Some thoughts on politics, troops, and school.

If you read my facebook or my wife's for that matter, you'll see that we're both pretty hardcore liberals. We don't try to hide it. Lately, we've both posted some articles critical of the radical right wing of the Republican party wanting to keep children home from school on Tuesday so that they aren't "indoctrinated" into evil liberal socialism by Barack Obama.

Honestly, I think that idea is just plain idiotic, but more on that in a minute.

My wife received a message in response to one of her posts critical of people who would keep their kids home for this reason. The basic thrust of the response was "Isn't it great that in America, we have troops that go out and fight so you can belittle people just because they don't agree with you?"

Yes, quite frankly, that is the great thing about America.

I'm not advocating that we should be hurling personal insults at each other from across the political aisle. That's not productive. However, we're all human and in the heat of a passionate debate we all slip sometimes. I'm guilty of it, and I know plenty of people, both democrats and republicans who are guilty of it as well.

But in point of fact, yes, we have had members of the armed forces die for my right to think certain people are just plain stupid. You know what? Not all soldiers are conservative. My grandfather fought in World War II. He was a medic and was in Europe when the Nazi death caps were opened and tons of people needing medical attention flooded out. He saw all the horrors first hand. He saw the emaciated Jews. He watched as army surgeons used meatball surgery to try to put people back together. You know something else he saw, something that bothered him until the day he died? As his unit advanced further into Nazi territory, he saw a group of American soldiers gang rape a German girl because "The Nazi bitch had it coming." What a wonderfully American sentiment! At any rate, he was a lifelong liberal that despised pretty much anything that ever came out of the mouth of a Republican and he was fond of saying that he was a veteran so nobody could tell him to think otherwise.

So don't pull out the "Troops are out their fighting for you card." The "troops" are just as likely to be liberals as they are conservatives. Oh, and they're not wonderful angels who would never do anything wrong either. Sorry.

And don't tell me you're right because God says so. My God is different than yours, I'm pretty positive. So if I don't believe in your God, why should I follow what he or she says? Bringing God in to defend your argument is a non-starter, period.

At any rate, yes, keeping your kids home from school so they don't have to hear Obama's speech is stupid. When I was in school, I had to listen to speeches from both Ronald Reagan and George Bush the First. Nobody ever complained. So why is it ok for a Republican to talk directly to school kids and not a democrat? Because you see a chance to play politics, that's why. If a Republican president were giving a speech to students, I'd make sure my kid was there for no other reason than to show him that people have different opinions and that people think differently. Trust me folks, it's not a bad thing to have different opinions.

It's just a bad thing to tell me I'm not entitled to mine because of "god" or "the troops." It's a pity we can't clean up the discourse a little bit in America.