It is a curious coincidence that just as the milblogosphere is reveling in the righteous joys of thumping another credulous editor of a formerly-pretty-reputable legacy media venue… here we are dished up another heaping helping of military bashing from a couple of personalities that I have never heard of. Allegedly, this doofus is claimed to be a regular on Saturday Night Live. The hell you say… is that show still on? Wow.

Whatever A Whitney Brown’s problem is, I’ll bet it’s damned hard to pronounce. And this guy at least had a few remaining shreds of decency left to him… enough that he pulled his post about how the modern military was creating mass murderers and serial killers…

Ops, scuse me, while I go outside, and flag down that idiot with the car speakers which go whoop-whoomp-whoomp at such a deafening level that his car actually sounds like it’s farting. I’m going to chop up his inconsiderate ass into quarters with a chain-saw and Fed-Ex each quarter and his head to five different places…

No, just kidding. But not about the car stereo… it really does sound like the car is farting.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes… military = killers. Got it. Kind of the point actually, in an official, just-doing-our-job, ma’am sense. Yes, we kill those who have been designated as our enemies; neatly, efficiently, and without particular prejudice. Unsanctioned, off the books free-lancing is still frowned upon, however. Just so we’re all on the same page, here.

Still, to note all this is to wonder… why all this perfectly rotten press now? And without the obligatory “Of course we support the troops!” in this round of being pissed-on… guess they’ve noticed we’re not buying the claims of the stuff just being rain.

I do wonder what has brought the usual suspects to a fine frothing boil; I haven’t seen such hysterical insistence on the brutality and licentiousness of the soldiery since the putrid days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Makes a bit of a change from painting them as poor widdle disadvantaged and victimized cheeeldren who had no other way to get ahead than to listen to the siren allure of the recruiter, which is the alternate method of denigration to date At least the “brutal and licentious” bit will give the troops credit for being grownups. Sort of.

But no credit for anything else, and credibility is where this whole thing is going… oh, not by any deep-laid strategic plan. More like some kind of subconscious hive-instinct, an irrational passionate urge to make the Iraq war and the whole WOT thingy just go away. And to go away without any blame attaching to the usual suspects, win or loose. Loose is always in the cards, of course. The middle east has been a veritable snake-pit for decades. If it reverts to type… no skin off ours, as long as we’re safely out of the middle, and a repeat of Saigon, 1975 can all be safely blamed on the Bush cabal. With appropriate tisk-tiskings, of course.

But…. What if the “surge” is working? What if the Iraqis are stepping up to the plate, and taking real control of their lives and their country? What if all those nice hardworking reservists and those high school graduates from Nowheresville, and those Marines from flyover country have managed to pull of a shaky miracle, and in another fifteen or twenty years, Iraq looks like South Korea, only with palm trees and more sand?

Wow, wouldn’t that be a facer for people like Senators Kerry and Murtha, for the Kos Kidz and the staff of the Guardian, among a long list of others… like A. Whitney Brown? Their advice has been spurned, and they are in peril of being shown up by the people that they secretly, or in some cases, not so secretly, hold in contempt. Makes it kind of hard to maintain that effortless air of superiority over lesser mortals, so of course, something must be done!

When old-time autocrats didn’t like the message, proverbially, they shot the messenger. The new autocrats in the legacy media, the nutroots, or in the higher ivory-towers wouldn’t be so crude. They’d rather denigrate the messenger; the troops and the leaders alike. Taint them by association; paint them as sociopath degenerates, brutal and vengeful and incompetent. Shame them into silence, make them shrink back into the little Nowheresvilles they crawled out of, put away their uniforms and their medals, and hide their associations away in the corners.

Really, it makes it so much easier to betray allies and friends, when these pathetic little people and their stupid “duty, honor and country” just forget all of that and do as their betters like A. Whitney Brown tell them.

And that’s what I think is going on here. Your mileage may vary, of course