As a vet, I also have no issue with those who choose not to server.
That being said, it does raise an eyebrow that there are six men (the father and five sons) in the family, yet not a single one of them served their country in any capacity whatsoever.
It makes me wonder if there couldn't some issue at hand - like Dad/Grandad advising against it or perhaps them having some other type of compunction. A mindset of thinking it's beneath them?
Not saying that's the case, but it seems odd to have an entire prominent family of American men shun military service.
That being said, it does raise an eyebrow that there are six men (the father and five sons) in the family, yet not a single one of them served their country in any capacity whatsoever.
The problems goes even further back than that. It's not just Mitt and his sons who have never served in the military, it the entire Romney clan going back to 1840.
It makes me wonder if there couldn't some issue at hand - like Dad/Grandad advising against it or perhaps them having some other type of compunction. A mindset of thinking it's beneath them?
Or perhaps it's just a mindset of viewing this country as merely a resource to be exploited for their own benefit, economically, politically, etc., but to which they owe no real allegiance or commitment (after all, military service requires the Oath, and the pledge of your lives).
The tragedy of Mitt Romney is twofold. First, he's extremely intelligent, competent, "clean and articulate", but he has no core. There is absolutely nothing on which he won't compromise, no principle which he won't sacrifice, nothing on which he'll draw the line and fight to the death.
In an earlier, less critical time in our history, he'd have made an okay President, but in what's coming down the pike real soon he'd be a disaster.
Second, the lifelong raw, naked lust for the Presidency of both him and his father is a great big honking red flag to anyone with a brain. Anyone who wants the job that badly should not be trusted - their needs and desires will always trump the needs of the country and it's people. The narcissist we currently have may yet prove fatal to the Republic - we dare not risk another.
None of what follows should be misunderstood as saying Romney would make a good president. At one point during the last election campaign I liked Romney because of his business background and his claim to affirm traditional family values, which was at least better than the positions of McCain and some of the other Republican candidates. The more I learned about Romney, the less I liked him, and I eventually voted for Mike Huckabee. At this point I don't trust Romney, period.
However, let's be honest — military service today is rare, and becomes even rarer at the upper echelons of income. Show me the son of a wealthy man who joins the military, and he'll probably either be from a family with a long heritage of military service or someone who got really mad after 9/11 and decided to do something that had never entered his mind before we got attacked by Islamofascists. Good for them, but they are rare. Even at West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy, how many cadets are from upper-class families like Romney? There was a day that all the Kennedy sons joined the military, and both Bushes served, but the day of upper-class people viewing it as their duty to serve in the officer corps is long past.
Furthermore, most people with enough experience to be president would have been of military age during Vietnam or the years immediately following Vietnam when our military was being gutted by Congressional funding cuts, and that wasn't exactly the era of long lines of people thanking veterans for their service.
Given how incredibly unpopular the military was during the late 1960s and the 1970s, I'm happy to give “extra credit” to a person who chose to join the military during that period who is now running for office, but I am not at all sure that lack of military service, especially during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, is something we should hold against people if they're otherwise pro-defense.
That being said, it troubles me that apparently nobody from the Romney family has **EVER** served in the military. AAABest may be on to something about a history of being opposed to military service. In the early days that's probably explainable because of the anti-federal attitudes in the Mormon Church, and maybe that applies as late as World War I, but I'd like to see a good biographical explanation of what the Romney family was doing during World War II. (Yes, I already know that during Vietnam, Mitt Romney was doing the standard tour of Mormon mission work and obtained a legitimate religious worker deferment.)
I realize the Mormons place a high priority on young men doing their mission work after high school and that's probably part of the low rate of enlistment cited by people here about Utah. On the other hand, I know that the Defense Language Institute gets a fair number of Mormons who decide to learn a foreign language for future mission work courtesy of Uncle Sam, and I think we need to respect Mormons who choose to serve their country in that way, even if I cannot in any way endorse what they plan to teach after getting out of the military.