Leftwingnut blogs (sorry, no linkage for morons) are still invoking the “chickenhawk” myth, that no president who hasn’t seen military service should send soldiers into war.
I guess this rules out Hillary, Obama or Edwards ever sending any U.S. soldiers on any mission, in the unlikely event one of them is elected.
The ChickenHawk rule is absolute and infallible, that explains why Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and FDR were all such terrible war-time presidents, because of their lack of military experience?
You can throw in James Madison, president during the War of 1812, who never served in the military. And James K. Polk, president during the Mexican-American War. We won all those wars, for the record. Or at least didn’t lose them, in the case of the War of 1812.
Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, did the ultimate chickenhawk act: he BOUGHT his way out of the army by hiring a replacement, yet this haughty pup had the audacity to use the US military to expand American influence:
“In his second term Cleveland stated that by 1892, the U.S. Navy had been used to promote American interests in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Argentina, Brazil, and Hawaii. Under Cleveland, the U.S. adopted a broad interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that did not just simply forbid new European colonies but declared an American interest in any matter within the hemisphere.”
(source: Wikipedia)
(Lincoln did spend a few weeks in a militia, but it was less than Bush’s time in the TANG and he never saw action.)