This came from one of my nice wingnut clients- she is a genuinely sweet person who just can't imagine that everything she has been led to believe politically is a lie and those she supports are criminals and liars. So, when I get something from her straight from the Monkeymail network, I like to pass along a nice de-bunking.
More after the fold-
I puked before The Dukester got through his first sentence, let's see if you do better.
http://sagebrushpatriot.com/...
My response; (all true of course)
You know what's funny about that, Peggy? John Wayne has this image as a super-patriot which is all fine and good, but when WW2 broke out, Wayne was 34 and his career had just started to take off. He was making big money for the first time in his life. His friend, John Ford, the Director of so many Wayne movies enlisted right away and made some of the most intense combat documentaries of the war and was actually under fire a good deal of the time he was doing this. He asked his friend, Wayne why he didn't enlist- a fair question- and Wayne told him the truth- for the first time in his life he had a chance to make a whole bunch of money and if he went into the armed forces, his career would be ruined and might not ever recover. That was a fair concern, but guys like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable didn't think in those terms and joined up. Stewart went on to skipper a B-17 and flew 25 combat missions. Gable insisted on being an enlisted man and when the brass found out he had gotten himself assigned as a B-17 waist gunner they flipped out and pulled him off that duty- too dangerous! But Wayne, his career came first and due to so many of the Hollywood leading man types had enlisted, Wayne's career REALLY took off because there were so many fewer leads available for film work. Wayne got jobs that he wouldn't have been the first choice for absent the war.
Wayne made a lot of patriotic movies during the war and it sure could be argued that he did more good that way than actually being in the armed forces but that's not why he failed to enlist- his career came first, not his country. Maybe his super-patriotism after the war was his way of assuaging a little bit of a guilty conscience, I don't know. I sure liked his movies though.
cross posted at Conceptual Guerilla Strategy and Tactics