Jingoism leaves a bad taste

Reading the material that was the basis of my previous post left me with kind of a nasty residue of feeling inside.  Now, Chuckie (Charlie Daniels) is a blowhard who, as many of his posts show, frequently gets in touch with his inner bully.  If it weren't for that, I might almost feel guilty making fun of his airhead arguments.

And I know I shouldn't take any given set of rants by the Freeper crowd too seriously.  Because within a few days, they're usually off onto something else.  (I may have more to say sometime about why Jane Fonda seems to be a perennial love-to-hate favorite of theirs.)  But this one seemed to be a little creepier than most.

Because here's a grad student in Massachusetts who uses some bad taste by taking the late Pat Tillman as a foil for an argument that was more seriously thought-out than anything I've ever seen from Chuckie.  His point was that, in his view, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were bad ideas and the soldiers who are dying there are losing their lives for a cause that won't mean anything positive in the long run.  And that an excessive fondness for Hollywood-Rambo macho bluster makes such unnecessary wars more likely.

Now, his polemical use of Tillman was in bad taste.  And, as I explained earlier, unfair to Tillman himself, the kind of person he seemed to be.

But then I look at Chuckie's rant (see previous post), and it's obvious that he's much more enthusiastic about spewing venom at someone he can sneer at as a wimpy academic and a Puerto Rican than he is about honoring Pat Tillman, whose name he used as his column title. 

And when I saw some of the comments at the Drudge Report blog post I cited, there was even more spewing with plenty of obscenity.  It's pretty pathetic, really.  But it also creeps me out to see how nasty some people think it's perfectly acceptable to be as long as you can drape a "patriotic" fig-leaf over it.

Something tells me that Pat Tillman didn't spend a lot of time trolling the Freeper boards looking for Puerto Ricans to bad-mouth.  He found more substantial ways of expressing his patriotism.