Yesterday, Rand Paul demanded that Donald Trump prove he is a Republican. I think we have found all the proof we need that he is, in fact, a member of the GOP:
During a TV interview Tuesday morning, Trump–who spent his high school years enrolled at the New York Military Academy–said, “I actually got lucky because I had a very high draft number. I’ll never forget, that was an amazing period of time in my life.”
He went on to recall, “I was going to the Wharton School of Finance, and I was watching as they did the draft numbers and I got a very, very high number and those numbers never got up to.” The word “deferment” was not mentioned by Trump during his chat with the morning show hosts on WNYW, the Fox affiliate in New York City.
However, Selective Service records reveal that Trump, the fortunate son of a multimillionaire real estate baron, took repeated steps to avoid serving in Vietnam.
By the time his number (356) was drawn during the December 1, 1969 draft lottery, Trump had already received four student deferments and a medical deferment, according to military records on file with the National Archives and Records Administration. An extract of Trump’s Selective Classification record, seen here, was provided in response to a TSG records request.
In fact, the December 1969 draft lottery occurred about 18 months after Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied business at the Wharton School. So, while claiming that he would “never forget” being at Wharton watching the draft numbers being drawn, the 64-year-old Trump seems to have misremembered, as candidates are fond of saying.
The racist draft-dodging son of a millionaire. What more proof do you need?
mikefromArlington
Fuck Trump.
campionrules
Ehh…Trump is a red herring. A convenient bully boy for the GOP to use while simultaneously claiming that he’s not really a republican. He’s not going to run, he’s just a club to hammer the president. We didn’t learn with Palin, but we should with Trump. Ignore.
Earl Butz
One deferment short of Dick Cheney. Not bad. These GOP bastards sure knew how to work the system.
Of course, I am insulting Dick Cheney by comparing him to Donald Trump. Frankly, Cheney has more class, more decency, better morals, and is a far more honest human being than Donald Trump ever could be.
Think about it. That you know I’m right tells you something about Donald Trump you probably didn’t want to look at too closely.
Lolis
And fuck our shitty media.
Mark S.
How about refusing to rent to “the blacks”? I think that qualifies you to claim you’re a Republican.
John PM
Two observations:
1)
Was there a recessive gene in the late 40s/early 50s that caused this amazingly similar behavior?
2) Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush should really slap every modern Republican upside the head because of their cowardly draft-dodging ways.
Comrade Dread
He’s also a loud, obnoxious, moralizing hypocrite.
So I just assumed he was one already.
Villago Delenda Est
In the modern GOP, those are unmistakable traits of a true member of the Rethuglican party.
Every bit as much as a self-accredited ophthalmologist son of a loonytarian racist asshole.
ppcli
You forgot to mention “multiply divorced”.
geg6
Well, based on this evidence, I’d say that you could put Trump’s photo next to the word “Republican” in the dictionary. He is the prototypical modern GOPer.
Villago Delenda Est
@John PM:
George H.W. Bush can start right at home, with the deserting sack of shit that is his eldest son.
PeakVT
Oh, snap.
RolloTomasi
Proof positive will be if unnecessarily invades a country.
MattF
See, Trump is sucking up all the oxygen on the wacko Right– and the wannabes are unhappy. “This used to be a nice neighborhood,” they say. “And nobody’s listening to me anymore.” Well, boofuckinghoo.
DonkeyKong
Stones movie had it’s flaws, but he nailed the start of the rot in this county. If you had the means to dodge Vietnam because you are a “producer” like trump, bush or cheney rather than a “parasite” like all the working class that got sucked into that hellhole, that was your birthright.
Unless you had the character of a Stone or Kerry that could have dodged but didn’t, that you were no better or worse then the men you served with.
Folderol & Ephemera
How about his financial records, to demonstrably prove that he is also a crook? Then we can put him in jail, for tax evasion and fraud. He could be like the Al Capone of racism.
Where’s wikileaks when you need ’em?
meh
@Earl Butz:
How fucked up is the situation that would cause someone to wax poetically about Cheney…
El Tiburon
Boy oh boy I can’t wait for the MSM to pick this up and run with it!! We are going to have wall-to-wall, 24-7, around the clock coverage of this budding scandal.
Tough questions will be hurled at the Trumpster from MSNBC to FOX to The View. How will the Trumpster ever recover from this?
