"No value"

Chris Floyd takes on Charles Rangel's ill-considered proposal for a draft in this week's column and dismisses it as "unsound" and "hypocritical." But worst of all, Floyd writes, "the ploy has introduced the idea of a draft into public discourse. If and when the Regime decides it needs forced conscription to feed its war machine, it can undermine opposition to the measure by pointing to this Democratic 'support' for such a move." No worries, though.

...for now, Bush still has a couple of million bodies to fling on his foreign fires before he need think about conscripting new ones. So Rumsfeld swatted the question away -- but it was perhaps the very ease of the parry that undid him. Ever the corporate pedant, Rumsfeld couldn't simply dismiss the notion of a draft; he had to explain why it was such a bad idea. His reason? Because the biological material "sucked" into the last draft, during the Vietnam War, was of such "inferior" quality.

Here the contempt finally broke through the avuncular rictus. Rumsfeld explained that your quality types -- college boys, married guys, teachers and others -- took advantage of "all kinds of exemptions" to skip out on combat. "And what was left" -- not even "who," just "what" -- "was sucked into the intake, trained for a few months, then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services."

Think about that. "No value." More than 58,000 of these "intake suckers" were left dead on the battlefield; hundreds of thousands more were maimed, scarred, tormented, brutalized, broken -- but they had "no value" to the "United States armed services." No value -- just meaningless biological material to be chewed up in geopolitical games.

The DOD transcript, where you can find Rumsfeld's remarks, is here. Russell Mokhiber asked Ari about this incident, and was met with the usual, obfuscatory jig.

Update: Rumsfeld apologizes for the "no value" remarks.