Why Kerry doesn't deserve your vote

[Pure]

I can understand Republican values, if they were genuine and straightforwardly applied. Let's keep a strong military, have an agressive, decisive defense of America: honor the warriors whose bravery protects us all. Let American and personal self sufficiency be fostered. Spartan values, perhaps.

What I can't understand, despite all the personal histories, explorations of feelings, relatives in military service, is why any thinks that the Yale party animal, some bubbas, and some neocon draft evaders with 'world empire' and 'american century' theories would be the ones--indeed the ONLY ones--to further these values.

 

[shereads]

I can understand Republican values, if they were genuine and straightforwardly applied. Let's keep a strong military, have an agressive, decisive defense of America: honor the warriors whose bravery protects us all. Let American and personal self sufficiency be fostered. Spartan values, perhaps.

What I can't understand, despite all the personal histories, explorations of feelings, relatives in military service, is why any thinks that the Yale party animal, some bubbas, and some neocon draft evaders with 'world empire' and 'american century' theories would be the ones--indeed the ONLY ones--to further these values.

Because the rest of us don't share Republican values, J. There would need to be two Republican parties: the neocons and the regulars, and that would split the vote and that would save the planet from destruction.

See if you can find someone, okay?



P.S. We honor those warriors until it's time to say it with dollars. $399.1 billion a year can only go so far, and if we added beds to VA hospitals the CEO of Lockheed Martin wouldn't be able to make $6,445,000/year plus stock options. Already, the Chairman and CEO of Raytheon, which has a critical role in the development of the Star Wars missile defense, is scraping by at an annual salary and bonus of under $4 million.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well put, raphy. I've said elsewhere, and it bears repeating, that one of the big mistakes the left made in the country was the way the peace movement blamed the soldiers for the Vietnam War. It's a shameful chapter in history, and it still haunts the left, so much so that the right has been able to argue that it has a monopoly on patriotism (it doesn't), which is one reason that Bush and his self-proclaimed conservative friends (they aren't really that conservative, when you think about it) have been able to both take power and abuse it.

Anti-war protesters were branded as un-American from the start. Personally, I didn't know anyone in the anti-War movement who was against our soldiers or who blamed the grunts on the ground for what was going on over there. That was the whole damned point of the anti-War movement for God's sake, that American lives were being squandered for no good reason and that we had to stop it.

You probably don't remember, but it was very common in the earlier days of protest for demonstrators to be set upon and beaten by construction workers and other right-wing types while the police turned a blind eye. "Hippie-bashing" became a popular weekend activity, because if you doubted LBJ, you had to be a commie sympathizer, right? And then in Chicago the police dropped their neutrality altogether and actually helped the thugs beat up and gas the protesters too, with Mayor Daley's blessing.

I know a fair number of vets, and while a lot of them came home from the war damaged in various ways, none of them was ever spit upon. The only spitting episode I remember was one I read about in Time magazine during a demonstration in San Diego, yet now the 'spit-upon vet' has become some sort of symbol for all Viet Nam veterans. The vets did get screwed, but they got screwed mainly by getting little in the way of benefits or help in reintegrating into society from Uncle Sam. Remember all the lawsuits over Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder? The government refused to recognize the latter as a disability until years after the war was over, and then only after they were forced to by threats of legal action.

No, the Viet Nam era vets were never welcomed home with confetti and ticker-tape parades, but they weren't reviled either. Most of them retreated into themselves as they tried to come to terms with what they'd been through. They were ignored by the government that sent them over there, and in the end they were ignored by everyone else too.

As for Hanoi Jane, does anyone know the context of that photo? How the US had just been carpet bombing Hanoi, including hospitals and schools? You never seem to hear anything about that.

---dr.M.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Colly, you sound as if there can be no middle ground between zero military spending and giving the Pentagon everything it asks for; and that there can be no meaningful war protest without spitting on soldiers. Maybe that's what they taught you at the VFW, and maybe it seemed that way to some of them, but if every one of the millions of Americans who hated that war had spit on someone, we'd have all drowned.

