A new poll found that Gary Johnson is a more popular pick among active duty service members than Hillary Clinton. In a Thursday story at the Christian Science Monitor, Amanda Hoover set out to learn why.
If you want to know how service members arrived at that preference, it would probably be best to ask some service members. Unfortunately, Hoover decided to consult a George Washington University professor. The result was simultaneously pathetic and revealing.
“No Rational Basis”
In quite a display of ivory terror arrogance and ignorance, political science prof Matthew Dallek passed swift and dismissive judgement on the military community’s preference: “There’s no kind of rational basis…Hillary Clinton is someone who has a long history of being both deeply knowledgeable and deeply hawkish.”
From the cozy confines of his perch at a university inside the DC beltway, it clearly didn’t occur to Dallek that perhaps the last thing military service members want—after 15 years of repeated deployments that have taken a terrible toll on their lives, limbs, minds and marriages while making the world less safe in the process—is a “deeply hawkish” president.
Perhaps, professor, many service members ever so rationally agree with Johnson when he says it has been a grave mistake to “use our military resources to pursue undemocratic regime changes, embark on impossible nation-building exercises, and to establish the United States as the policeman of the world,” and that an “imperialistic foreign policy makes it easier for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent extremists to recruit new members.”
Blind to the most logical rationale for a preference he deemed inexplicable, Dallek offered one that is more speculative and dare I say slanderous: “Maybe there’s also some reluctance to vote for a woman.”
If gender does play any part in the calculus of service members, perhaps its wariness that an already hawkish Clinton may feel extra pressure to imperil their lives just so she can demonstrate “strength” as the first woman commander in chief.
Johnson wasn’t the top pick in the Military Times/Institute for Veterans and Military Families poll. Trump led with 41%, while 27% preferred Johnson and 21% picked Clinton.
