Not Smart and You Can't Make Me

A recent accidental reader (obviously not one of the five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon) commented on the Colonel's reference to Islamo-fascism thus: "...I find it hard to respect any 'educated' writer who uses the term Islamo-fascist." The Colonel takes great umbrage with that remark.

The Colonel has never, ever claimed to be "educated."

The five of you who regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon know full well that the Colonel didn't even go to college...; the Colonel went to Ole Miss instead.

And, immediately following the four years of study-avoidance that marked his matriculation at what has since become widely known as the Harvard of the South (by reciprocal agreement, Harvard is allowed to call itself the Ole Miss of the North), the Marine Corps proceeded to heavily plaster over any vestige of the liberal arts education (a more accurate term would probably be minimal exposure) the Colonel had accidentally accrued whilst whiling away the last of his care-free youth in the kudzu-clad hills of North Mississippi with a liberal slathering of the fine art of leading men in the killing of the enemies of our nation and the destruction of their tools and toys. And, given that the Marine Corps is considered by most to be the single largest repository of the nation's Cretins and Neanderthals, anything that organization taught the Colonel can, therefore, in no way be mistaken for an "education."

Granted, the Colonel did have ample opportunity to further his, ahem, "education" over the years. Sadly, those opportunities were wasted in the most egregious fashion. A year as a student (and two further years as the Marine representative on the instructor staff) at the Air Forces' postgraduate equivalent Air Command and Staff College were mainly spent making fun of aviators and mocking the airpower zealots' mistaken belief in the primacy of strategic attack from the air.

Oh, there was that year spent coincident at the local extension of the ubiquitous Troy State diploma mill, from which the Colonel received a masters degree in Human Resource Management. But, it turns out that what the Marine Corps had already taught the Colonel about leading men in combat was quite easily translated into what was required to make the grade in case study analyses of the corrective actions needed to make boys and girls place nicely together in an office setting.

Yeah, and there was that summer at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk. That's where the Colonel bought his first set of golf clubs.

The Colonel did suffer a year of incarceration behind enemy lines in Newport, Rhode Island where he attended the Navy War College and received that highly esteemed and universally applicable Master of Arts in National Security and Strategic Studies.

Actually, it turns out that knowing how to employ joint and combined military hard power in consonance with diplomatic and NGO soft power to influence the strategic will of another nation is not that readily applicable in the private sector as one might think. Not in the Colonel's experience, anyway.

So, it seems that the Colonel's decision to settle on a 100 acres and buy a tractor is perhaps the most educated thing he has ever done.