The spitters and abusers of soldiers were a small minority. The ones carrying the signs - the ones who made Nixon stop an insane corrupt war - were a minority too; most of us lacked the courage of our convictions. We hated the war and grieved for its dead and we argued with our parents and school mates, but we didn't do much else, because we were lazy or afraid. We didn't want to be arrested or embarrassing our families. And when we saw unarmed students shot at Kent State, we began to see what was really at stake, and we got even quieter. The Veterans who protested the war were a remarkably brave group of people, in that they separated themselves from the people they felt closest to, and whose respect mattered most to them. They risked being vilified in later years like Kerry.

All you care about regarding his war medals is that he rejected the war later and threw some of them away. What he endured to win them is meaningless.

As for acknowledging civilian casualties, those are human lives no different than Nick Berg. Wouldn't you love to think that some student group in the middle east had enough concern about the lives of their enemy's civilians that they would carry protest signs with Nick Berg's picture and demand a stop to the carnage?

You'd admire them, I imagine. They would change the world.

You'll never make me understsand the difference between collateral damage and dead children, when it comes to imagining what it's like under the rubble at the World Trade Center or an apartment in Fellujah. I make no apology for the fact that I see innocent people as worthy of grief whether they are murdered in my name by George Bush, or in Bin Laden's name by a suicide bomber. I don't reject the idea that there may be times when it's necessary to risk civilian deaths, or to invade a country where thousands of such deaths are inevitable. But I won't simply accept on faith that what looks, sounds and smells like a trumped-up reason is really for my own good. To stay silent if you believe your country is killing people for no good reason is not unlike murder. If waving a sign with some dead civilian's picture on it saves a life that should never have been risked, it's worth hurting some feelings. Even soldiers' feelings. Even your grandfather's, or mine. Nobody's pride, not even the people we most love and admire, is worth one life.

If you hate the people who protested the Vietnam war, you hate millions upon milions of people in the country you say you love. It becomes a rather small group of people to love when you discount everyone outside our borders, and half of the people within.

My responses were not political ad campaigns. They were not thought out, worded or intended to make anyone change their opinions. They were, as much as I could, honest answers to a question posed by people who I consider my friends. An attempt to let those who know me, care about what I say, but simply can't understand my position have some insight into what I think and feel. If not understanding the points, at least giving them a point of reference into how I could reach these conclusions.

At no time did I ever expect anything I said to change anyone's mind or even really to let them understand, because most of those who post here are incapable of understanding. That isn't a knock on anyone's intelligence or empathy, simply an ackowledgement that our experience and personal points of reference are so at odds that real understanding is impossible. An agreement to disagree would be about the best outcome I could expect.

I don't understand your point of view. I cannot. It is as incomprehensible to me as a chineese puzzle. In one paragraph you go from telling me the number of protestors who followed Hanoi Jane's example, who spit, hated and acted like Parisians at a guioltining, drawing strength in numbers to spew hate and vitriol were very few. To telling me if I hate protestors I hate half the country in the next. I find zero internal logic there.

My reasons for feeling the way I do are obviously deep and personal. Your reasons for feeling the way you do are obviously the same.

In a very real sense though, your opinion, Doc M's and the opinons of the majority of posters here at lit aren't really pertinient, because your vote was never in question. John Kerry, John Edwards, John the milkman, it makes no difference, You are voting against Bush and if Satan was running against him I don't think that would make you a republican. In the same vein, my opinion isn't really pertinent because I live in a state that will go democrat no matter where I place my vote.

The wider question, one of how people could refuse to vote for Kerry based on his protesting was more pertinent. I suspect I am not the only child who sat on their grandfather's knee at the VFW. I suspect too I am not the only person who inherited a value set that is similar to mine. It's a position you won't understand. One I suspect most democrats don't understand, considering Kerry won the primaries and exit poles showed eletability was the major issue for most voters. Yet now you are all scratching your heads, wondering how people like me could exist.

