Word: uniforms
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...been said that the clothes make the man, and nowhere is this truer than in the military. A soldier's uniform denotes everything from allegiance and branch to title and rank. And when it comes to camouflage, it can mean the difference between life and death - a point brought up by U.S. lawmakers as Congress prepared to pass a $106 billion emergency war-spending bill that will fund, among other things, some 70,000 new uniforms for troops in Afghanistan. Evidently the country's muddy, mountainous terrain clashes with the "universal camouflage pattern" designed for dusty desert cities like Basra...
...criticism of his style as a function of the mission he was asked to do. "Change is hard" has remained a frequent refrain of his. Chosen to lead the Defense Department as the agent of change, Rumsfeld said he expected that he would come under attack. "People in uniform resisted, and people in civilian clothes resisted; the Congress resisted," he recounted in an interview. "They don't call it the Iron Triangle for nothing, between the permanent bureaucracy and the defense contractors and the Congress. They're permanent, and the people coming in are temporary...
...once the conquering was done, Muslim leaders found that trying to compel uniform belief in a multinational empire was a lose-lose game. Doctrines granting freedom of worship to Christians and Jews emerged promptly. And later, such freedom would also be granted to Buddhists and polytheists...
...members of Congress is going to have to vote to undo the ban - and that will have its political fallout. Obama is plainly taking his cue from the 1993 fiasco, which hurt Clinton's relationship with conservative members of Congress, both Democratic and Republican, and with many in uniform...
...Obama also has some ammunition that Clinton never had: a new Gallup poll finds that most conservatives - 58% - now support openly gay people serving in uniform (nationally, 69% support the change; when Clinton assumed office, a Gallup poll found 53% of those polled opposed lifting the ban). Perhaps even more surprising, 58% of self-described Republicans, and 60% of weekly churchgoers, also support gay men and women serving openly in uniform. "While the Administration to date has not taken action on the issue," the polling firm reported last Friday, "the Gallup Poll data indicate that the public-opinion environment favors...