BCT Editorial – 4/25/08

This page was last updated on April 26, 2008.

Heavy load; Editorial; Beaver County Times; April 25, 2008.

The editorial subtitle is “Increase in waivers shows the strain that is being put on the U.S. military.”

The editorial told us how many criminal record waivers were granted, but failed to put them in context. The 511 Army waivers were out of over 80,000 total recruits and the 350 Marine waivers were out of nearly 36,000 total recruits.

Let’s look at the following two paragraphs. “But let’s not fool ourselves. The reason the number of waivers for those with criminal records increased — from 249 in 2006 to 511 in 2007 for the Army and from 208 in 2006 to 350 in 2007 for the Marines — is that Americans don’t want to serve in the military.

“The military acknowledges that. A Pentagon spokesman told the news service ‘low unemployment, a protracted war on terror, a decline in propensity to serve,’ and the growing reluctance of parents, teachers and other adults to recommend young people go into the military, have made recruiting a challenge.”

You’ll note how these paragraphs never mentioned any potential effect of the constant bashing of the military effort in Iraq by most of the mainstream media and partisan elected Democrats.