Well, I had to do something I don’t like to do. I had to actually perform a bit of censorship and remove Seth’s second link in his post which pointed to a site scaremongering about the draft.

Why? For one thing, there was nothing comic book, movie or general geek-newsy about it. While certain deviations from that line are permitted and such decisions don’t have any hard-and-fast rules, I think we can all agree that if linking to just any political site were fair game, we all have tons of sites we could link to all day long. Most of us have our own personal blogs where we can spout opinions. I actually don’t, just because I devote all my spare time to other things and if I had a political blog I’d probably bury myself in it.

Still, I might have left the link up while posting this warning, except for one thing: all this draft business is a big bit of misinformation. Actually, “misinformation” is putting it lightly. That’s like calling Protocols of the Elders of Zion “misinformation”; a better word might be “hoax.”

President Bush does not have any plans for instituting a draft. The Republican Party does not, either. There was a bit of draft legislation making its way through Congress, and it was a bill introduced by Democrat Charles Rangel…and he didn’t do it because he wants a draft, but to make a point about how more people would be against the war if they were going to be drafted. And it was so much a bit of show that when it came time to vote on it, Rangel voted against his own bill…as did hundreds of other congresshumans.

There is no draft, no threat of a draft and no plans for a draft. So why are there web sites about the draft coming back? Because the Democrats found out that they could talk vaguely about a draft bill being in Congress, leave off the mention about it being a not-serious-bill by a joke of a congressman from their own party, and scare all the young people into voting for them just to keep from being drafted when it’s not going to happen. It’s a bit of dirty campaigning and I’m just not going to have someone on Monitor Duty furthering it.

The military doesn’t want a draft and they are not asking for a draft. This isn’t a war that you can fight with draftees. Our armed forces require highly-trained people who will learn specialized skills, not a bunch of dogfaces who can be handed a gun, forced through bootcamp and then dropped into the frontline whether they want to go to war or not. If our enemies in the War on Terror would wear uniforms, line up in trenches on one end of a battlefield and they outnumbered our side by 10-1…THEN we might have to activate the Selective Service just to get the raw numbers of gun-wielding soldiers up. But that’s not going to happen.

Our military is made up of people like my brother, who had to go through well over a year of intense training before he could serve in the AWACS. A draft would randomly bring in people of all education levels, but our military can’t take just any ol’ unejicated hick and put him to good use. They need high school graduates and would prefer college graduates, which is why our own Eric Spratling signed up to enter the service when he graduates. (He is, by the way, already being called a murderer of innocent people by the radicals on his campus. No crap. So much for the whole “support the troops” movement that would fix it so our boys wouldn’t be treated the way they were in the 1970s.)

The bizarre thing is that the left has spent four years screaming about things they hate about Bush; in addition to all the other reasons that are debatable, you have to tell a total lie to win?

Anyway, I could have just deleted the whole post, but this isn’t about squelching any old partisan thing I don’t like. It’s for that reason I left the link to the Richie Rich parody; it’s JUST comic-related enough to be tolerated. I mean, it’s so innaccurate that I could spend 10,000 words replying to it if I had my own political blog. It’s also hateful and bigoted and it makes me feel the way a Jew must feel when he sees a political cartoon of a big-nosed moneylender gleefully squeezing blood from a German child to make his bread. But at least it parodies a comic book so I can’t in good conscience just wipe out the post.

I still feel dirty leaving it up, but I will. I’ve always believed in countering speech with more speech, but I’m hindered by the fact that this blog is supposed to be comic-book-oriented and writing long political responses (like this one) isn’t the point of Monitor Duty. Also, I could link to Jack T. Chick tracts and they wouldn’t be half as hateful as that Richie Rich cartoon, so I don’t really know HOW to counter it.

Now, Ian does a lot of linking to the political hitjobs in comic book form (or today’s example, a disingenuous movie poll) and I leave them up because they’re just on-topic enough to squeak by…and we like having him around due to the added diversity of comic news he brings. It isn’t our fault that Monitor Duty can’t be fair and balanced, since there aren’t really any right-wing comics that aren’t the run-off-at-Kinkos variety while the left has Alex Ross.