CHARLIE RANGEL: LYING WITHOUT SHAME OR COMPUNCTION

What is it about leftists? They don't seem to have the DNA for shame at all. Here's Charlie Rangel in black & white, in print, in the New York Daily News, with an outright and easily checked lie about the Armed Forces:

The great majority of people bearing arms for this country in Iraq are from the poorer communities in our inner cities and rural areas, places where enlistment bonuses are up to $40,000 and thousands in educational benefits are very attractive. For people who have college as an option, those incentives - at the risk to one's life - don't mean a thing.

As an elected Representative, he should know better. The facts are easily verified. Military recruits are better educated than the general youth population; they have higher average aptitudes; and they are not drawn from "the poorer communities in our inner cities and rural areas" -- they are solidly middle class:

In summary, the additional years of recruit data (2004–2005) sup­port the previous finding that U.S. military recruits are more similar than dissimilar to the American youth population. The slight dif­ferences are that wartime U.S. mil­itary enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on aver­age than their civilian peers.

Recruits have a higher percent­age of high school graduates and representation from Southern and rural areas. No evidence indicates exploitation of racial minorities (either by race or by race-weighted ZIP code areas). Finally, the distri­bution of household income of recruits is noticeably higher than that of the entire youth population.

Here's how to tell that Charlie Rangel is lying: his mouth is open, and speech is coming out.

On this Thanksgiving Day, let us pause to be thankful that our Nation's call for military volunteers is still being answered by the best, the brightest, and the bravest young men and women in the entire world. (Read more at Betsy's and Gateway.)