“Sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen don’t deserve creature comforts while fighting America’s wars. This is what many high-ranking members of the left have spent the past 24 hours suggesting in light of a report published by the New Republic that detailed recent Pentagon spending…

“Far too many members of the public, specifically one’s betters, are wholly detached from the realities of military life. Hundreds of the leading cultural, intellectual, and political lights haven’t an inkling of deployments, extensions, and separations, which means that they don’t know — or personally care about — anyone in uniform. That’s tragic. We are abstractions to them: active-duty deaths or suicides to be blamed on the opposition. (And in this, both parties bear responsibility, as the GOP’s “new right” disparages the service member’s role in preserving order.)

“The steak and lobster meal is a tradition in the armed forces, and it predates the U.S. by millennia. Homer describes the Hellenic practice of pre-battle feasting, and there can be no doubt that the Christian imagery of the Last Supper influenced medieval dietary practice as warriors prepared their bodies and souls for combat.

“In the U.S. military, the frequency of steak and lobster on the menu is largely dependent on the branch and operating conditions. While I was in the Navy, from 2013 to 2018, the meal was one of foreboding, because we knew it heralded an extension of our deployment.”

I asked a friend, a retired Marine who had seen combat in Iraq, about the controversy. He had enjoyed a lobster meal before being deployed more than once, and well before the era of Trump and Hegseth. “It’s kind of a grim tradition,” he told me. “It’s like the last meal of a condemned man, or “The Last Supper.” Then he got angry: “How dare these smug cowards who never served complain about that?”

Michael West wrote,

“No matter how many times leftwingers make a play for the military vote they will consistently prove they have no idea what the military life is like or they do but they hate it.

“Someone at our office asked what was the deal with spending money on lobster and steak. Since I knew but wanted another guy to voice it, I asked a former Marine at our office who wasn’t privy to the question, “What does steak and lobster mean?”

“Means I’m about to be sent to a craphole to be shot at,” [he said]. “Or it’s just regular dinner at an Air Force dining facility that I’m not allowed to go to.”

“I find the complaint to be obviously tedious. What amounts to about .01% of the price of some of the boondoggles the complainers insist are essential for our republic has them raging…?

“There’s this weird argument about having plenty of money for bombs but never enough for food for children. Yet I’m sure the math will show that the amount of money the bombs cost is a tiny fraction of the amount we spend on various welfare programs and other quality of life programs.

“If the expenditure of the bombs is for a good cause, then the expenditure is worth the price. If the expenditure of the bombs is for a bad cause, argue against the cause…not the price of the bombs. Because, angry progressives, you never get to cry about the price of anything. Sorry.

Michael added, “To clarify- the army already spends money feeding soldiers. So the price of the steak and lobster ‘morale treat’ should first have subtracted from it the regular price of feeding soldiers.”

“Then if the progressives want to complain about that paltry sum, which went to a time honored tradition in the military. By all means rant on with your America-hating selves.”

Thanks, Michael. I think that about covers it.

Assholes.