This is going to be great!!
Citizen Alan
@Earl Butz:
I suppose it is possible that some kind of “fecal connoisseur” could compare two steaming piles of dog shit (perhaps even by tasting them) and declare with some authority that one of them is a superior grade of dog shit than the other. It is, however, a distinction I don’t consider to be very important.
Rosalita
He never meant that as a factual statement…
eemom
@Earl Butz:
holy shit. I didn’t think it was possible for ONE of those words to appear in the same sentence as Dick Cheney, never mind all of them. Furthermore, I did not think it was possible for Cheney to compare favorably with any human being short of Josef Mengele.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
And a liar. Yet our media fall all over themselves to get this guy on TV every day. You know, I’m not angry at Trump any more, he is what he is. The media folks are another story. It won’t be pleasant for them in my dictatorship.
Dan
You can NOT convince me that he is not doing a Colbert. Becoming an extreme caricature for the fun of it and to ultimately ridicule the people that believe it. He is a merry prankster.
Culture of Truth
I can’t blame him for that.
eemom
@Citizen Alan:
yeah. That too.
Studly Pantload
Y’know, if I were of draft age during a time of a war I didn’t believe we should be fighting and I had the means of evading getting drafted, I know I woulda availed myself of them. Now, if Trump has stated in the past Vietnam was a just war and/or has a history of championing use of our troops for any of dubious military campaigns, then I think you got somethin’.
But that whole “misremembering” thing at the end turns this from a dog-bites-man story into another round of “Why the fuckleberry does that asshole even bother opening his diseased maw?”
@ppcli:
Heh – ’nuff said.
fasteddie9318
Look, Trump is a wretched human being, lowest of the low. But call me when he’s got something approaching the amount of blood that’s on Cheney’s hands, and I’ll consider comparing them.
Studly Pantload
@fasteddie9318:
That was necessary. Thank you.
Bob
A song from CCR –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec0XKhAHR5I
Chris
@ppcli:
Heh.
“Not every conservative is an old wealthy white man on his third wife, but nearly every conservative aspires to be so, which is a real waste of money, youth, race and women.” (John Scalzi)
Culture of Truth
Yeah I still gotta give the edge to Cheney, on account of the war, and everything. Torture, also.
Hungry Joe
Sorry, but there was nothing wrong with taking a student deferment during the Vietnam War. I did it myself for four years, as I a) was opposed to the war, and b) did not want to get my head or anything else blown off participating in what I believed to be an immoral, unjust enterprise. Others less fortunate had to go, or were suckered into going; I protested that, vehemently and publicly, but did not feel obliged to join them — see a) and b), above. Now, if Trump wants to come out as having been opposed to the Vietnam War, great. If he just wanted to save his ass, not so great, but understandable. But if he supported the war and still didn’t go, well, he’s a schmuck. He’s a schmuck anyway, of course, but this would enhance his schmuckosity.
Anne Laurie
Of course Rand’s upset — once Haley ‘Boss Hogg’ Barbour dropped out, Dr. Paul the Lesser thought he had the wink’n’nod racist Repub primary vote all locked up!
steviez314
If he ever dressed up as a woman for a musical number or roomed with some gay guys, our victory will be complete.
Studly Pantload
@Hungry Joe:
“Now with enhanced schmuckosity.” I may have to get that printed on a card.
Svensker
@Dan:
Perhaps. But the joke falls flat when it needs racism to be funny.
Lydgate
@Earl Butz: Frankly, Cheney has more class, more decency, better morals, and is a far more honest human being than Donald Trump ever could be.
umm, no.
Unless by more class, more decency, and better morals you mean being a chickenhawk that thinks nothing of violating international law, sending young men and women off to wars of choice started on false pretenses, destroying sovereign states…
well, then yeah. He’s got more morals.
Citizen_X
Whoa, count me out of that, too. Trump has “invaded” my brainspace with his braying, and “tortured” my mind with his stupidity.
Cheney is responsible for actual invading and torturing, no scare quotes required.
