Yesterday, WAPO blogger William Arkin, wrote a nasty, anti-troop screed on his blog and judging by a post he put up this morning, he has taken a righteous verbal beating for it.

After bitterly complaining that people had written him nasty emails and said mean things to him, he went on to slap the troops around again. Here's an excerpt:

"I said I was bothered by the notion that "the troops" were somehow becoming hallowed beings above society, that they had an attitude that only they had the means - or the right - to judge the worthiness of the Iraq endeavor.

I was dead wrong in using the word mercenary to describe the American soldier today.

These men and women are not fighting for money with little regard for the nation. The situation might be much worse than that: evidently far too many in uniform believe that they are the one true nation. They hide behind the constitution and the flag and then spew an anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, anti-journalism, anti-dissent, and anti-citizen message that reflects a certain contempt for the American people.

What I've heard ever since my article "The Troops Also Need to Support the American People" was published on Tuesday are a lot of people telling ME to shut up and be grateful for the sacrifices others are making.

....As the debate about the Iraq war demonstrates, war-making is a shared endeavor and the arrogant and intolerant few who think they are above the people seem to be those who are wearing the uniform."

First of all, you've got to love his artful variation on the Tim Robbins defense which normally works like so, "As a liberal, I'm allowed to say anything I like, but if people criticize what I say, they're stifling my freedom of speech." In Arkin's case, he ripped on the troops yesterday, but today, when they blast him back in the comments section of his blog or in emails, they're showing, "contempt for the American people."

Setting that aside, here's what you need to understand about liberals like Arkin. With them, the way that they "support the troops" really has a lot in common with the way that they fly the flag at political rallies.

You see, they always claim to support the troops and be patriotic. In fact, if you want to see an outburst of red faced indignation, just suggest that a liberal isn't patriotic or doesn't support the troops, and they'll flip out -- and that may puzzle you when you also notice that they take every opportunity to complain, kvetch, and whinge about displays of patriotism or the troops.

Well, why is this happening? Because they're not as patriotic as conservatives and they really don't support the troops like conservatives do either. Yet, they know that hurts them at election time. So, they grudgingly bring some flags to a political rally and repeat through clinched teeth that they support the troops because they know that if they said, "America isn't really such a great country and the troops are a bunch of poor, dumb, brainwashed losers who'd probably be handing me my food at Mickey D's if they weren't in the military where they get off on killing brown people," it would turn off a large swath of the American people (pretty much everybody but other liberals). So, for the most part, they keep it to themselves, until it just spills out and they say a bit more than they intended on the Democratic Underground or in blog posts like those made by William Arkin.