Thanks for reporting Brown's decision, even via the Corner!

Woot! Massachusetts comes through!
(Cosmo Men never let us down...) http://static.thehollywoodgossip.com/ima…

Well, modeling military practices on those of armies that actually win in battle seems like a sound enough approach. Not that there's any evidence that repealing DADT will have an appreciable negative impact on our own military's ability to bomb the living fuck out of whatever third world country we choose.

Canuck, good lord I'd forgotten....

Bet your "waxologist" would like a crack at *him,* gus...

Don't confuse Germany's military with their politicians. The Germany military in WWII was pretty amazing. The vast majority of them had nothing to do with the Holocaust, that was the work of the German politicians.

Not that I'm on any right wing nut's side, nor do I really think our military should emulate the military of any aggressive nation... although that's sorta the pot calling the kettle black, but I digress.

So Senator Brown is a man of priciples and not blind ignorance, unlike his Repugnant colleagues.
Maybe there's hope, after all.

He'd see dollar signs, Canuck...

Scott Brown would easily lose his seat in the following election if he opted for a strictly reactionary voting agenda. This is Massachusetts after all; I'm guessing that most of the conservative "hot air" is coming from non-residents of Massachusetts.

@6 I wouldn't absolve the German military of guilt. This was far from the action of a small group of men at the top.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_…

and the SS specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen_ss#W…

@3,

Germany may have won battles, but they lost both wars. Seems like that's the most important metric.

Also, the disastrous turnout during WW2 for France had more to do with a large, top-heavy senior officer class and poor military investment (see Maginot line) than it did with the quality of French troops.

The French, after all, fought Germany to a stalemate in WW1; you would be hard-pressed to find more hard-bitten soldiers in any war before or since than the French infantryman of WW1.

French cowardice is a myth; the French have arguably the most glorious military history of any contemporary nation. Horace's famously revisited "What coast knows not our blood," can be readily re-applied to Imperial France; Germany, by contrast, for much of that time was not a unified state, much less an international super-power.

@6 I'd read up a little on the behavior of the German Army in WWII before absolving them of any guilt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen_ss#W…

Were the French soldiers gay? More gay than the Germans? What does one have to do with the other?

@15, The GOP platform clearly holds that all of France is gay, therefore the Vichy regime came about because gay French soldiers were unable to defeat the German army.

Unit cohesion is an argument that one believes that military personnel are too immature and/or bogoted to work effectively in the presence of known homosexuals. Yet we trust such personnel to bear arms.

yeah the quoted commenter sort sounds like s/he is saying "we should be more like the nazis, and the french sucked, maybe because they were gay"

Duke @ 10, 14: You might want to read up a bit yourself, starting with those Wikipedia articles you link to.

The Waffen-SS article states at the very top that it was a part of the Nazi party, not the Wehrmacht. The distinction between the two, in terms of command structure, culture, and mission was maintained throughout the Third Reich.

The War-Crimes-of-the-Wehrmacht article is a list of the sort of "normal" war crimes that any defeated army is likely to be charged with, and that any victorious army would likely be charged with, had they been defeated: plunder, rape, reprisals and other unpleasantries in the course of military actions. Conspicuously absent from that article are Holocaust and political crimes, which were almost entirely carried out by party apparatus such as the SS and Gestapo.

The shine of the heroic, gentelmanly Wehrmacht has certainly tarnished somewhat under later scholarship. A small number did participate in the Holocaust and they obviously did fight for the Nazi regime. But on the whole a strong distinction between the actions and culture of the Wehrmacht and the party apparatus is accurate and valid.

@19 -- I'm so glad we cleared that up.

No I'm with them. Any army that's capable of defeating not just Poland but France as well must know all about winning battles.

I don't see what is wrong with saying we should be more like Germany's military int eh early 20th century. Sure the policies of the Nazi's were terrible but their military was mostly just an effective arm to implement whatever policies come from the top. Isn't that what we want our military to be like?

Also a quick history lesson will show that the German army was not part of the Nazi party like the various paramilitary groups that committed most of the atrocities was.

Can't we give some respect to our enemies abilities without being accused of agreeing withe everything they do?

"Social Conservatives" are a problem for everyone...most of all the Republican Party who they seem to have glommed on to.

99 percent of support was for Fiscal Conservatism...here in WA State and in the nation.

Social Conservatives who want to piggy back their programs to that mandate should get the boot.

I don't like the moniker "the gay agenda" at all. I think it's an agenda of pure, undiluted freedom, if anything. Treat all people equally. Everyone is definitely in this together, regardless of the absolute bullshit that a bunch of fucking asshole right-wingers spout as truth.

Putting this in the context of military service, if someone threw him/herself on a grenade and saved your life, would you care if the person was LGBT? If your answer is "yes," you're not only a goddamn liar, you're as full of shit as a foie gras goose.

The French has better tanks?? I have never heard of such a thing.

Screw going into the military. Bad hours, bad dress code, bad haircuts, and an increased risk of getting SHOT. Hmmm, why is it that there is no shortage of people willing to sign up for this job? And why, on earth, if people are willing to go through all that crap to defend their country, would we give a shit about what kind of crotch they prefer.

Scott Brown is looking to get re-elected here in Massachusetts. Nothing more, nothing less.

Massachusetts is simply as blue as the sea. Scott Brown is the most conservative they could possibly hope to wring out of this state - and I mean that VERY LITERALLY, seeing as Brown won election by a narrow margin despite a damn near perfect storm of factors working in his favor. Turnout was less than usual, which is in the Republicans' favor, because it was a special election in January; his opponent, Martha Coakley, ran a campaign that was made of the world's purest, most finely distilled EPIC FAIL, offending everyone with her arrogant, tone-deaf manner every time she opened her mouth (seriously, she would have been better off running no campaign at all); and the national Republican base was energized by the Tea party and the healthcare debate and send him a shipload of money for a huge ad blitz, which he pulled off quite competently. I live in Massachusetts and I saw his ads. Yes, they were well done. And I got a mailer from Martha Coakley that read like she was running for reelection as attorney general, not at all like what a person running for Senate should do. And my mom asked a lot of people after the election, and they told her that they would have voted for Coakley if only she hadn't offended them so much.

In almost any other state, these factors would have carried Scott Brown to a landslide victory. Here in Massachusetts, it barely fetched him the seat. That's how hard it is to overcome having an "R" next to your name around here. Next time he runs, it appears all three of the factors that he had going for him the first time around will be absent; it'll be a regularly timed general election (in a presidential year, no less, meaning maximum turnout), he'll almost certainly be facing a much more competent opponent (since it's hard to imagine anyone being less competent than Coakley and he's an attractive target for any Dem with standing), and the national Republican base has already turned on him. His only hope is that the incumbent's advantage will carry him to victory, but I wouldn't count on it. 2010 was a Republican wave nationally, but the Republicans weren't able to pick off a single one of our all-blue House delegation. If the Repubs had any sense, they'd tolerate him. But they don't seem to realize that the value of a member isn't in how closely he aligns with the party, but how closely he aligns COMPARED TO HIS CONSTITUENCY. This is the reason why I tolerate Ben Nelson; he's annoying, but Nebraska can scarcely be expected to elect anyone better. It's also the reason I despise Joe Lieberman - Connecticut, you can do better!