Chickenhawk Hall of Shame

October, the month of tawdry political surprises, is again upon us; an election draws near. One political party seems to be advocating a war on Iraq as an answer to the question, “Are you better off now than you were two years ago?” The irony is that many of the loudest war drummers in that particular party avoided military service in their youth. These so-called chickenhawks seem rather eager to send a quarter-million children of other people into the kind of armed conflict the chickenhawks themselves avoided in Vietnam—what with student deferments, at least one desertion and, in the case of a porcine former Sacramentan, a doctor’s excuse for pilonidal (anal) cysts. This Web site does a decent job of delivering that editorial point with a short, Flash-animated movie. It’s the kind of thing that, in a saner world, would be running as a public service announcement on network television.