Democrats Propose Bringing Back the Draft

The party of MoveOn spent years dishonestly claiming Bush would do exactly this. Oh the hypocrisy.

by Rod D. Martin
November 19, 2006

Remember the lie the MoveOn crowd told against George W. Bush all through the 2004 campaign:  that he had a secret plan to bring back the draft?  This saturated the internet for a good solid year, and of course was propaganda to the core.

Now comes the ultimate irony (and one that close observers knew all about at the time): one of the first policy initiatives of the new Democrat Congress is to -- you guessed it -- reinstate the draft.  Incoming House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel said today that he will push to draft Americans between the ages of 18 and 42; and unlike previous years when he pushed his idea on an unwilling Republican Congress, times have clearly changed.

President Bush, virtually all Republicans and a generation of military leaders and experts contend strongly that an all-volunteer service is better for America: more Constitutional, higher quality, better educated, and entirely composed of people who want to be there.

Rangel says he wants a draft to discourage future wars; yet there's no evidence from history that a draft has ever done any such thing, and moreover, the vast majority of 20th Century conflicts were entered into by Democrat presidents.  What Rangel really wants is a less effective military which -- as in Vietnam -- can be better used as a propaganda tool.  The heroic volunteers of our current forces are not nearly so good a club to beat America with: Rangel wants to "fix" that.

And so it begins.  The only question is how long the DailyKos crowd will take to blame Rangel's actions on Bush.

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