Fox News: Volunteers Don't Deserve GI Bill

Posted by Ali Frick, Think Progress at 1:00 PM on May 27, 2008.

After garnering 256 votes in the House, Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-VA) 21st Century GI Bill passed the Senate last week with 75 votes. Yesterday, on Memorial Day, the New York Times criticized President Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — who skipped the vote — for opposing the bill, writing that Bush and McCain “would prefer that college benefits for service members remain just mediocre enough that people in uniform are more likely to stay put.”

Discussing the op-ed this morning, Fox and Friends’s Brian Kilmeade defended Bush and McCain, saying their position is “just a different emphasis.” He insisted that current circumstances are “different” than after World War II, when the original GI bill was passed, because today’s veterans volunteered to serve:

This is just a different emphasis. … After all this is different. People point to, ‘Well, look what they did after World War II.’ Well after World War II, people were conscripted. They said, ‘You’re joining.’ They said for doing that and winning the war, here’s a college education. Now, people are saying, ‘I want to be a military person. I am signing on in a volunteer force.’

In reality, Bush and McCain’s stance on the GI Bill is not just a “different emphasis.” McCain’s watered-down alternative reserves the most generous benefits to those who serve at least 12 years. Furthermore, soldiers would not “jump off to college after three years,” as Kilmeade suggested, because they would still have to complete their enlistment terms.

The Congressional Budget Office report concluded any reduction in enlistment rates is made up for in recruitment increases. And as Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America pointed out, “The GI Bill is the military’s single most effective recruitment tool; the number one reason civilians join the military is to get money for college.”

Fox and Friends’s Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson also took up the White House line, slamming the Times for its “vitriolic” (or, as Carlson said, “vitrolic”) criticisms. Carlson said Bussh thinks soldiers “should serve more time before they get a free education.” She quickly added, “Not that he’s against military at all,” to which Doocy interjected, “No!”