Thanks. For 9/11-generation Ivy League veterans, there’s no better example than this group: http://milvets.columbia.edu/ . Better yet, they’re mostly enlisted veterans, so they were formatively American soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen before becoming Ivy Leaguers.

Check out Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. Marlantes went to Yale and was a Rhodes Scholar, then went into the Marines and did a combat tour in Vietnam. Incredible story and book.

Ivy League military veterans are a breed apart. Ivy League combat veterans are rare.

Then he became a serious player for the Republican nomination. Suddenly, on no evidence other than some rumors that were heard by somebody who claimed to be friendly with somebody who claimed to know something the New York Times had McCain diddling some media consultant.

Remember that?

I know the above was intended to disparage Senator Cotton, in addition to Sarah Palin, but my take on it is that if a Harvard grad, by definition one of the intellectual elite, is in agreement with Sarah Palin, her ideas can’t be that bad.

As a graduate of flagship State U’s, what is important to me is not where someone graduated, but what they say, think, and do. I also realize that not everyone at a given institution follows that institution’s social norms. Just because Tom Cotton is a Haavaad grad, and many Haavaad grads consider themselves one of the annointed, doesn’t mean that Tom Cotton follows that Haavaad norm.

Of the Haavaad grads I have known, some are insufferable asses, and some are not.

Heather Digby Parton is the kind of person who is nonplussed when confronted by the actual law and policy, fact basis of OIF.