Yes, I made two mistakes in this Corner post: The original post had the guard listed as a Marine. He’s an Army infantryman. And the picture is from September, as indicated in the story I linked to, not from yesterday.
But Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post tries to make a funny about my imagined desire for an increase in defense spending on “ornamental” bayonets:
While Pollowitz has the wrong photo (as well as the wrong branch of the U.S. Armed Services — for some reason he believes the Tomb of the Unknowns is guarded by Marines), the correct photo from yesterday’s scene at Arlington Cemetery confirms that the Tomb Sentinels still carry ornamental bayonets. But let’s return to the context that birthed the quip — the changing nature of modern warfare and the need to properly budget for it. If Gregg Pollowitz thinks that a major budget outlay needs to be made to defense contractors to spur the increased manufacture of bayonets to protect graves from the rain, he ought to say so.
Naturally, I won’t take that very seriously, but in that respect, I’m well ahead of the curve.
I was of course mocking President Obama’s debate answer on horses and bayonets. The fact is bayonets still play a large part in our military, no matter how much Linkins wants to use my error to distract from the president’s rhetoric. And the bayonets carried by the guards at the Tomb are more accurately described as “real” rather than Linkins’ “ornamental” classification.
Now that I’ve got my correction out of the way, maybe Linkins can get back to the HuffPo’s main topics of interest, like porn and jailbait links.