The Marines dodge a major bullet

Many folks  missed it, but a few weeks ago, the NewYork Post reported that the Obama administration was trying foist some seriously uncool covers -- "hats" to civilians -- on the Marine Corps in the interests of an inclusive "unisex" look:

Thanks to a plan by President Obama to create a “unisex” look for the Corps, officials are on the verge of swapping out the Marines’ iconic caps – known as “covers” — with a new version that some have derided as so “girly” that they would make the French blush.
“We don’t even have enough funding to buy bullets, and the DoD is pushing to spend $8 million on covers that look like women’s hats!” one senior Marine source fumed to The Post. “The Marines deserve better. It makes them look ridiculous.”
The thin new covers have a feminine line that some officials think would make them look just as good on female marines as on males — in keeping with the Obama directive.
“The Marine Corps is being ‘encouraged’ by DoD to standardize on a unisex/universal dress and service cap,” Marine brass noted in an internal memo obtained by The Post.

Fortunately for the Marines, the people responsible for actually making the decision realized that "unisex" for the Marines should lean toward male, not female, style. Also, the Marines love tradition, and the current cover has been in use since 1922. Fortunately, last Friday (Nov. 15), the Marines shot down the girly cover in favor of tradition:

In late October, the Uniform Board sent a survey to all active duty Marines asking which hat they preferred. An overwhelming 91 percent of all Marines, male and female, preferred going to the current male cap. On Friday the Marine Corps announced that Gen. James Amos, the commandant, had decided everybody would be wearing the male cap.

This is good. While the proposed new cover was called the "Dan Daly" after Sgt. Maj. Dan Daly, a Marine Corps legend and one of only 19 men (including seven Marines) to be awarded the Medal of Honor twice, it isn't like Daly endorsed the cover. The Corps handed a similar cover to him, told him to wear it and he did. No one ever recorded whether he thought the hat was cool. It seems unlikely that Daly liked the Frenchy-French cover -- the man chewed nails and spit carpet tacks. At the battle of Belleau Wood in World War I, he led a (successful) charge against a German position by shouting, "Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?"

Any chance that guy would have thought it was a good idea to dress Marines in the swishy crap the two Marines on the right are wearing?

Say what you want about the "bucket cover" on the left that the Marines are keeping, no one would want to wear that steaming heap of manure on the right. Cpl. Wolves informs me that the decision to go with the current cover is popular because a) it means male Marines won't look French and 2) he won't have to spend 70 bucks per cover to replace his current inventory. Makes sense to me.