Keeping Up With the Frenches

Last updated on: July 27, 2011 at 12:44 pm by David French

Keeping Up With the Frenches 2011-07-27T12:44:00-05:00 David French

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Today in Townhall I ask why there aren’t more veterans in America’s op-ed pages. It begins:

After almost one full decade of continuous war, the gap between America’s veterans and our cultural elites is wider than ever. With ROTC (until recently) removed from our top-tier campuses, lingering anti-military biases that date from the Vietnam war, and an understandable reticence to risk promising futures on foreign battlefields, our culture-makers have shunned military service – at great cost to our country.

Take a look at the editorial pages of five of America’s largest-circulation and most influential publications, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. How many columnist-veterans do you see? How many veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan? By my count, I don’t see a single veteran of our current wars.

Yesterday in The Corner, Nancy talked about Alex P. Keaton, the New York Times, and teen sex. She begins:

Alex P. Keaton, 17, lost his virginity to a college student he wooed over a discussion about his favorite economist, Milton Friedman.

I realized this after we began showing our kids 1980s-era TV shows, after running out of bandwidth for Hannah Montana. Over the past years, the kids have laughed at Murdock’s antics on the A-Team, imitated Arnold’s ”WhatchutalkingaboutWillis” on Diff’rent Strokes, and enjoyed Dr. Huxtable’s rants on The Cosby Show.

And Christianity Today reviewed our book! The bottom line? The reviewer liked it . . . except for our politics. Her core paragraphs:

The Frenches are funny, incisive writers, never straying into overly sentimental territory. The book winsomely recounts their sometimes comical, often touching daily lives: buying a dog for the kids from fancy dog breeders, stumping for a Mormon Yankee governor in Tennessee, being crammed into armored vehicles, seeing World of Warcraft triumph over Rock Band as the base’s game of choice. They let us peek in on their communication, misunderstandings, and deep love for one another.

While the integrity of the authors’ decision to go beyond mere patriotic words toward real and risky action is inspiring, at times the book suffers from an overdose of political commentary. Nancy admits that “politics bound us together in the way some couples play golf or watch movies,” and the Frenches are well known in the conservative political world: David is senior legal counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, and he and Nancy (whose previous books include the memoir A Red State of Mind) campaign for Mitt Romney, run the popular Evangelicals for Mitt blog, and are regular commentators in publications such as National Review.

That’s the news for now. Stay tuned. More to come.

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