Because after all, they inculcate discipline, patriotism, and train people to protect her right to trash the military.

I know why I chose Columbia: the campus is magnificent, the education is top-tier, and my peers are intelligent. I could look at a stranger, tell him or her that I went to Columbia, and hear the predictable, “Wow, you must be smart.”

* * *

My brother ended up liking Annapolis and he has decided to stay. While it has been difficult for me to accept that I have a brother in the military, I must allow him to pursue whatever path he is drawn toward, and he has admitted to me that he feels called to being there. However, for anyone else out there considering a career in the academy, let it be known: the U.S. Naval Academy is not an elite college; it is first and foremost a branch of the U.S. military and the prestige comes at a big price—it taxes parents, siblings, and participants if they do not understand what they were signing up for.

Imagine that -- the service academies are a part of the military! I guess it takes a little left-wing snob from a school that does not even allow its students the option of an ROTC program to tell the rest of us that incredibly insightful observation. Her decision to trash them as "not an elite college" shows her lack of respect for diversity -- it is an elite college, just not in the way that her school is. Indeed it is better, and reflects a call to a purpose higher than that of her school: the preservation of our country.

So while Idris Leppla is busy sucking down her lattes and attending her rallies against the war and mourning the fact that her brother didn't respond to her efforts to get him out of the Naval Academy AGAINST HIS WILL, it is her brother and those like him who are defending the right of ms. Leppla to spit on them with her unAmerican words and actions from the hallowed halls of her "elite" university.