wapo's Terry M. Neal. a.k.a. "Captain Obvious"

I know you're in a hurry to delve back into your research on, "Why do I keep getting wet when I stand out in the rain?" but I thought you might want to take a fast peek at this.

There has been much talk about the relationship between race and ethnicity and military recruitment. But what about social and economic class? Are wealthier Americans, who are more likely to be Republicans and therefore more likely to support the war, stepping up to the plate and urging their children and others from their communities to enlist?

Ummm... Terry? Would you like to buy a vowel? Go for the "O" because there's only one other letter in the answer. The wealthier Republicans are highly likely to have Bush Cheney signs in their yards and yellow magnets on their cars, and right self-righteous letters about how everyone has to support the troops. But pull Junior out of his classes before he gets his stock broker certification and send him to someplace dirty? Where some filthy foreigner might actually shoot him? I think you should move along now.

The article manages to capture a nice sense of this.

The writer of the Post-Gazette article, Jack Kelly, explored this question in his story that ran on Aug. 11. Kelly wrote of a Marine recruiter, Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, who went to an affluent suburb outside of Pittsburgh to follow up with a young man who had expressed interest in enlisting. He pulled up to a house with American flags displayed in the yard. The mother came to the door in an American flag T-shirt and openly declared her support for the troops.

But she made it clear that her support only went so far.

"Military service isn't for our son," she told Rivera. "It isn't for our kind of people."

No, ma'am. Not at all. We typically pull the cannon fodder off the farms and out of the ghettos. This was obviously some sort of mistake. Sorry to bother you.