The Smoking Marine

Blogging Lileks seems redundant, but I have to call attention to his prose now and then, it's just too good.

Here he is on the "controversy" about the smoking Marine:

For God's sake, if Patton were alive today he'd be slapping civilians. Granted, we're talking about a select stratum of the population whose undies come pre-bunched, but even by their standards this is ridiculous. You get the sense that this was the last straw for some -- it's bad enough that we have soldiers in Iraq (if we have to have soldiers AT ALL) but to have conspicuously smoking soldiers just rubs their nose in it all. It's stuff like this that makes the standard imagery of WW2 look like dispatches from an alternate dimension[...]