Ed Morrissey sees a trend in how Democrats are denigrating John McCain's military service as his being someone who got into the Navy riding on his family's prestige and then didn't serve very long in combat before he was shot down and didn't do any fighting on the ground so his air combat just doesn't matter as much as if he'd been in the infantry.

Now we have at least three Democrats and Obama supporters on the record as attacking McCain's 24 years of service in the Navy: Gillespie, Jay Rockefeller, and Tom Harkin, as well as unnamed "colleagues" in the Matt Bai hit piece in the New York Times. The criticisms sound remarkably similar; all of them question the quality of his service, claiming that he grew up as a child of privilege and had his career handed to him, in a role where he didn't know what combat was really like. He had a "silver spoon", was "Navy royalty", and so on.

This sounds like someone wants to fight the elitist stink that has attached itself to the Barack Obama campaign through the intrepidity of the candidate himself. Obama scorned middle-America voters as bitterly clinging to guns and God because of a lack of wealth redistribution in America, while his wife told audiences that she only starting taking pride in America when people supported Obama's bid for the presidency, and his pastor and friend talked about the US government's creation of the HIV virus as a genocidal tool against people of color. Team Obama has argued ever since that McCain is the real elitist, and not the Harvard-educated man who sat on boards with William Ayers and never knew he had befriended an unrepentant domestic terrorist.

Remember how upset Democrats got about the Swivt Boat Veterans for Truth for questioning John Kerry's short service in Vietnam. So some of these Obama supporters are now in the position of saying that it was despicable to criticize anything about Kerry's service, yet McCain's is fair game. I doubt whether they're going to get anywhere dissing McCain's military background. Sure, lefty blogs and their mouthpieces in the press will take up the cry, but they just aren't going to get much traction with these sorts of attacks.

The question is why experienced politicians would try this tactic. Perhaps they really fear the aura of hero that McCain has due to the courage he showed as a POW. Or maybe they just don't get the military and deep down dislike the military. John Hawkins has compiled quite a list of comments that liberals have made about the military. For people who think that way, McCain's record of service is not a plus, but a negative that can be exploited.

I'm not saying that Obama feels this way or is dumb enough to make such accusations in public, but Morrissey is correct about the emerging trend of Obama supporters going on the attack against McCain's service.

Betsy blogs daily at Betsy's Page