Tough Talk and Hot Air

So now that Jill Carroll, the freelancer writing for The Christian Science Monitor who was taken captive by Islamists, is free, where are her accusers? You remember them: all those self-righteous and more-patriotic-than-thou Right-Wing pundits who condemned her as a "spoiled brat" and an "America hater."

Typical conservative bravado, from a bunch of candy-pants sitting safely and comfortably in their ivory towers. Cooler heads warned us that perhaps we ought to wait until the young lady was freed to be sure we'd heard everything she had to say on the matter. But the chickenhawks couldn't be expected to wait for that! No, they're sooooo patriotic...they love America sooooo much...that they had to think first of -- their ideological agenda! How could we possibly expect otherwise?

Do I think much of people who trek over to a war zone (determined to feel the pain of the oppressed from as close a range as possible), get abducted by Islamofascist monsters, get rescued and then -- once safe in the arms of the U.S. military -- gracelessly refuse to thank the brave souls who helped them get out of harm's way? I should say not. Was this what happened here? It's looking less and less like it.

Ms. Carroll now informs us that three men with machine guns forced her to make her videotaped statement that all was well and she was unmenaced. Too bad we can't put every one of her critics in front of a similar impromptu firing-squad and find out just what brave patriots they REALLY are. Would not their Studley Do-Right proclamations of all-American gung-ho be inspiring? But of course if they had any gumption to begin with, these pathetic excuses for manhood would have been over there in the first place -- in uniform -- where they belong.

Plenty of girls much younger than Jill Carroll are over there doing their fighting for them.