THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The first rule of Political Correctness is that you must worry yourself to death because some remark you made might offend left-handed mulatto lesbians who are Jehovah's Witnesses with bad teeth. Political Correctness dictates that no group has a sense of humor, and that each is touchy to the point of paranoia.

At the same time, liberals all agree that President Bush "dodged the draft" by joining the National Guard. They are not bothered in the slightest that there are millions of Americans who served in the National Guard to fulfill their military obligations when the draft was on. It never occurs to these self anointed guardians of sensitivity that those millions of people might not appreciate being labeled draft dodgers.

But Michael Moore, despite his "I'm a regular guy" baseball cap, doesn't know anybody who ever served in the National Guard. Jane Fonda, who has spent her entire life preaching that she is a Marxist champion of the working people, doesn't really know any regular working people.

Nobody who ever served in the National Guard gets invited to Hollywood cocktail parties or fashionable get-togethers in New York.

People who served in the National Guard are simply off the radar screen for those who preach Political Correctness. So for them an upper-income person like John Kerry served in the real military while Bush was off "dodging the draft" in the Texas National Guard.

The reason only Bob Whitaker points this out is because respectable conservatives occupy the same radar screen liberals do. If they didn't, the media wouldn't give them the "respectable" label each must have if he is to be a National Spokesman for anything.

I know hundreds of people who served in the National Guard, including one of my brothers. But I know this only as a matter of statistics, not because they told me so. We are talking about regular working people here, not the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation.

People like my uncle who served with the marines in the Pacific during World War II never brought it up. Their attitude was that this is their country and they fought for it, period. I do not owe them a free ride for the rest of their lives because of it. I am not a worm who does not know what Real Suffering and Real Sacrifice are because I dodged the draft by being four years old when the war ended.

I have known people for years before happening to find out that they won combat medals in Korea or Vietnam.

My brother-in-law "dodged the draft" by being in the Merchant Marine during World War II. He was never in combat because if he had been he would be dead now. He spent months on a ship being hunted by German and Japanese submarines. If he had been "in combat" it would have meant being hit by a torpedo and going down to a freezing death in the sea.

One of my Confederate ancestors "dodged the draft" because he spent his life as a railroad worker. The Confederacy had a desperate lack of troops, but it had an even greater shortage of men to run the railroads.

The death rate during the Vietnam War was higher among men who were being trained as jet pilots in the National Guard than for those who went to Vietnam. I don't like Bush, but I have to say that if he wanted to avoid the dangers of Real War, he picked a hell of a way to do it.

The bottom line is that neither liberals nor respectable conservatives actually know any railroad workers or Merchant Mariners or National Guardsmen. They don't know any regular people. Which should explain why they can promote such disastrous and destructive nonsense with a straight face.