We can't believe the number of "liberals" touting Rangel's obscene proposal to invoke a mandatory draft as a means of avoiding a war in Iraq--the faulty premise being if you put the sons of the rich at risk, perhaps the rich will come to oppose the war.

With all due respect to our "liberal" friends, this is sophomoric and dangerous to the futures of tens of thousands of American youth. What right do they have to call for the interruption of the lives of these young men who have done nothing to them? Most of these so-called "liberals" are too young to remember Vietnam--too young to remember the agony that every male college student went through the night of the draft lottery--the scenes in virtually every living room of every dorm and apartment from Berkeley to Ann Arbor to Boston and in between--the anguished cries of disbelief and rushed exits from the room when someone's number was called--all for a war that no one wanted to fight and that history now confirms we shouldn't have ever entered--the thousands of dead youths, the thousands of mothers whose boys came home in a box. We're not exaggerating, we were there and we lived it-- the war, the draft and the lottery--two of those we took the LSATs with never made it to law school, their numbers came up high and off they went--hopefully to Canada, but certainly not to the lives they had dreamed of and worked so hard for. When we went to our 20th high school reunion in 1987, the party opened with a a simulcast of a radio show hosted by a well-known disc jockey of that era acknowledging our reunion and reading off the names of the dead from our high school class.

How crass and unfeeling for these "liberals" to wish such a fate on an 18 - 26 year old who has done nothing to deserve it. So what if their parents have money? Is that their fault? How does that devalue their accomplishments and dreams? If these so-called liberals believe the war should be opposed, let them get out in the streets and demonstrate, get their hands dirty, risk an arrest. How how dare they sit on their comfortable rear ends from the distance of a computer screen and call upon others to do what they would never do themselves--forfeit their freedom in the name of a soundbite.

Sorry, but this is despicable. And anything but liberal.

Update: Oliver Willis agrees with us and notes, "A government that compels one to die for a cause one may not believe in is not a free government, and if the government isn't free... it isn't American."