Moral Geniuses

From a comment on The Daily Kos:

...But do I still support the individual men and women who have given so much to serve their country?
No. I think they’re a bunch of idiots. I also think they’re morally retarded. Because they sign a contract that says they will kill whoever you tell me to kill. And that is morally retarded.
Friends, the most important moral decision a man makes in the course of a day is "Who am I going to kill today?"
That’s a decision you should agonize over, dream about, rehearse in your mind for hours, not just leave up to some hare-brained President you didn’t even vote for.
A man’s killing list is a very personal matter. It should be between him and those persistent voices in his head.
So to sum up, I don’t like our troops, I don’t like what they’re doing, I don’t like their fat, whining families, and yet, I support them. Thank God I live in a free country.

I'd actually argue that looking down the barrel of a firearm, of any caliber, and pulling the trigger because you are under orders to do so, requires a level of moral insight greater than most of us have. Morally retarded would seem to indicate someone who is slow, or backward in his/her moral development. I haven't met a combat soldier/sailor/airman yet who would say, honestly, that warfare didn't trouble him or her. Even those who shut away the pain and don't think about the carnage once they come home, aren't morally retarded. Those are just the folks fighting for a way to deal. No, the real morally retarded are the people who criticize other's moral choices without ever having faced such a choice themselves. They are morally shallow, lacking the depth to realize that the very right which they espouse by their dissent was paid for by those they so naively disparage.

Thank God for the men and women who, throughout history, have awakened in the night screaming at the remembered horrors of warfare, but risen the next morning to go out once more and face the demons again.