I am not a hydra. Not the mythic pheonix or even St. Geroge's dragon. I am a pretty unoutstanding person over all I think. Not normal, but not too far from the norm in a lot of ways. I am an old school conservative, an anachronism it seems in today's world. I can live with that. Certainly I am not a standard bearer for today's GOP, I am not even really a republican any longer. The views I expressed, are just my own, perhaps not even represenative of anyone else. The question was asked of how I could feel this way. I answered it to the best of my ability. You don't understand it. I can't expalin it any better, too much of it is tied up in feelings and memories you don't have and I can't express with words.

-Colly

 

[KenJames]

But Ken, blankets are so warm!

You're right; I was overgeneralizing. The movement did move from the left to the center (which was when it began to be effective). The trouble is that for my vet friends, one image of Hanoi Jane celebrating in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft emplacement is all it has taken to brand everyone left of center as a traitor and an enemy.

I think that few anti-war folks agreed with her, but she's the thing remembered today. That's the unfortunate thing about human memory (including my own): we remember the memorable, and one memorable spitting hippy stays with us far longer than a thousand quiet "welcome homes".

I stand corrected for my overgeneralizations, but I think those same generalizations, multiplied several million times in people's minds, are a perception of the left that pacifists need to consider and respond to, lest they continue to be painted with an unfair taint.

I agree with all that, except maybe for the blanket part. Blankets get you pretty sweaty in Austin for most of the year.

The true nature of the Vietnam peace movement has been so systematically distorted since the end of the conflict that I don't think it's possible to correct the false perceptions. There's no indication that the US media is even interested in trying.

The "liberal media" is the most effective lie the right wing has ever devised. In the 2000 election, the so-called liberal media gave Bush much more positive coverage than Gore and covered Gore in a negative manner more than Bush. Liberal bias?

http://www.journalism.org/resources/research/reports/campaign2000/lastlap/default.asp

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I don't understand your point of view. I cannot. It is as incomprehensible to me as a chineese puzzle. In one paragraph you go from telling me the number of protestors who followed Hanoi Jane's example, who spit, hated and acted like Parisians at a guioltining, drawing strength in numbers to spew hate and vitriol were very few. To telling me if I hate protestors I hate half the country in the next. I find zero internal logic there.

That's because the majority of protesters were not spitting, hating, etc. You seem to be making the same error that was made back then, that anyone who thinks the war is wrong is anti-American. It wasn't like that at all.

They lied to us back then. They told us that an anti-colonial war for independence was actually a war of communist aggression. They lied because no one chose to look into the history of Viet Nam, and because they were seeing commies everywhere. Even after they knew it wasn't true they kept up the fiction. I mean, it wasn't like it was a matter of opinion whether the war was wrong. Once you knew the facts and the history of Viet Nam, it was dead obvious to everyone it was wrong. And yet they kept on sending Americans over there to die. What would you have done?

As for all this spitting, I'd like to know where it happened. When they got off the troop ships, where there were thousands and thousands of servicemen at the docks? Or after they got home to the people who knew them before they went to Viet Nam? Did their friends and family spit on them?

It couldn't have happened during the parades, because there weren't any. So where were all these people getting spit upon?

The wider question, one of how people could refuse to vote for Kerry based on his protesting was more pertinent. I suspect I am not the only child who sat on their grandfather's knee at the VFW. I suspect too I am not the only person who inherited a value set that is similar to mine. It's a position you won't understand. One I suspect most democrats don't understand, considering Kerry won the primaries and exit poles showed eletability was the major issue for most voters. Yet now you are all scratching your heads, wondering how people like me could exist.

Well, I am scratching my head, but it's because I'm wondering what it was that you learned at your grandfather's knee. That we should always obey our leaders without question? That is we feel something's morally wrong we should just keep our mouths shut? That the honor of the service comes above the life of the servicemen? What?

---dr.M.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

While I am revisiting memories of long ago and far away, I remembered Mr. Jim. I won't use his name, since he would turn over in his grave if it were mentioned on a porn site and since I always called him Mr. Jim anyway.