Cap'n Phealy
I don’t think an “ophthalmologist” who had to start his own accreditation society has any goddamned business questioning anyone else’s claim to be a member of any organization.
cathyx
I love what Jerry Seinfeld said about Trump;
“Let me say this about Donald Trump,” Seinfeld told “Extra.” “I love Donald Trump, all comedians love Donald Trump. If God gave comedians the power to invent people, the first person we would invent is Donald Trump… God’s gift to comedy.”
bemused
@Cap’n Phealy:
You said it!
scav
@Cap’n Phealy: It’s all grist the mill. It’s going to be harder and harder to position themselves as the effective, sober, grownup party after a couple solid seasons of flailing about on all possible news and media outlets as some of manic combination of Jersey Shores, The Apprentice, The Beverly Hillbillies, Birth of a Nation and a graphic documentary about the last days of the Donner Party, all the while trying to woo votes from what can best be described as tea-enhanced wanna-be contestants of The Price Is Right.
JCT
@Hungry Joe:
True — but the problem with guys like Trump and Cheney (and the rest of the chickenhawks on the Republican side of the aisle) is that while they avoided serving in an unjust war, they seem to have no problem with sending other folks’ children to war.
Over and over again.
Paul in KY
@Earl Butz: Gotta disagree with you here on the morals bit. The Dark Lord knowingly & for the most callous of reasons lied our way into Iraq & wasted 3,600 or so of our fine young men & women. Then there are all the Iraqi civilians killed.
Some of the other points might be true (thus showing how loathsome Trump must be), but on ‘morals’, I’m going with Trump for the time being.
Edit: Didn’t see FastEddie’s post up above. I posted this as soon as I read Mr. Butz’s post.
Monala
@Dan: I disagree. Colbert is actually funny. Trump is inflaming racist sentiments. there’s nothing merry or funny about that.
Jay C
@Mark S.:
I especially liked this line from the Salon piece; from, what, 30 years ago?
Nice to see nothing’s changed….
BOSS BITCH
OT: from the DCCC
http://roilwedding.com/
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Shoemaker-Levy 9:
This.
[well except for the not angry at Trump part. I’m not there yet]
I recently had the pleasure of re-reading my old dog-eared copy of HST’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. Two things struck me as remarkable about it with the passage of time since those days: (A) the savage, vicious, curb-stomping level of contempt, loathing and hatred that HST had for the old-school mainstream Democratic Party hacks like Humphrey and Muskie, and his bone-deep conviction that nothing good would happen to the country until that their institutional power was utterly destroyed and the ground salted where the smoking ruins had been, and (B) that I feel the exact same way about our mainstream news media today.
Paul in KY
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Problem was, it turned out the ‘old-school mainstream Democratic Party hacks’ were much better than the ‘insert random Republican Party hack here’.
HST should have spent more time on the Republican campaign of 1972, I hear they were not entirely on the level…
eemom
@BOSS BITCH:
tee hee
cbear
Magnificent.
malraux
To jump on the band wagon, there’s no way trump is as evil as cheney. Trump might be an ego filled self-centered blowhard, which cheney really isn’t. Cheney is something far worse. Trump would sell his mother for a couple of bucks, but cheney would sell his own mother to hear her scream in pain. Trump is evil for money’s sake, Cheney is evil for evil’s sake. There’s really no comparison here.
Don
Could we not play this game, please? Yes, it’s crappy when people like Cheney avoid ever serving themselves but are willing to send our young men and women to their death with bad planning or poor reasons. But personally I am thrilled as shit that my father got a deferment and thereby was alive to sire me in 1970.
Further, from a historical perspective, my biggest problem with deferments for Vietnam is that everyone couldn’t get one.
It blows when we’re on the subtle end of these arguments. Yes, deferments were racist and class-ist and favored the powerful and connected. Yes, it’s a high-order hypocrisy when people who are cavalier about conflict clearly believe they’re above it impacting their own family.
But simply attacking them for taking them is as moronic as when folks went after Kennedy for filing his taxes such that he paid as little as possible, same as everyone else does. The problem is not living within the system as it is, it’s participating in making the system that way or behaving as if the system doesn’t have flaws.
Trump is hot-buttered-scum but I don’t recall him banging the war drum. Making hay out of his deferments is then just helping the right reinforce this flawed attack message for when they use it on other folks. Don’t play.
Citizen Alan
@malraux:
Well said.
Brain Hertz
Am I the only person who finds Trump’s constant use of repeated adjectives incredibly annoying? Everything is “very, very…” whatever it is.
To my ears it just makes him sound like a fucking, fucking idiot.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Paul in KY:
re: the historical hindsight, yes, agreed.
