The Blood Royal
This is a farce: Lieutenant Wales. This is exactly why Europe's monarch's survive only on the charity of the state and why they have been rightly denounced as thin-blooded, inbred malingerers. Once upon a time, the members of the House of Habsburg were both fierce and cunning, and had they been otherwise they could not have secured dominion over Austria, much less taken as a nearly hereditary prize the elected throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet by the time Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire the Habsburg had become but a shadow of their former selves, and in fact this was a major factor in the demise of Imperial authority; the Habsburgs would limp on as constitutional monarchs until the Austro-Hungarian Empire's defeat in the Great War, but by then they had degenerated into an embarrassment to their antecedents. The House of Windsor (sic) must have been ferocious once, and by all indications Lieutenant Wales was fully prepared to accompany his regimant to the war. What is the point of the monarchy if not to be a symbol for the nation? What is the symbolic message of sending the Prince's men to the front but leaving him, their officer, safely at home? I do not understand the Ministry of Defence's thinking.

In a similar vein, the McCains continue to embody the old chivalric tradition of service: John Sidney McCain IV, the son of the senator, is the presently the fourth consecutive John S. McCain to attend the United States Naval Academy, and his brother James is a United States Marine, almost certainly to be deployed to the war zone. No doubt the Department of Defense will take a more egalitarian view of the risks in Iraq than the Ministry of Defence.