The larger point here is it's not hard to get out if you want out, or rather it wasn't when I was in.  One failed drug test, gone, but that wasn't a good discharge, but better than the discharge one's gets after prison time. Other-than-honorable is way better than a dishonorable discharge.  One can be upgraded, I believe, after 6 months.

The other point I take issue with is this statement:

And a majority of Americans want something done about ISIS, so use of military is in the forefront of issues.

I don't believe that to be true, and while I maybe projecting my personal beliefs on others, I think that statement needs a source, because no one I know wants to go to war in the ME.

Militarytracy: "The one thing this country can't afford is a Democratic nominee that can't get elected."

... and not merely reactive. And the best way to innoculate Sen. Sanders and the party itself from any forthcoming false equivalence of conscientious objection as a form of treason, is to preemptively nail Republicans foursquare on the charge of their own chickenhawkery and duplicity.

It's been my experience that most people will come to accept, however begrudging it may be, a person's stated and principled opposition to a war of choice in Vietnam.

By the same token, most people will likely despise the hypocrisy on display from those ex post facto cheerleaders for that same war, when they learn that such men did their own level best at the time to avoid having to serve in that particular conflict.

It's not unlike the feeling of bitter contempt that many Australians and New Zealanders nurtured for Great Britain in the wake of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign during the First World War. With the lives of tens of thousands of their young men senselessly squandered by the British High Command in a very badly conceived invasion of European Turkey, the rueful standing joke Down Under became, "England will fight to the last ANZAC." Their distaste and distrust of the Mother Country continues in varying degrees to this very day.

I remember an op-ed by the L.A. Times' resident conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg from about ten years ago, a time when U.S. forces occupying Iraq were suffering increasing numbers of casualties from a steadily intensifying urban guerilla war waged against them by resistance fighters. The then 35-year-old Goldberg intimated in that column that the mounting number of American dead and wounded in Iraq were perfectly acceptable, given the Bush administration's stated goals in that country.

The public blowback against him in both the LATimes.com's online comment section and in the print edition's Letters to the Editor section was immediate and severe. In variations, many critics asked him point blank that if he felt the Iraq War was such an honorable undertaking, why didn't he volunteer for service in Baghdad himself?

That's how you deal with the problem posed by Bernie Sander's claim of conscientious objection during the Vietnam War. You fight their fire with some of your own. When they light a match, you burn them to a blackened crisp with a flamethrower.

If Republicans are so goddammed critical of Sen. Sanders' principled stand against that conflict, well, where were they during that time, exactly? Dick Cheney not only garnered five deferments from the draft, he also wracked up several DUIs as well, IIRC. And for all the hullabaloo over the 60 Minutes story about George W. Bush's Texas Air Guard duty, we STILL don't really know where he was during that entire year prior to his discharge. Because wherever it was, it certainly wasn't where he was supposed to be, which was in Montgomery, AL.

So, given their collective and individual records and results, I'd offer that we trust the Republicans' collective judgment on matters of foreign affairs and national security simply at our country's own imminent peril. Their public conduct is a perpetual exercise in willful self-delusion and freestyle deceit.

That's the message which needs to prevail here.