Thanks for your sacrifice

Crooked Timber finds that the conservative (and myopic) gang of warbloggers have now convinced themselves of a couple things. Not only that they're serving their country better behind their keyboards than they would actually going out and putting themselves in a position to be shot.

But that in fact, they may be suffering from a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You know, that thing actual soldiers get. They think they've got that from

defending difficult positions at the forefront of the battle against irredentist Democrats in Congress and their fifth-column in the media.

BTW, I admit I had to look "irredentist" up but I don't think it means what this guy thinks it means.

I could take a paragraph here to say how fucking insane such a comparison is. However, Belle Waring at CT has done just that while also heaping a side order of scorn on Jeff Goldstein.

So I think I'll just let her take it. Belle?

actual real live American (and coalition) soldiers are fighting and dying right now, and one might imagine the Iraqi on the street to be suffering from a bit of battle fatigue herself (better make that himself given current conditions for women walking alone on the streets of Baghdad), and there are thousands of US soldiers returning each month at severe risk for, or suffering from actual PTSD. The armed forces, sadly enough, are not well known for sensitive, effective responses to these emotionally wounded soldiers.

...manning the keyboard against the evil MSM and “irredentist” Democrats is not very much like going out and getting shot at every day, or having a car bomb kill your daughter, or having to go to the morgue to identify your son’s mutilated body. (Let’s keep in mind that there’s likely to be a line at the morgue too, if we’re talking about Baghdad itself.) Not much like it at all. And you know the closer-to-home scrum of domestic politics? Also not like that at all. Not a bit of it. Now, and I hate to belabor the point...but we are talking about some strikingly dissimilar things. I’m not saying that the desire to conflate the rigors of combat with the crushing burden of being, say, Jeff Goldstein means that you’re a dishonest person with an extraordinarily inflated self-regard, I’m just…No, take that back. I am saying that.

Thanks, Belle.