Remember the lie the MoveOn crowd told against George W. Bush all through the 2004 campaign, that he had a secret plan to bring back the draft?  This saturated the internet for a good solid year, and of course was propaganda to the core.

Now comes the ultimate irony (and one that close observers knew all about at the time): one of the first policy initiatives of the new Democrat Congress is to — you guessed it — reinstate the draft.  Incoming House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel said today that he will push to draft Americans between the ages of 18 and 42; and unlike previous years when he pushed his idea on an unwilling Republican Congress, times have clearly changed.

President Bush, virtually all Republicans and a generation of military leaders and experts contend strongly that an all-volunteer service is better for America: more Constitutional, higher quality, better educated, and entirely composed of people who want to be there.

Rangel says he wants a draft to discourage future wars; yet there’s no evidence from history that a draft has ever accomplished any such thing, and moreover, the vast majority of 20th Century conflicts were entered into by Democrat presidents.  What Rangel really wants is a less effective military which — as in Vietnam — can be better used as a propaganda tool.  The heroic volunteers of our current forces are not nearly so good a club to beat America with: Rangel wants to “fix” that.

And so it begins.  The only question is how long the DailyKos crowd will take to blame Rangel’s actions on Bush.