Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt on the Downed Chinook

The Left simply doesn't have these types of discussion:

HH: Mark Steyn joins us from Steynonline.com, columnist to the world. Mark, it always hurts to have people killed in the war, but sixteen at once, and especially special forces, SEALs, and their Army counterparts. A really grim day for the military.

MS: Yes, it is. These are perhaps the best trained fighting men anywhere on the planet. Not just fighting men, that doesn't really begin to do justice to it. But they're also people who in this particular war, proved expert at liaising with very different local tribesmen and very different local configurations of forces, and figuring out, really, hill by hill, the best way to deal with the problem. And one of the reasons that we don't hear a lot from Afghanistan, is because the kind of men who died in this crash have done such a great job at fighting this war in such a successful and low-key way, that it kind of dropped off the radar. And this reminds us of what they're engaged in there is very real and still a war.

HH: I recall when we were at the Naval Academy together two years ago this past April, I asked to meet the captain of the water polo team, because I follow polo. And he came up, and I asked him what he's going to do, and he said he's going to the SEALs. I don't know where he is right now, but he had said that the Academy had seen a huge surge in their midshipmen who were signing up to go and serve in the SEALs. An interesting counterpoint, really, to those Americans who want to cut and run in Iraq, versus those who want to go...not just the front line. I mean there are brave people serving all through Iraq. But they want to go right in the ravine where the Taliban and the Al Qaeda are.

MS: Yes, and I think what we forget as well is that it's easy to talk about where the big land forces are in this war. But there's an awful lot of countries around the world, not just Afghanistan, but all kinds of little tiny pin pricks all over the map, where small numbers of U.S. special forces are engaged in holding down small local branches of this Islamist terrorist thing. Because these guys are trying to basically destabilize every country. I mean, just to pull a country at random off the top of my head, something like 700 people have been killed by Islamic terrorism in Thailand in the last two years. This is a country everyone thinks of as a popular tourist destination, and a country that doesn't have any real internal problems. Yet that's been destabilized. And what the U.S. special forces have been particularly effective at, in places like the Horn of Africa and other parts of the world, is sending small numbers of people in to work with whoever's on the ground there, and to roll back some of these advances these guys made. I mean, that's really the future of the modern Army, and the modern Navy, and a modern advanced nation's military, not whether you've got huge bases of fixed forces in Germany and Belgium and all the rest of it.

Is anyone on the Left as well-informed about the modern military as lawyer Hewitt and columnist Steyn are?

It is painful to watch the Lefties try to cover a war when they loathe the military and lack any knowledge whatsoever of military art, having not served themselves.