Chickenhawks Cook Books on Army Recruit Backgrounds

You may recall that just the other day I posted about a study that says its still the poorest people who are joining the Army. Quelle suprise, this week the Washington Times is carrying water for the chickenhawks at wingnut think-tank The Heritage Foundation. They say that they found that a higher percentage of middle-class and upper-middle-class families have been providing enlistees for the war on Islamic militants since the September 11 attacks on the United States. Then again, they seem to suggest that "middle-class" is any family earning more than $30,000 a year -

"The poorest neighborhoods provided 18 percent of recruits in prewar 1999 and 14.6 percent in 2003. By contrast, areas where household incomes ranged from $30,000 to $200,000 provided more than 85 percent."

Let me just put that beside this quote from last week's report:

Nearly two-thirds, 64 percent, of recruits to the military were from counties that have average incomes lower than the national median National Priorities Project said. The group looked at Department of Defense data for 2004.

The Heritage report states that median household income for all enlisted recruits in 1999 was $41,141, compared with the national median of $41,994. By 2003, the recruit household income reached $42,822, when adjusted for inflation. That doesn't sound like a hell of a lot of those recruits came from the $200,000 end of the Foundation's 'middle-class' bracket.

The breathtaking audacity of this study, and the mindless way in which the Washington Times simply parroted their press release without looking at figures a child could see were being seriously cooked to produce the report's foregone conclusion, tells you that the chickenhawks and BTK personalities in charge of the GOP will lie about anything and everything.