[when you have a chance to use the phrase legitimately, it's a crime to pass it up...]
Now this really defines chutzpah. Someone at the Pentagon got the "security correspondent" at Reuters to bite on a story that frankly looks like budget salesmanship--it's a "needs being met with the help of your money" kind of story. The need in this case is for highly trained lingual specialists--translators. The military, understandably, needs people primarily who speak Arabic, Farsi and Chinese, Arabic of course at the top of the list. There was, there is, there continues to be a backlog of transmission intercept documents that go wanting for translation.
All right, so there's a need for more linguists, and the Pentagon flack indicates the money they're asking for (under the ridiculously named banner Defense Language Transformation Roadmap) is for better language schools and labs. Notice that better schools are not the need; trained bodies are. The article doesn't address the source or reason for the shortage, strangely enough.
You don't need an extraordinary memory to remember why this whole story is unbelievably galling. It was only January that we learned at least 26 linguists had been fired by the military over the last six years, some as late as last year. Were they miscreants? Bad apples? Bad seeds in the bad apple? Druggies? Commies? Please God, tell me they weren't commies. No, they were something worse...worse than commies. They. Were. Gay.
Yes, that's right: the military, in desperate need of that magical thing nicknamed HumInt, sacked more than 25 highly trained specialists--Arabic speakers who have a US security clearance being pretty special--not for incompetence or insubordination, but for who they like to bang. All of this incredibly damaging behavior over torture that has yielded next to nothing, but real terrorist communiques are going unreviewed because the people who can review them are homosexual.
So that's bad enough. But three months later to be mumbling aloud to the gullible British media, "Hmmm...we've noticed lately we're short on translators, so we're hoping for more money from Congress to fix a problem we've created and continued to exacerbate during our entire administration"---that's inexcusable.
From the Schiavo case the religious right has once again found their framing: it's a culture of life issue, and those against them are beholden to its darker twin, the culture of death. But what culture is it that prevents people from doing real work to protect millions of lives, because you don't like their consensual adult sexuality? What culture is it, as Arianna Huffington said tonight*, that thought there was more wiggle room in the Church for priestly buggery than there was for ordinary Catholics jerking off? That thought AIDS was a reasonable price to pay for rejecting the use of condoms?
I guess regular AA readers have figured out the faux religiosity juxtaposed with very real hate on display the last two months or so is really beginning to grate on me. I got notice today that the library has my copy of God's Politics ready. Thank, uh, God.
I do have one last question, and it strikes me every time I think about this story: were there really 26 gay people in military language capacities who specifically spoke Arabic or Farsi? That's not exactly a demographic Nielsen salivates over.
--TJ
*That wasn't even her best line. Her best line was that we know what the parties in Congress are: the Republicans are a bunch of fanatics, and the Democrats are spineless weasels. Ever so spot-on.
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