Remember “Oddball,” the hippie tank commander memorably played by Donald Sutherland in the 1970 Clint Eastwood movie, Kelly’s Heroes?

Evidently, he’s now in command of the National Guard:

Does this mean that concurrently, the Peace Corps will be tooling around in heavily armed Abrams tanks, just to offset the absurdity? (And note the initials GTE, which represented something a bit more forward-thinking in happier times.)

Since the dawn of the 20th century, American “progressives” used the concept of “the moral equivalent of war” to ram through their punitive ideas. As Thomas Sowell once told an interviewer:

There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

After 9/11, global warming became the latest example of that notion; a way for those rather squishy about actually defeating terrorism to have some to get excited about and to provide a distraction from the fight — recall this Time magazine cover story in 2008, which attempted to equate crippling the economy in the name of global warming with the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima:

And now the phony-war of the left is joined by a real-life division of our military.

On the other hand, look at the upside. What would Osama bin Laden think of them quitting — only temporarily one hopes — the war on terror, whatever it’s call this week, to fight global warming?

Actually, he’s pretty cool with the idea, curiously enough — who said radical Islam couldn’t coexist with another religion?

And if this doesn’t get the military back in the good graces of Harvard, nothing will.