Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Okay, I'm a bad, mean-spirited person. I admit it.

Some time back I reported here that one of the Junior Woodchucks from Third Way, one of my favorite components of the Fromsphere, had been called up for military service in Iraq:

Sean Barney is a Senior Policy Advisor at Third Way. Serving in that capacity, Sean has been an integral part of the first year of this organization....

Sean is also a Marine Corps Reservist. He enlisted in the military just after 9/11, while a senior member of the staff of Senator Tom Carper. Lance Corporal Barney is a machinegunner with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 25th Marines and in October 2005, he was called up to serve a tour of duty in Iraq.

Now Third Way is quite a War Democrat outfit, so they lost no time in signing poor Barney up to contribute a regular diary on their site, with this unutterably smarmy sendoff:

We know that you will join us in wishing fair winds and following seas to Sean and his fellow Marines who are headed to Iraq.

Yecchh. Barney, like a good soldier, kept his side of the deal, contributing chipper little War Dem travelogues:

We conducted a big raid last night. We were targeting a cell of al Qaeda snipers, but all we found in the house was a large extended family. It’s impossible to know if it was a safe house and the snipers had fled, but the family seemed genuinely innocent. In any case I felt bad for them. We woke them up in the middle of the night and gave them quite a scare. I’m sure the children will not soon forget the sight of Marines with bright lights searching their home and interrogating their father and grandfather at gunpoint. These things are unavoidable under the circumstances, but it is still a shame. One little girl was wearing an American flag t-shirt. Hopefully, she will still be wearing that shirt a week from now.

She will if she knows what's good for her, I expect.

Anyway, I was enjoying Barney's Ernie Pyle schtick quite a lot, but apparently there won't be any more of it. Here's the latest:

May 16, 2006

Editors Note:

On May 12, Sean was seriously wounded in an ambush in Fallujah. While we do not yet know the details of the attack or if others in his unit were hurt, Sean was shot in the throat, treated in Iraq and quickly evacuated to Germany and then to Bethesda Medical Center in Maryland.

His current condition is stable but serious.... Doctors still cannot predict the full extent or permanence of his injuries.

Now not even I am heartless enough to derive any Schadenfreude from poor Barney's predicament. But I can't help wondering whether Barney's colleagues, the cocky little cubicle-bombardier creeps of Third Way, the careerist reptiles who gave us the phrase "Tough and Smart in Iraq," are having any second thoughts. I'd like to think so -- but I doubt it.

In my earlier post I expressed a wish that they'd all go to Iraq. I would now like to repeat that wish, with a windward gun for emphasis. And fair winds and following seas to the lot of 'em, all the way to some particularly nasty circle of Hell.