Tom earlier pointed out the ludicrousness of Wolf Blitzer’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” question, but this deserves to be highlighted again. From the last night’s GOP debate :

BLITZER: Mayor Giuliani, recently we’ve learned that several talented trained linguists — Arabic speakers, Farsi speakers, Urdu speakers — trained by the U.S. government to learn those languages to help us in the war on terrorism, were dismissed from the military because they announced they were gays or lesbians.

Is that, in your mind, appropriate?

Recently??? Take a look at this article :

Nine soldiers being trained as translators at a military-run language school have been discharged for being gay despite a shortage of linguists for the US war against terror, officials and rights activists said Friday.

The nine were discharged from the army’s Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California over the course of this year, said Lieutenant Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

They included six who were being trained as Arabic speakers, two in Korean and another in Chinese, he said. “All the servicemembers had stellar service records and wanted to continue doing the important jobs they held, but they were fired because of their sexual orientation,” said Steve Ralls of the Servicemen’s Legal Defense Network.

“This is a very vivid illustration of how ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and anti-gay discrimination harms the national security of the United States and the war on terrorism,” he said.

That’s from November 18, 2002. Liberals have been complaining loudly about this for years. In the four and a half years since, the President has started a war in Iraq and there’s been a Presidential election, yet with all of the talk about “terrorists” and 9/11, the mainstream press has ignored this issue completely.

Going back to the debate question, the only thing more infuriating than Wolf’s long overdue question is the answers from the GOP candidates. Despite the fact that investigations into 9/11 consider the lack of Arabic translators “one of the most serious issues limiting the Intelligence Communitys ability to analyze, discern, and report on terrorist activities in a timely fashion.” (PDF), Giuliani dismissed the firing of translators as “disruptive issues”. McCain and Romney agreed that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is “working”. And when Blitzer ended the line of questioning asking “Is there anyone here who believes gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the United States military? If you do, speak up now.”, it was met with silence.

After the debate, Blitzer noted that this week’s debate “paints a stark difference between Democratic candidates and the Republican candidates”. Clearly, the Republican party considers institutionalized homophobia to be a higher priority than defeating terrorists. Keep that in mind the next time a Republican tries to imply that they take national security more seriously than Democrats.