Ed Perlmutter isn’t going to let opponent Rick O’Donnell get away from his 2004 essay calling for a mandatory service program for high school boys. Last week the Democrat pounded O’Donnell on the issue and yesterday held a press conference at Jefferson High School “to denounce Rick O’Donnell’s bizarre and dangerous plan to draft high school boys to guard our nation’s borders and ports rather than completing their last semester of high school.”O’Donnell insists that’s not what he wrote in the Denver Post column and last week asked the state attorney general to investigate Perlmutter’s characterization of his words. In the column, “A new rite of passage,” O’Donnell said the semester of service would be mandatory for boys, and “After a basic-training type orientation, they would be given various duties in sore need of attention: securing our border with Mexico; thinning our national forests to reduce fire risk; providing homeland security at ports and other vulnerable locations.”
Hair-splitting aside, O’Donnell is still quietly standing by his plan, which has been called “ridiculous,” among other things.
From a Perlmutter press release:
“Parents don’t need advice from my opponent on the ‘rites of passage into manhood’ and they certainly don’t want to have their sons drafted away and potentially placed in harms way on the Mexican border.”
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