The Rocky Mountain News continues the left wing propaganda that the U.S. military is preying on poor and disenfranchised Americans.

"We" can blather on about how freedom isn't free, and Gettysburg and Omaha Beach, but it's the great anonymous "they" - the kids from the projects in Rangel's Brooklyn congressional district and from depressed farming towns in North Dakota, and from East Los Angeles barrios - who do the fighting and the dying.

This is accepted as gospel on the Left, but the problem is the facts don't support the assertion. Just last night Major Garret reported the facts:

Now what about the charge that an all volunteer force is poorer, less educated, and more minority? Well a Heritage Foundation study last year, analyzing census data on income, race, region and education, found there that military recruits before and after 9/11 were more middle class than poor, more rural than urban, better educated than the general public, and that whites joined in higher proportions to the general population than all minority groups.

Now, I am sure some will ignore those findings because they come from the Heritage Foundation, but hard data from the census bureau is pretty difficult to fudge. The Heritage study has been out for over a year and I have not seen a credible attempt to refute its findings.

It's fine to dislike Bush and it's fine to oppose the war, but why does the left insist on perpetuating this myth?

And by the way, it is this exact attitude that got Senator Kerry in trouble with his "joke."