On the other hand if you actually read in detail what he wrote back then, he had more than enough bile and venom left over for Nixon and the GOP when he wasn’t savaging the Dems, and as for the rest you have to contextualize it. He was writing at a time when the Dems had been The Establishment (with capital letters) for all of his life right up until only 3 years prior to the time of writing, and in many ways were still The Establishment (Nixon was still working at rooting Dems and liberals out of the various levels of the civil service, a task which took years), and on many of the issues he (HST) cared most deeply about there really wasn’t much daylight between Nixon and the mainstream Dem leadership, and the latter were more intent on sabotaging and putting down any Dems that tried to do something about it than they were on fighting Nixon. There was a civil war raging within the Democratic Party and one side saw Nixon as a ally of convenience rather than as a foe.
Ironically, the leadership of the organized labor movement (e.g. George Meany) provided some of the more disgraceful examples of the latter problem, yet I think with the benefit of hindsight today we can say that they’ve lost more ground over the years than anybody, as a result of the GOP takeover of the US govt and intimidation and co-option of the news media which began in 1968 and was cemented with Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972. Talk about fouling your own nest!
Brain Hertz
@malraux
One addition: Trump just isn’t smart enough to be as evil as Cheney.
cmorenc
Trump is a quintessential sociopathic rich jerk and cynical race-monger, don’t get me wrong.
NEVERTHELESS, EVERY ONE OF US of the generational age to have graduated high school and gone off to college before the draft lottery was instituted are, by your reasoning, unprincipled hypocritical draft-dodgers. I too remember waiting anxiously for the initial 1969 draft, and was fortunate enough to draw a high number (330 in fact).
Among those from my high school class who went off to Vietnam and serve, those who did wind up in combat recall it as a vividly colorful, paranoid nightmare tempered only by the free availability of really good marijuana, beer, and liquor. For the one classmate who served in a rear support capacity in the safety of Saigon, OTOH, his experience of the War was one unending party with whatever vice that momentarily tempted and pleased him freely available, so long as he got enough of his workday stuff done without too many screw-ups. For two other classmates, .in fact the most gung-ho two…well, their names are on “The Wall” in Washington.
I have not the slightest mote of guilt about avoiding wasting two years of putting my life at totally pointless risk in Vietnam, the first 2 1/2 years after graduation from high school in 1967 by student deferment, the rest by high draft lottery number. Neither does just about any other guy who lived through this period without being drafted, for one reason or another (student deferment, high draft number, etc). I only resent someone in my category if they’re like Dick Cheney…who personally went to great lengths to avoid being drafted to serve in Vietnam, yet went on to become ardent chickenhawks, pushing wars for other people’s sons and daughters to serve and die in and calling anyone who criticized such as traitorous and unsupportive of the troops and lacking spine to defend the country’s interests.
Donald Trump has many ugly sins, but avoiding Vietnam and getting drafted is not among them, not back in that particular era.
Paul in KY
@Don: Obviously there were legitimate deferment reasons back then. I assume your father had one.
We are surmising that Trump & Cheney’s were not legitimate.
maus
@Don:
We all agree that everyone should have gotten them, but are irritated that Trump’s lying about his. If he was out and honest, there’d be little to criticize him on.
@Paul in KY:
What’s the difference?
Paul in KY
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Excellent points. I have not read the book. I need to read it sometime.
Tsulagi
Yeah, no one could have predicted.
If Trump wants to continue evolving as the everyman teatard, soon he’s going to have to bring guns into the mix. Maybe he could regale with daring tales of he and dad duck hunting together shooting from blinds on NYC penthouse balconies.
@eemom:
Those two? I dunno, tomato-tomatoe. Six of one, half dozen of another.
malraux
@Brain Hertz: Cheney isn’t all that smart, as near as I can tell. He’s brazen, able to say intelligent sounding things with utter conviction, but not actually say well reasoned or insightful things.
TuiMel
@Citizen Alan:
And I think the analysis is bull.
Emma
Shoemaker-Levy 9: This. Exactly. The media is the one I’d like to smack around for a while.
Paul in KY
@maus: Many good & brave people sucked it up & went if there was no other way out (a good friend of my family is in the cemetary, dead at 24 in Vietnam serving honorably). To me (a USAF veteren), out and out lying about a valid deferment reason is cowardly.
Example: What uber-manly-man Ted Nugent did to get out of serving was cowardly (cynically pretending to be crazy).
