Dude, Where's My Draft?

As we fast approach the 2006 elections, I recently remembered one of the issues that liberals were trying to push in the 2004 elections - namely, the supposedly imminent return of a military draft. Leftists assured us that if Bush and the Repubs won the 2004 election, a draft would be instated soon thereafter. CBS News even pushed a scare story on the possibility of a draft just weeks before the Nov. 2004 elections, basing the story upon patently phony emails that were circulating at the time (another feather in the cap of the "fake but accurate" network). Democrats and the Kerry-Edwards campaign pushed the issue all that fall, vowing "There will be no draft when John Kerry is president".

The issue was probably promoted most prominently by MTV's "Rock the Vote" campaign, which ostensibly is a "non-partisan organization" dedicated to promote youth participation in politics, but in reality mainly served as a device to push the draft issue as a scare tactic. RTV joined forces with something called Alliance for Security, a liberal anti-war activist organization.

We were promised a draft sometime in early 2005 if the evil Repubs won - so what happened? The main problem is that the whole thing was a lie from the start. The premise was that Washington would have no choice but to bring back the draft due to a supposed "crisis in retention and recruitment" - a notion that was (and continues to be) utterly false.

Moreover, there was never any possibility of a draft being reinstated because the key players who could make it happen are 100% against it - the Pentagon doesn't want it, the Bush administration doesn't want it, and the Congress doesn't want it. Indeed, when the issue came up for a vote in the House during 2004, the only legislators who supported bringing back the draft were Democrats.

Liberals constantly level the charge that Republicans cynically use fear to motivate voters. Recall the non-issue of the draft the next time you hear that tired canard.