MoveOn Did What?

Think Progress
"Montana conservative attacks fallen soldier over op-ed.

Earlier this week, Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance Gray, who recently co-wrote a New York Times op-ed critical of the Iraq debate, were killed in a vehicle accident in Western Baghdad. The two fallen soldiers have since been hailed for serving their country and speaking out on Iraq. But one former conservative state Senator in Sgt. Gray’s home state of Montana, Dave Rye, has chosen to attack him for the op-ed, claiming he and his fellow soldiers weren’t intelligent enough to write it on their own:

Pardon my skepticism, and certainly no disrespect for the dead Montana soldier, but in my time in the Army I never heard such a word as “recalcitrant” escape the lips of any Staff Sergeant. I doubt if it’s spoken all that much in Ismay, either. The soldiers had the help and probably the encouragement of a writer with an agenda, from a newspaper which has always had one. Its continually declining circulation now mainly consists of those who want desperately to consider themselves sophisticated as well as compassionate, even if that means always branding the U.S. as the chief villain on the world stage—in fact, especially if it does."

I knew quite a few big college words when I was in the service. Some of them I actually learned there because-- gasp!-- the military has schools where they teach you some stuff like that and trigonometry, too! I guess only officers and politicians have sufficient intelligence to parse the language into melodious tones for editorial consumption. I offer as my proof George. W. Bush, who certainly has taken the hum-drum English vocabulary found betwixt the covers of the Oxford English Dictionary into a netherworld no one has never experienced before.