Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they’ve never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.
That sentence should be amended to: “Newspaper columnists are rarely as smart as they think they are…”
Dowd goes on to say that the Rolling Stone profile
was a product of the warrior-god culture, four-star generals with their own public-relations teams, that came from Gen. David Petraeus. And the towel-snapping was intensified by the fact that McChrystal used to be a tough special-ops, under-cover-of-the-night, rules-don’t-apply-to-us military guy.
Or maybe it was just a boneheaded series of mistakes made by Gen. McChrystal and his aides.
As for the “towel-snapping” nature of the military culture, whatever its sins, it isn’t a hundredth as self-satisfied as the liberal-newsroom culture in which Maureen Dowd has enthroned herself. And in its ethic of sacrifice and dedication to service, that culture ennobles those who commit themselves to it — unlike the culture from which this column emanates, which is rotting away, and justifiably.
