No empty promises of hope and change for us, please.  We’re in the military.

A poll by the Military Times newspaper group suggests that there is overwhelming support for John McCain among U.S. troops in every branch of the armed forces by a nearly 3-1 margin.

According to the poll, 68 percent of active-duty and retired servicemen and women support McCain, while 23 percent support Barack Obama. The numbers are nearly identical among officers and enlisted troops.

It’s not a scientific poll, but it does represent responses from 4,300 members of all branches and service levels in the military (a much larger sample than most national polls) and a margin this wide can’t be ignored.

So is it surprising?  Not really.  I think the military, perhaps more so than anyone else, takes Obama’s connections to extremist 1960’s radicals to heart.  It’s hard to love a guy who allied himself so closely with people who hate the military and hate this country.

It can’t be hard for them to forget that the man who Obama worked with for over a decade, who he shared an office with for three years, once lead a group that plotted a bomb attack on Fort Dix.  A bomb attack that, if carried out, would have been more catastrophic than the Oklahoma City Bombing.

It’s easy for civilians to dismiss the extremism of far-left liberals like Bill Ayers, but not so easy for the members of the military that Ayers and his cohorts hate.