Liberal myths about the troops
October 31, 2006| By Nathaniel Ward
Liberals have a nasty habit of getting the facts wrong when it comes to our troops. In 2002, Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) suggested that poorer Americans and minorities are disproportionately represented in the armed forces. And just yesterday, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) claimed that those who don’t perform well in school “get stuck in Iraq.”
Fortunately, Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis was there with the facts to debunk this liberal myth. “The Heritage report refutes utterly the statement made by John Kerry yesterday at a rally for California Democratic gubernatorial nominee Phil Angelides,” columnist Michael Barone writes on his US News & World Report blog.
As it turns out, “wartime U.S. military enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on average than their civilian peers.” What’s more, the study finds that “whites are the most proportionally represented racial group among recruits.”
I encourage you to read the whole report, “Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment, 2003–2005,” on Heritage.org.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