While staying with my Grandfather, I saw a lot of things that would be considered outlandish now. I saw neighbors help one another, people come to each other's aide and I saw bussiness done on a man's good word. I saw feed, grain, fertilizer, insectisides, even tractors & land sold on nothing more than a hand shake. It wasn't uncomon. New comers to town weren't extended that priveledge, unless a good man of his word spoke for them. And anyone who ever went back on his given word was reduced to a strictly cash on the barrelhead customer. Someone no one trusted.

I saw Mr. Jim once buy land from my grandfather, on nothing but his promise & a hand shake. It took him nearly a year to get financing from the bank, and in that time he put two crops in on that land. Papa never once doubted he would get his money and he was right. Mr. Jim showed up one evening with it all in cash.

Mr. Jim was also a regular at the VFW. He told more lies and more obvious lies than anyone. He always had a bigger and better fish story, war story or old times story. Some of them so obviouly fabricated even I could tell and I was quite young.

A rather strange dichotomy, especially for a child. As I grew older & the men I had spent so much time around began to die I finally came to understand. Lying was perfectly acceptable to them. At the VFW they were EXPECTED to lie. As my grandfather's second wife put it when I would call and he wasn't in, he's down at the feed store, telling lies. Or over at the VFW drinking beer and telling lies. Even though my grandfather didn't drink.

A man's given word was what he was judged by.

Politicians are expected to lie. They are over at the state house telling lies, so to speak. Bill Clinton didn't just lie, he broke his given word. In a parallel to that small town, Clinton would have been a cash on the barrel head customer. A man no one trusted.

I don't know how much of this still goes on in rural america. Perhaps not much, since it was a long time ago, but I do have to wonder if there are still a lot of pople to whom telling lies down at the bar with your fishing buddies and lying under oath aren't still two very different things?

-Colly

 

[KenJames]

FYI, he was the person in Congress who pushed to help fund internet technologies at a critical time; it's unfortunate that a misstatement of having "invented" the internet is the only thing people remember. He was in fact a key person in the process that provided us with access.

Gore never actually said, "I invented the Internet."

As a congressman and senator in the 1980s, Gore fought for the funding which would turn Apranet, an emergency military computer network, into the Internet. In a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." That's slightly bombastic, in typical politician fashion, but essentially accurate.

The phrase "invented the Internet" first appeared in a Republican Party press release and was parroted endlessly by that damned liberal media, always out to get Bush.

The "liberal media" never bothered to examine the essential validity of Gore's claim.

 

[shereads]

I don't understand your point of view. I cannot. It is as incomprehensible to me as a chineese puzzle. In one paragraph you go from telling me the number of protestors who followed Hanoi Jane's example, who spit, hated and acted like Parisians at a guioltining, drawing strength in numbers to spew hate and vitriol were very few. To telling me if I hate protestors I hate half the country in the next. I find zero internal logic there.

I thought I had made clear that the "spitters" were a minority of the millions who protested the war. I never said that the protesters who abused veterans numbered in the millons.

I feel real hatred for very few people and I was a little taken aback to hear you say you hate people who felt about the war exactly the way I felt, and half the country felt. I genuinely hate very few people. I think Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld have earned a place among those few. I don't extend my hatred to a majority of their supporters, I'm just bewildered by their non-reaction to the facts that have been revealed. As I am by your continued belief that only a non-Republican could deeply offended by what they've done. I don't even hate George W. Bush. He's not bright enough to be evil, but he has allowed himself to be a tool of evil and his use of God's name to justify this war is pushing a lot of people farther from the idea of God than they might otherwise have been.

You are voting against Bush and if Satan was running against him I don't think that would make you a republican.

I have voted Republican on a few occasions, Colly, in local races where the actions of incumbent Democrats made me believe that someone else should take their place. I've said before, and meant it: if a president I liked and admired as much as I did Bill Clinton had taken this country to war in defense of a direct threat to us, and if it was then revealed that it had all been a lie, I would want to see an impeachment even if the war had gone as planned.. I'd be sad, I'd be disappointed. But I couldn't consider supporting someone who committed troops to a war that he clearly knew could not be sold to the Congress and the public on its own merits.

