Dan Choi Does Tell

An Incoherent Elaine Donnelly Attacks Dan Choi After Interview

Submitted by David Hart on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 13:43

Elaine Donnelly needs a new calendar. Her date-marker seems to be stuck in the nineteenth century. Donnelly, through her inaptly named Center for Military Readiness, is obsessed with preventing gays from serving openly in the military. With financial backing from uber right-winger, Phyllis Schlafly (Schlafly is on CMR's board), Donnelly has made a career of misreading, misrepresenting and, in some cases, manufacturing information that supports her narrow-minded point of view.

Last April, a group called Flag & General Officers for the Military sent a letter signed by roughly 1,000 retired military to President Obama and members of Congress. The letter, which was sent from Jefferson Government Relations in DC. — a lobbying firm that co-owned by Thomas R. Donnelly, Jr. (relation to Elaine unknown), strongly opposes gays serving openly in the military.

Lt. Dan Choi is a West Point graduate and an Arab Linguist. Choi, who served as an infantry officer in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, currently serves with the New York National Guard. In March, he outed himself on the Rachel Maddow Show. He has since received a discharge letter. A final decision, by the commander of First Army and the chief of the National Guard Bureau, is still pending.

On October 6, Choi and Donnelly appeared together on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360º (Video below).Cooper begins the segment with a quote from Col. Prakash from the Pentagon's Joint Force Quarterly:




"There is no scientific evidence to support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if homosexuals serve openly."

An obviously exasperated Cooper kept taking Donnelly to task for not answering questions. Donnelly essentially persisted in suggesting that the law is good because it is the law — or something to that effect. She then tried to score points with her retired officers letter. Cooper did a good job of pressing for coherent answers from an incoherent guest. He also pointed out that Donnelly has never served and has never been to Iraq or Afghanistan. Donnelly goes on to suggest – falsely – that repeal would "force" personnel out of the military. Donnelly also falsely desribes the retired officers' letter as formal statements (plural).

In response, Lt. Choi used some hyperbole claiming that Donnelly trolled retirement homes to get these signatures. It was not intended as a literal statement of fact. On the whole, these folks are elderly retirees. While some served after DADT went into effect, it was in the waning years of their careers and their views are largely shaped by the military culture of 30 or 40 years ago.

Given that Donnelly was so inept at making any persuasive arguments for her position, she (or some unnamed person at CMR) attacks Choi and Cooper ad hominem. It took almost a week for Donnelly to craft some sort of rebuttal which is really no more compelling than her cartoonish appearance on Cooper's show:

With the help of Anderson Cooper, who conducted the interview as an unabashed advocate of repealing the law, Daniel Choi made a statement that was simply untrue. When Elaine mentioned that more than 1,150 high-ranking officers had personally signed a formal statement in support of the 1993 Eligibility Law, Daniel Choi falsely described the Flags & General Officers for the Military (FGOM) as being "in their seventies and eighties," and living in "senior citizen centers" where Elaine "collected" their signatures.

Choi also claimed that most had not served under the current law, which he misdescribed as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." On the contrary, of the Army generals whose retirement dates are known, a clear majority retired since 1994, when current law went into effect. Some were in leadership roles during the post-9/11 and still-current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. To state the obvious, it takes many years to earn the respect of peers and four-star rank in the military, building on decades of decision-making experience that 20-somethings do not have.

The intemperate attack on former military leaders who had served our country with distinction--51 of them having retired in four-star rank--said more about Daniel Choi than it did about anyone else. Choi's comment was ironic in view of the fact that many of the retired flags and generals are very involved in second careers, running businesses, volunteering time, raising money for military charitable organizations, consulting with the Department of Defense, and traveling frequently.