ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The good guys do win once in a while, even in liberal-leaning California.

A teacher with the El Rancho Unified School District in Southern California named Gregory Salcido was fired after Board of Education members decided his anti-military comments caught on tape were so vicious that they — as well as he — didn’t belong in the classroom.

“His comments do not reflect what we stand for, who we are,” said Board of Education President Aurora Villon, speaking to the Los Angeles Times about the vote to fire Salcido. “The classroom should never be a place where students feel that they are picked at, bullied, intimidated.”

And the military should never be slandered like this, either, Villon might have added.

Salcido was secretly recorded saying the military was made up of a bunch of dumbs—s.” He defended his comments as more pro-student than anti-military — even outright denied being anti-military.

That, while saying this, as captured on the student’s recording device: “Think about the people who you know who are over there. Your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever. … They’re not like high-level thinkers. They’re not academic people. They’re not intellectual people. They’re the lowest of our low,” Fox News reported.

Hmm. Can you say West Point?

Seems like some of those graduates — as well as the ones that come out of other top-tier places of higher learning like the Army War College, the Citadel, the Virginia Military Institute, and so forth and so on — may have a difference of IQ opinion.

So, too, even the “lowest” of the “low” recruits into the enlisted ranks, some of whom no doubt possess a level of intelligence that places them far above — say, what’s needed to teach a high school class.

Salcido, pressed for clarification, only dug himself deeper.

In February, shortly after his initial remarks went viral on the media stage, Salcido apologized to the City Council and said he wasn’t making a statement about the content of military members’ moral character.

Rather, he was only trying to say: “I don’t think it’s all a revelation to anybody that those who aren’t stellar students usually find the military a better option.”

Yes — along with those of patriotic mind who may or may not have been “stellar students.”

Salcido’s comments sparked national and even worldwide outrage. And rightly so.

And now he’s gone. Fired from his job. Fired from his teaching job — which is a shock-and-awe phrase to hear in today’s union-strong society. Who even knew teachers, protected and shielded as they are by the unions, could be fired any more?

“Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion,” said Victor Quinonez, the student who recorded Salcido, to Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “But at the same time, they shouldn’t be disrespecting the veterans who have fought for our rights, who give up their lives and do stuff that other people are not willing to do.”

Right. Other people like Salcido, something he would do well — he should have done well — to remember.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.

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