The view from Manhattan

One has to wonder who Peggy Noonan knows. She says:

I've never met a career military man who was a conservative on social issues. I think they tend to see questions such as abortion and marriage as essentially uninteresting, private and not subject to the movement of machines. (Connected to this, I suspect Mr. Webb will benefit to some degree by the high number of military retirees in Virginia. They're always assumed to be hawks on Iraq. From personal experience I'd say a high percentage have been dubious about the war, many from the beginning.)

I guess living in Manhattan will do that to you.

If she thinks that career military people don't care about gay marriage, I think she is mistaken. More importantly, a vote to put Democrats in charge of national defense and the Pentagon is not a referendum on the wisdom of fighting in Iraq. It is a choice between two very different views of America and our role in the world. The predominant Democratic vision of America and the role of the American military is attractive to an extremely small percentage of career military people.

Peggy Noonan is a great crafter of words. She wrote great speeches and sometimes writes good columns. Her analysis, however, is often lacking. It seems to suffer from over-exposure to the type of thinking that dominates her neighborhood.