Joel Stein Doesn't Get It

Everybody is having a grand old time with young Joel Stein’s foolish oped in the LA Times.
“I don’t support our troops,” he writes. Still, when the troops come home, of course, he wants them to have the full use of the welfare state:

All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return.

But please, no parades.

But Joel, you completely misunderstand the whole ethos of the nation state, you and all your liberal buddies. What those soldiers need, first of all, is to know that their nation honors their service. It doesn’t matter if they were sent off on a wild goose chase, if millions of them died for nothing. When they come back, we tell them that we honor them. Period. End of story.

Forget all the stupid welfare state nostrums of hospitals, pensions, and mental health counseling. These are men, old chum. What they need is a wife and a job. And they need to be honored.

The anti-war leaders understand this: that is why they put out those mendacious signs in the spring of 2003. “Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home.”

Guess why the Swift Boat issue was so powerful in 2004. Because it reminded a whole generation of American men why they cannot vote for Democrats. It reminded them, as if they had ever forgot, of what they experienced when they came home from Vietnam a generation ago.

But go ahead. Don’t support the troops. Go ahead and send another generation of young men into the only political party that honors them, the Republican Party.

You can gauge the depth of Joel Stein’s folly by reading the interview (or try here) he gave to Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt is turning into a ferocious interviewer. He just knows exactly how to make a liberal look like a fool. So he runs Stein through a bunch of military situations: Does he support our troops in Afghanistan? In Kosovo? He gets Stein to say that he only supports the troops in missions that he, Stein, personally supports.

But this is folly. Liberals have this fantasy that they are above the mere nation state and its patriotism, and dare one say, nationalism. Therefore they have the moral standing to pick and choose what they support.

Of course, liberals don’t extend such privileges to the rest of America. When it comes to the support of liberals and their initiatives, in the media, in the schools, in social services, and in the university, then there is no opting out. There is no right to pick and choose. Everyone must pay their taxes, and everyone must support the journalists, the teachers, the social workers, and the professors. Otherwise they are mean spirited and ultra-conservative. Or even racist, sexist, and homophobic.