The wider question, one of how people could refuse to vote for Kerry based on his protesting was more pertinent. I suspect I am not the only child who sat on their grandfather's knee at the VFW. I suspect too I am not the only person who inherited a value set that is similar to mine. It's a position you won't understand. One I suspect most democrats don't understand, considering Kerry won the primaries and exit poles showed eletability was the major issue for most voters. Yet now you are all scratching your heads, wondering how people like me could exist.

Not true. I just wonder about the generalization of all protesters into a group that deserve your hatred. I admire your love for your grandfather and what he represented to your childhood. My military roots go as deep as yours, my dad was a pilot and I used to love to watch planes come in to land at the base and know that one of them might be his. His father was a medaled WWI hero. Like your grandfather, mine didn't display his medal and never talked about it, not even when asked. But his reasons were probably closer to John Kerry's. Whatever he had seen and done and endured in France was so horrible that he couldn't bear to speak of it. He came home and started drinking and didn't stop until it killed him. I suppose if John Kerry had quietly taken that route, he'd be less offensive to the people who think he's a disgrace. But I'm glad that he and Bob Kerrey and DirtMan and others who returned from the belly of the beast didn't give in to the anguish that took my grandfather from his family. You were lucky that your grandfather was around to tell you his war stories. And he was lucky that some of them were stories he could bear to tell.

I don't think you're a hydra. I was hoping you and others might be able to forgive what John Kerry did 30 years ago if you heard another perspective on the Vietnam era than the one you grew up hearing.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

That's because the majority of protesters were not spitting, hating, etc. You seem to be making the same error that was made back then, that anyone who thinks the war is wrong is anti-American. It wasn't like that at all.

They lied to us back then. They told us that an anti-colonial war for independence was actually a war of communist aggression. They lied because no one chose to look into the history of Viet Nam, and because they were seeing commies everywhere. Even after they knew it wasn't true they kept up the fiction. I mean, it wasn't like it was a matter of opinion whether the war was wrong. Once you knew the facts and the history of Viet Nam, it was dead obvious to everyone it was wrong. And yet they kept on sending Americans over there to die. What would you have done?

As for all this spitting, I'd like to know where it happened. When they got off the troop ships, where there were thousands and thousands of servicemen at the docks? Or after they got home to the people who knew them before they went to Viet Nam? Did their friends and family spit on them?

It couldn't have happened during the parades, because there weren't any. So where were all these people getting spit upon?



Well, I am scratching my head, but it's because I'm wondering what it was that you learned at your grandfather's knee. That we should always obey our leaders without question? That is we feel something's morally wrong we should just keep our mouths shut? That the honor of the service comes above the life of the servicemen? What?

---dr.M.

I learned to love my country Doc. To respect the men who fought for it, died for it or came back maimed for it.

I tried to answer your question, to the best of my ability and as honestly as I could. And you come back with this, which I find smart assed, petty and actually, pretty mean. The men I grew up around weren't fascists, the fought fascism. The insinuation that they were or that I am was uncalled for.

-Colly

 

[shereads]

]I learned to love my country Doc. To respect the men who fought for it, died for it or came back maimed for it.

I tried to answer your question, to the best of my ability and as honestly as I could. And you come back with this, which I find smart assed, petty and actually, pretty mean. The men I grew up around weren't fascists, the fought fascism. The insinuation that they were or that I am was uncalled for.

Not wanting people to fight and die and be maimed is a way of respecting them, and of loving one's country.

 

[KarenAM]

I'm seeing Colly's perspective better and better now; this isn't stuff we're going to be agreeing on because it's obviously too personal. Still, I'll post this, since I think I've been minsunderstood.

Anti-war protesters were branded as un-American from the start. Personally, I didn't know anyone in the anti-War movement who was against our soldiers or who blamed the grunts on the ground for what was going on over there. That was the whole damned point of the anti-War movement for God's sake, that American lives were being squandered for no good reason and that we had to stop it.

Which is, as I'm sure you recall, exactly the point I made about the Iraq war, and in relation to my experiences opposing it. I also retracted my overgeneralization about the subject in relation to Vietnam. But the perception that liberals behaved like this still exists, even if it is inaccurate. Should we in the anti-war movement do something about that, or should we just surrender the flag and patriotism to the Neo-Cons?

