To the Liberal Media, Scott Brown's Military Service Is Just a Pose

Surging Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown has served more than thirty years in the Army National Guard, but to commentators like the Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi, this is merely “pretty packaging” and part of how “Brown’s glossy veneer conceals [a] misleading campaign.”

It’s sad, but not surprising that the liberal media – and it is hard to find any newspaper more liberal than the Martha Coakley-endorsing Boston Globe – would want to minimize and denigrate Brown’s three decades of service to our country. After all, when a liberal politician has actually served it’s so unusual that it becomes the centerpiece of his campaign.

But, of course, Coakley has served, too – not in the Army, but in a comfortable office with many minions to get her coffee and knock over pesky reporters who dare to ask hard questions. She has “served” as the Bay State’s attorney general and, as Vennochi helpfully points out, she has prosecuted scam artists, child molesters and murderers (although even that claim is dubious). Presumably, this distinguishes her from all those other attorney generals out there who strongly support the work of scam artists, child molesters and murderers.

So, what Vennochi is actually saying is that Coakley simply showed up at her job, but then when the Globe is talking about a liberal candidate that’s pretty much as far as they need to go down the resume before slamming down the “ENDORSED” stamp.

If Vennochi treats Brown’s military service as some kind of calculated political ploy, it’s no wonder. That’s the way some of the most prominent of the relatively few recent politicians on her side of the aisle who were involved with our military have treated it. There’s the former president who wanted “to maintain [his] political viability within the system” as he weaseled out of service, and the candidate who brought a movie camera to Vietnam to preserve his heroics for the ages… and for future campaigns.

I somewhat doubt that political calculations were entering into Brown’s head when he stood in the C-130’s door for his second qualification parachute jump at the Army’s Airborne School (The first jump is easy because you don’t know what the hell is happening- it’s the second jump that’s a killer). If Brown was anything like me, he probably thought those silver wings would be a great way to meet girls. But you don’t stay in the Guard for thirty years – giving up a weekend a month, having to run every day to meet the stringent fitness requirements, taking course after course on your own time to keep educationally qualified, wearing terrible haircuts – unless you are either crazy or you have a deep and abiding love for your country. And Scott Brown’s not crazy.

Yes, Scott Brown’s service paints a “pretty picture” all right. It’s a picture of dedication, patriotism and service that the liberal media is eager to write off as just a pose because, to so many of its political fellow travelers, that’s the only way they can understand it. It remains to be seen what the people of Massachusetts think about the people who protect them when they go to the polls Tuesday to fill “the People’s seat.”