The "chickenhawk" accusation and Senator Barbara Boxer

You may have heard that Senator Barbara Boxer from California recently tried to politcally smear Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As Reported by the New York Post:

Rice appeared before the Senate in defense of President Bush's tactical change in Iraq, and quickly encountered Boxer.

"Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price," Boxer said. "My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young."

Then, to Rice: "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family."

Note the self-refuting character of these remarks. If Secretary Rice is presumed to have no understanding of life and death in the context of war, Senator Boxer is all too willing to extend that same intellectual disqualification to herself. It's as if Senator Boxer believes so strongly in the "chickenhawk" accusation that she's willing to throw her own immediate Presidential ambitions (her grandson won't be too young for military service forever) into the dustbin in order to prove her disinterested affirmation of such an accusation.