking rocks in the Outer Hebrides (which, believe me—I’ve been there—have a LOT of rocks). Now, I confess, I wouldn’t shed a tear if some worse fate befell them.
The only coherent response I get to these sentiments is: “How do you know what they’ve been through? How would YOU stand up?” To which the obvious reply is the one Dr. Johnson gave in some similar case: “I may criticize a carpenter who makes me a bad table, though I cannot make a table myself. It is not my job to make tables.”
Obviously, the solution is to kill the carpenter, which means no one would have any tables but maybe then Frank Miller would make an awesome movie about it and Derbyshire and Peters could watch it alone, in the dark, by themselves.
ALSO: Derbyshire says, “I nurse a quiet hope that if put to the test, I would stand up as well as any Marine.” I nurse a quiet hope that he meets one of those Marines in a dark alley sometime.