Krauthammer vs. Generals

Charles Krauthammer usually manages to piss me off. So he's got an MD? An MD friend of mine says that an MD is easy compared to a PhD. So he's got a law degree? So do a lot of people who aren't able to apply what they learned to living inside the law. And when he goes off, as he did last Friday, on retired generals who (heaven forbid!) are saying unkind things about Rumsfeld and Bush, he really pisses me off. I'd love to hear what my father-in-law, a retired military officer and (now) a staunch Democrat, has to say on the subject.
See, Dad wrote a letter to the Washington Post about a year ago when the Swift Boat slugs crawled out from under their rocks to attack John Kerry for his opposition to the Viet Nam war. As Dad pointed out, free speech is the right of every American, but it particularly belongs to those who have fought for it. And the generals surely fall into that category. Apparently Charlie Krauthammer thinks that people in the armed forces should permanently give up some of the rights of American citizens rather than just checking them at the door and picking them up as they leave the service.
Charlie seems to think that the generals kept quiet while they were still in uniform. I'm not so sure. Some of these guys were one-stars before the war, and in the Pentagon, where anything less than a bird colonel is a go-fer, a one-star isn't going to get much of an audience. Anything they said would have had to percolate up the chain of command to Rummy, and those who told the truth--see Shinsecki--suffered the consequences. It's entirely possible that some of these guys made their thoughts known to their superiors, and their superiors (for whatever reasons) refused to carry the message forward. ("One-star, what you say makes sense to me, but my fourth star makes even more sense, so I'm not going to tell the boss.") And they were soldiers, so they didn't step outside of the Pentagon and make their cases to the first reporters they could find. That's part of being a good soldier, and being a good soldier matters a lot to officers.
The generals have every right to call it as they see it. If they didn't do so when they were in uniform, shame on them. If they did and they were ignored by those who outranked them, those who outrank them are a disgrace to their uniforms. The Republican Revolution is over. The defection of military is a clear sign.