Fuzz
I’m not a baby boomer and I’ve never been in the military, but to me there was always something really unsavory about the way people in the Vietnam era were so willingly blind to the consequences of their avoiding the draft. When you pretended to be crazy or got a doctor’s note, someone was going to end up taking your place. You weren’t taking a brave moral stand like so many thought they were, you were just sending someone else off to Vietnam in your place. They thought that the whole system was corrupted and unfair, but they felt no lingering guilt about using that exact system to their benefit, and seemingly they chose to forget that everything they did that was to their individual benefit was to some faceless (often poorer) strangers detriment.
Garrigus Carraig
@Don: @cmorenc: Um, the point of dinging dishonest draft dodgers like Cheney & Dubya is dependent on the fact that they sought federal office. So their dishonesty is a consideration & their draft dodging means you don’t want them starting dumb wars.
I would have tried to get out of it too. But then I wouldn’t run for federal office.
Don
@Paul in KY:
Neither myself or, for that matter, my father, are under any illusions that dad’s deferment didn’t depend in some significant percentage on the fact that he was white and, by then, at least reasonably financially successful. If he’d been born a few years earlier or his dad had walked out on him and his mom just a few years later and given them less time to financially recover then my existence might have been less probable.
But that’s irrelevant to my point. Deferments existed and as unfair as they were, if you had an option to take one then I, for one, think no less of anyone for taking that opportunity to avoid dying in a stupid, pointless struggle.
Similarly I don’t go into salary negotiations demanding 10% less than I think I can get because I know there’s impediments to folks without my advantages. I’d like to see the impediments in front of those folks removed but for the time being I’m going to live within the world I’m in.
Trump may be lying by admission when he mentions his lottery number and excludes mentioning his deferments but the offense there is the omission, not the taking of deferments.
Honestly I’m not even that eager to beat him up over that. Is he glossing because of his audience? Sure. But in the realm of shittacular things Trump says I don’t think that even cracks the top 100. I wish we had a media that was engaged enough to call him on it and force him to clarify but implying that taking the deferment is an offense in and of itself is playing their game.
If we’re going to harass folks about this then it ought to be the way Markos does, by pointing out the avoidance of service when folks are actually beating the war drum. Point it out when Cheney is stumping for soldiers. To attack hypocrisy is fine. To attack the lack of service in and of itself is just as odious as when it was made an issue against Clinton.
Carraig – so you think that a deferment is a precluding factor for government office even if the person then uses that office to oppose similar wars & actions? I don’t agree.
Wolfdaughter
@Fuzz:
You probably weren’t alive then. I was. As a female, I didn’t have to worry about risking my life in a stupid war which should never have been started.
I do have to say that the people who started it had what they thought were good reasons to do so. The Domino Theory, etc. Based on what we know now was bad information by the CIA, which never understood just how much of a paper tiger the Soviet Union was, and which greatly exaggerated its threat. Just as the CIA has done with every conflict since then. Beats me why they still have credibility.
However, I had relatives and friends, most of whom managed to avoid the draft, for which I am grateful, but I did know a few young men who died. And I still see today veterans of that war–a number of the current homeless are veterans of Vietnam or the Gulf War, etc., who have been abandoned by the government and the American people. It wasn’t just cowardice that caused them to evade the draft. I would also remind people that draft evasion came with its own risks–jail time, etc., and that 4 people paid the ultimate price at Kent State.
So, Fuzz, you’re oversimplifying here.
Hungry Joe
@Fuzz
Give me a fucking break: I wasn’t willingly blind to anything when I took my deferment — and yes, I would have faked being crazy, or whatever, if it had come to that. And excuse me, but I wasn’t “just sending someone else off to Vietnam in [my] place”; I wasn’t sending anybody anywhere, the United States government was. I protested the war: marched, wrote letters, worked for anti-war candidates, learned to distinguish between standard tear gas and CS (ah, Berkeley … ), so I don’t feel the least bit “unsavory” (your word) about taking measures to prevent my being drafted and (probably) sent to Vietnam to pitch in and help kill people and maybe get myself killed in the process — which was my alternative, and apparently the path you have determined that I should have taken … to avoid being “willingly blind” and “unsavory,” anyway. Jee-zus christ.