You probably don't remember, but it was very common in the earlier days of protest for demonstrators to be set upon and beaten by construction workers and other right-wing types while the police turned a blind eye. "Hippie-bashing" became a popular weekend activity, because if you doubted LBJ, you had to be a commie sympathizer, right? And then in Chicago the police dropped their neutrality altogether and actually helped the thugs beat up and gas the protesters too, with Mayor Daley's blessing.

Okay, I just typed something rather unkind about your patronizing tone. Then I erased it. It's better that way.

I know a fair number of vets, and while a lot of them came home from the war damaged in various ways, none of them was ever spit upon. The only spitting episode I remember was one I read about in Time magazine during a demonstration in San Diego, yet now the 'spit-upon vet' has become some sort of symbol for all Viet Nam veterans. The vets did get screwed, but they got screwed mainly by getting little in the way of benefits or help in reintegrating into society from Uncle Sam. Remember all the lawsuits over Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder? The government refused to recognize the latter as a disability until years after the war was over, and then only after they were forced to by threats of legal action.

I never said otherwise. And I know some vets, too. They are in fact one of my best sources of information about Vietnam vets.

As for Hanoi Jane, does anyone know the context of that photo? How the US had just been carpet bombing Hanoi, including hospitals and schools? You never seem to hear anything about that.

Take a look at the May, 2004 issue of National Geographic. It has an article about Hanoi which mentions the bombings. Does the bombing of Hanoi make Jane's actions justifiable? On the same trip to Hanoi our dear Jane made a visit to the Hanoi Hilton, where she let the North Vietnamese parade American POW's who had been tortured in front of her and the cameras. She epitomized the blaming of soldiers for the war to the point where she stopped being anti-war and turned into an open advocate for it, so long as it was Americans who were killed. That's what my vet friends remember.

I said it in an earlier post: the actions of a very tiny minority of people can and often are remembered as being representative of others. The very public mistreatment of Vietnam veterans by some of the more extreme members of the anti-war movement is one of the big reasons that the Neo-Cons are able to paint even a decorated Vietnam veteran as unpatriotic today. Having been painted that way unfairly myself for opposing Bush and the Iraq war, I am acutely aware of the problem. Maybe it doesn't bother anyone else here, but it sure bothers me.

 

[shereads]

I have seen what medals for valor mean to man who deeply loves his country. I have seen what they mean to a grieving mother. I have seen what John Kerry's medals meant to him.

You know, it's possible if not likely, that his medals meant nothing at all. But I think you might be able to appreciate what his life meant to him. He risked it by choice. More than once.

That means more to me than any medal or lack of one, and it ought to have bought him some goodwill.

I suspect that when he volunteered for Vietnam, his motive was something like the love of country you admire. Al Gore went, too. He was reviled by his opponents for having had a desk job while he was in country. He'd have been safer if he had stayed home, but he chose to go where the bombs were falling.

We pick and choose our heroes with such intricacy. We should print a set of rules.

 

[shereads]

I don't know how much of this still goes on in rural america. Perhaps not much, since it was a long time ago, but I do have to wonder if there are still a lot of pople to whom telling lies down at the bar with your fishing buddies and lying under oath aren't still two very different things?

I hope there aren't a lot of people who equate telling lies down at the bar with your fishing buddies with manufacturing evidence and invading a country under false pretenses. You may be right, though. In which case I might as well stay home from the polls in November because there really is no hope.

I wonder: if Clinton had refused to be questioned under oath, and later his lie about Monica had been revealed, would it have been okay? Is there no suspicion down at the bar about Bush/Cheney's reasons for refusing to take an oath before their testimony?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I hope there aren't a lot of people who equate telling lies down at the bar with your fishing buddies with manufacturing evidence and invading a country under false pretenses. You may be right, though. In which case I might as well stay home from the polls in November because there really is no hope.

I wonder: if Clinton had refused to be questioned under oath, and later his lie about Monica had been revealed, would it have been okay? Is there no suspicion down at the bar about Bush/Cheney's reasons for refusing to take an oath before their testimony?

