Columbia University students heckled a war hero during a town-hall meeting on whether ROTC should be allowed back on campus.
"Racist!" some students yelled at Anthony Maschek, a Columbia freshman and former Army staff sergeant awarded the Purple Heart after being shot 11 times in a firefight in northern Iraq in February 2008. Others hissed and booed the veteran.
Maschek, 28, had bravely stepped up to the mike Tuesday at the meeting to issue an impassioned challenge to fellow students on their perceptions of the military.
"It doesn't matter how you feel about the war. It doesn't matter how you feel about fighting," said Maschek. "There are bad men out there plotting to kill you."
Sadly, the way it works, Staff Sergeant Maschek was wounded defending the rights of bad people here to act like dickheads. They're too elite to believe simplisme notions like enemies trying to kill them because they are Americans.
I suppose I should be grateful that the end of "don't ask, don't tell" has exposed the lie of anti-war radicals claiming to oppose military ROTC because of the law. I always knew that it was a cheap excuse to justify anti-military views since true outrage would lead the college administrators and students to reject federal aid either appropriated by the Congress that passed the law or the administration that carried out the law. It wasn't a military policy, after all, and civilian control of the military requires the military to obey those laws.
Maschek will do fine. He faced tougher foes in Iraq. More honest ones, too, for that matter, since they never claimed to be anything but his enemies out to get him.
UPDATE: More on those a-hole students. Oh, and while I saw a picture of Maschek in a wheelchair, and he spent two years recovering from wounds, I don't know if he is technically disabled.
Vanguard of the credentialed scum, they are.