Villago Delenda Est
There is a HUGE difference between not wanting to go to ‘Nam because you opposed the war, or because you didn’t want to face the danger, and being an active, vocal proponent of the war and not wanting to put your skin in the game. See Bush, George W. and Cheney, Richard for examples of the latter. The war was grand as long as their worthless cowardly asses were not placed in harm’s way.
Contrast this with John Kerry, who VOLUNTEERED for brown water Navy duty AFTER serving a tour off the coast, which would have exempted him from further ‘Nam service.
Of course, Republicans do not care about these things, as we saw, illustrated in 2004, when they mocked Kerry and celebrated a deserting sack of shit.
Chuck Butcher
@Don:
I was going to just let all this go because what my thinking processes were at that time were mine and not others’. There was a method to avoid participating in a stupid immmoral war – walking into the Selective Service Office and simply refusing. Yes, that would involve jail and that does interfere with other interests.
So, just how stupid and immoral a waste was that war or was it a matter of convenience? I have my own thoughts on the subject and they’re not complimentary and yes I experienced anxiety watching my very high number get drawn at nearly the end of the process – mooting a prison sentence.
Nellcote
@steviez314:
Well, there’s this…
http://graneyandthepig.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/hail-to-the-chief/
maus
@Fuzz: Would you say the same if drafted into Iraq?
rikryah
I thought it was automatic.
GOP=DRAFTDODGER
Dan
@Svensker: The racism isn’t the joke or even part of the joke. It’s an element of the character that he is portraying. Very meta.
Dan
@Monala: Well, I didn’t say he was funny. I said he is doing a character, which is what Colbert does.
Trump is wily, and I think he knows what he’s doing.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Fuzz:
and if the real world played by such a set of rules, the decision of whether one participates in a war, or many other things, would be moot.
let me take this out of the context of military service, since neither of us have served. would you consider locking your car, adding a kill switch, an alarm or other theft deterrents,to be pushing the problem of auto theft onto another otherwise anonymous victim?
Rekster
Right on John. Trump is a proud member of the 101st Chairborne Brigade! Fuckin Chickenhawk.
I’m a proud Viet Nam veteran who served with the 1st Marine Division.
Fuzz
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
This is probably a dead thread but I’ll respond anyway. The car theft example doesn’t make sense, you add a device to your car to protect it from being stolen, you aren’t pushing the problem on to someone else because whoever is trying to steal your car is committing a crime. A kid who just didn’t have a doctor come speak to his college class about how to avoid the draft didn’t commit any crimes. I really just don’t see what you’re talking about.
Fuzz
@maus:
Yeah. You may or may not believe me but I’ve tried to join the army but been rejected (in 08 and then ’10) because I have a form of bipolar disorder which Catherine Zeta Jones just made famous. The fact that I haven’t gone to my generation’s war (I’m 26) makes me ashamed of myself, my dad was an advisor to ARVN during Vietnam and my cousin is an 0-4 and has been to Iraq. So yes, if drafted to Iraq I would go, I’m not saying that makes me have any moral high ground or make me an awesome guy, it’s just how I feel.
Fuzz
@Hungry Joe:
My my I touched a nerve. BTW I know what my words are because I typed them.
By not going, someone else who didn’t want to was sent in your place. It doesn’t matter after that, you could inhale all the tear gas in the world and write letters until you ran out of ink, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was a kid in the jungle who wasn’t any more enthused about the war than you were, and he was there because you weren’t. You made the decision that your well being was more important than this other person’s, a person who likely was not in the same social class as you. The government was sending him, but it was also giving you the chance to get out, so you’re condemning the exact same government that according to you may have spared your life at the expense of someone else’s.
The idea that you feel no lingering guilt is absurd, all I did was bring up the fact that someone else got drafted in your place and they didn’t want to be there any more than you and their family missed them as much as they’d have missed you, and you started cursing and freaking out.
PS: None of my thoughts are original here, just read the James Fallows essay “What did you do during the class war.” Its from 75 but its easy to find online.
Chuck Butcher
@Fuzz:
Forty years later and that fucking mess is still stirring things up. That alone should give anyone without direct knowledge a clue to just how fucked up things were.
Paul in KY
@Don: Good point, Don. If you could legitimately claim any of the deferments on the books at time (even if you worked to get one of those only to stay out of war), then that’s OK by me.
I only had an issue with someone who would lie about the deferment condition to avoid serving.