Lowering the bar. (And after this news, I may need to go to a bar.)

Today the Army announced that it will once again lower the minimum standards for recruits. This time they won't be lowering the minimum age or raising the maximum age. (Like last time.) They will now accept high school dropouts without a G.E.D. There's a bit more to the story than meets the eye, but it still revolves around the fact that the military is going to miss its recruiting goals for fiscal year 2005.

Army recruiters now have a wider pool to find future soldiers in. The Army is reaching out to a slice of AmericaÂ’s youth long ineligible to serve: non-high school graduates who donÂ’t have a General Equivalency Diploma

Recruiters can now go after that demographic through the “Army Educations Plus” option, the Army announced Tuesday.

If an individual has been out of high school for at least six months, can pass a physical exam and the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, he or she may be eligible for help getting a GED.

On the one hand, you can see that the Army is desperate enough to enlist people who couldn't or wouldn't finish high school or take the effort to go get a G.E.D. instead. Of course, to be fair, they still want the recruit to get the G.E.D. before they can enter active duty and will assist them in getting it. I think this even speaks volumes about the state our volunteer military is in at the moment, but there are clearly two schools of thought on it.

First, you can look at Talk Left for one opinion.

Once more, the military targets the poor and underprivileged. One of my clients just got his G.E.D. in the county jail while awaiting trial. At least he'll be alive to use it when he gets out.

No matter how much you may favor Bush or the war in Iraq, that's a valid point. But James Joyner also has a thought on this from the other side.

This is actually a smart policy. For a small resource investment, the Army increases its recruiting pool without lowering its standards.

Technically, that's true. They will still be taking recruits who meet the same educational standard at the time of their entry to active duty, since they've been accepting G.E.D. holders for quite a while. But one still can't escape the feeling that, while "young Republican college clubs" are at home, safe and sound, supporting the war, the Army is fishing in the pool of the country's most disadvantaged and at risk for new bodies to send to Iraq.

The nearest thing to that category was a gaggle of college kids from Ithaca who showed up on Sunday to whoop it up for the war — provided, of course, that some other, non-college kids were fighting it.

You can make a case that Operation Yellow Elephant was an over the top partisan act (at least if you drink a lot of Koolaid) but moves like this make it seem all the more real every day.