WHO FIGHTS? Man, The Corner's really in damage control mode lately. Depending on the day, you'll have dozens of posts on Santorum's just-around-the-corner comeback, James Webb's novels, Casey's corruption, Kerry incorrect wording the astoundingly banal point that Ivy League grads are underrepresented in Iraq, etc. Thankfully, on Tapped, we're still talking about John Kenneth Galbraith -- none of this relevant, topical, "election" stuff. On the Kerry comment, my understanding is that this is a lower-middle class war. After Vietnam, the military began requiring a high school diploma, so you cut out really poor or really uneducated recruits (this always struck me, incidentally, as a bad idea: So long as we're going to have an army, it may as well offer upward mobility and discipline to those who can most use it). Nevertheless, the privileged don't serve. So what you get is a bell curve distribution, shifted a bit to the poorer end of the income scale. Data on this stuff is hard to come by, but I assume Spackerman or Rob can speak to this more authoritatively than I can.
--Ezra Klein