Help, We Can't Stop Ourself

Just one more Althouse quote, which should tell anyone anything they need to know about her critical or cognitive faculties. It's from her comments section, & is in response to this comment:

Peter said... I was twelve or thirteen when I read The Naked and the Dead. I thought it was a great novel. Then, at age eighteen I went over a bow ramp at Chu Lai, May the 7th, 1965. After fghting [sic] a war I had the chance to read that book again and discovered how utterly lame and inane it was. As for the picture of our hostess, perhaps it is because I am an adult but I kind of like the Ann of today, speaking of reletive [sic] hotness. 8:16 PM

To which she replied:

Ann Althouse said... Thanks, Peter, both for fighting a war for us and for being an adult. I'm 19 in that picture. 8:30 PM

"Fighting a war for us?" Vietnam? That was fought for us? For America or the American people? Fought for the benefit of the Catholicized elites of Vietnam, the inheritors of French colonial power, perhaps. Fought for delusional reasons of "stopping communism," & then fought so that the United States (& Lyndon Baines Johnson & Richard Milhous Nixon) wouldn't appear "weak," yes. But fought for "us?" The last war fought for "us" was WWII, & that really was self-defense. Wars of choice, wars fought for rulers unable to lead their own countrymen, or wars to "show the world we mean business," Michael Ledeen-style, are never wars for "us," you foolish person. Are you truly allowed to teach anyone anything? Has idiotic patriotism blinded you to the simplest, most obvious truths? Or was it just the unthinking rote recitation: "Thank you for your service?" And has it ever occurred to you that if people didn't fight wars for "us," there would be no armies w/ which to start wars? And a note to Peter: Perhaps had you waited for the bow ramp to be lowered, you could have gone down it or across it, rather than having to go "over it." And learn to spell & punctuate; then we'll pay attention to your literary criticism.