Have I Gone Too Far?

For the record: If I don’t write something, I don’t take responsibility for it. To wit, this letter from om****@yahoo.com (he would have deserved total anonymity, but since he sent his email unsigned I have to identify it somehow):

“Today’s military is a far cry from the draftee-heavy Vietnam-era force. These guys are volunteers, hired guns. Make no mistake about their “limited job opportunities”…the military pays less than McDonald’s, and McDonald’s hires even in West Virginia. These troops are there by choice.
It’s hard to hear the radicals when they’re not given airtime–but I don’t see them hanging out in the streets, either.”
Your comments above show just how little you know of the U.S. military. First, how dare you say such horrible things about the men and women who take an oath to defend you and die for your freedom if need be. Second, the military is not a bad paying job at all, especially for those who are deployed overseas. They pay no state or federal tax, they make tons of extra money in combat pay and imminent danger pay, and they’re usually very busy with their job (a job you were obviously too scared to do yourself), so there’s not a whole lot of time to blow all their money. I’m in the Coast Guard and have friends who did year long deployments on CG patrol boats in the Persian Gulf within the past two years, and they all came back with tens of thousands of dollars saved up. We’re not a bunch of back water yokels who joined up for the opportunity of kill some little brown people.
This mother fucker “Jack” you you replied to (in quite a friendly manner I might add) openly endorsed the murdering of military officers. What’s worse, you did not even show the least bit of outrage at the idea of enlisted members turning on their officers. You should be ashamed to call yourself an American, you America hater you.

What’s “horrible” about noting that the military pays poorly, especially at enlistment? It’s hardly a secret, and there’s no crime in getting a bad salary. Of course, being called too “scared” (if that’s a way of noting that I prefer not to get killed without reason for some psycho “president,” than I’m guilty) by a Coast Guard dude who’ll never see as much combat as I have as a civilian journalist is, well, droll.
Jack didn’t “endorse” fragging officers. He predicted that we’d start seeing it soon, and I said I doubted it. Hardly the same thing, and I think his email was interesting enough to warrant sharing.

The Parable of the Bus

But there’s also love, this from Donald:

The August 4th comic is your best since the one — damn, wrote to you about it before but I forget the date — the one that showed us attacking them, and then when they retaliate (mildly) we say something like “That’s it!” and we attack them even more.
I’m in Mexico now (had to leave U.S.) but I remember well being a New Yorker and going through the do-I-keep-waiting-for-the-bus dilemma. This is exactly what’s happening now with our attitude towards Iraq, I
can’t think of a better way of capturing this than your comic today.
I don’t often write you dude, but I just want to say, you are like the only person out there and who gets widely published who expresses the kind of rage I feel over what is going on in Iraq. I was against
Afghanistan too. And the war on drugs before the war on terror. I always look forward to your next comic because I know it will help relieve a little bit of the aggravation I feel over everything that is
happening today.
(you do irk me a little when you tweak the libertarians, but hey, nobody’s perfect.)
Keep up the great work!

Actually, real (i.e., liberal) libertarians who just want the government out of their lives are pretty cool. Who doesn’t? It’s the phony (right-wing) libertarians who want everyone but their rich bow-tied selves to fuck off and die who piss me off.