Tie A Yellow Ribbon—Or Else

I doubt that the editors of The New Republic met with Michelle Malkin and decided to craft of message of the day. It's probably just luck that puts Rob Anderson's screed against "The Left's military hatred" on the same calender date as Malkin's expose of the fifth column at UC Santa Cruz.

Anderson's is the less convincing of the two epistles, if for no other reason than Malkin has pictures. He reviews a short book called 10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military, a collection … of well, what the title says, written by wits like Cindy Sheehan. Books like this have been dropping from left-wing publishing houses for decades, but Anderson sees a trend brewing. Liberals like Matthew Yglesias, John Kenneth Galbraith, (ostensibly funny) columnist Joel Stein and "the editors of The Nation" have started wringing their hands about military intervention. It's practically epidemic!

Malkin, meanwhile, is working the campus military recruitment beat with words, photos, and at least two buckets of spittle. A group of anti-war students protested and kicked military recruiters out of a job fair, posted pictures of the deed, and haven't been punished yet. "This used to be called sedition," Malkin writes. (Although If our war-on-terror strategy depends on recruitment at UC Santa Cruz, I think we've already lost.)

Class act that she is, Malkin posts the names, numbers and e-mail addresses of the anti-war student leaders. I've never heard of anti-war students posting the contact info of individual soldiers or military recruiters.