I cannot answer your question for anyone other than myself Sher. In my case, if you knew you were going to be asked question you weren't prepared to truthfully answer, I would hold it against you far less if you pleaded the fifth than I would for commiting perjury.

Politicians lie. The magnitude of their lies usually comes up and does them in, in the end, but not always. Some escape without facing those lies, some don't. Bill Clinton was a shrewd judge of people. He chose to tell the lies under oath and hope they didn't bite him. When normally rationaly people like you voice the opinion he had the right to lie under oath, it shows me he knew his supporters, or had an unparalled sense of just how much the american public had become jaded, how low our expectations for our political leaders has fallen.

Now you are incensed by the seeming apathy of the voting public to this administration's lies. You can point back to Regan, Iran-contra & I forget as a start if it pleases you. But Clinton is in many ways just as responsible for this disreguard. Harry Truman and the buck stops here is far in our past. The days when the media didn't report the less noble side of our leaders passed with LBJ & Nixxon. Our collective standards for politicians has been eroded by a succession of men who would lie through their teeth and smile while doing it. Honesty, integrity, honor. These aren't words we use for politicians. The only group I can think of who are held to even lower standards is lawyers.

About the only thing that seems to affect this is extremely partisan politics. When a republican is in office, to republicans, they are just "inaccurate'. When a democrat is in office, to Democrats "they have the right to lie". And the only time either calls for truthfullness, honesty or integrity is when the other side is holding the reins.

No Democrat said we need the truth when Bill was in office. No republican is now calling for an honest accounting. It seems to indicate that the running of this country is such dirty bussiness that the truth is incompatible with the job.

-Colly

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Deleted as it was sarcastic and filled with venom.

-Colly

 

[raphy]

Colly, you know I love you. I've known you for a very long time and always respected your opinions. So bear that in mind as you read this post.

Firstly - It's not for me to decide what kind of protestor John Kerry was. My question was a purely historical, factual one.

Did John Kerry ever verbally (or otherwise) abuse the soldiers that he fought alongside when he (or they) came home?

or

Did John Kerry simply stand up and say 'The war in Vietnam is wrong. Bring our boys home.".. ?

That's what I was asking. The first kind of protestor is (in my opinion, not a very nice person). The second kind of protestor is doing the right thing, protesting the right way, protesting against the people who declared the war, not against the people who are forced to fight it.

I have to say, Colly, that in this, I find your attitudes much more narrow-minded than I'm used to hearing from you.

My reasons for feeling the way I do are obviously deep and personal. Your reasons for feeling the way you do are obviously the same.

Mine don't stem from any kind of passion or deep personal feeling. I'm trying to (once again) find the middle ground here. I'm trying to understand everyone's reasons for believing what they believe and I'm hoping (maybe vainly) that people have rational and logical reasons for their opinions.

I have another question for you then, Colly. It's just an either/or question, really.

Does your objection about Kerry's protesting stem from

Option a) the manner in which he protested

or

Option b) simply because he protested

I understand this is obviously a difficult and deeply personal subject for you, and I'll understand if you don't wish to answer, but I'm still trying to understand your viewpoint on this. I'm trying to narrow down exactly where it is you stand.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Colly, you know I love you. I've known you for a very long time and always respected your opinions. So bear that in mind as you read this post.

Firstly - It's not for me to decide what kind of protestor John Kerry was. My question was a purely historical, factual one.

Did John Kerry ever verbally (or otherwise) abuse the soldiers that he fought alongside when he (or they) came home?

or

Did John Kerry simply stand up and say 'The war in Vietnam is wrong. Bring our boys home.".. ?

That's what I was asking. The first kind of protestor is (in my opinion, not a very nice person). The second kind of protestor is doing the right thing, protesting the right way, protesting against the people who declared the war, not against the people who are forced to fight it.

I have to say, Colly, that in this, I find your attitudes much more narrow-minded than I'm used to hearing from you.


Mine don't stem from any kind of passion or deep personal feeling. I'm trying to (once again) find the middle ground here. I'm trying to understand everyone's reasons for believing what they believe and I'm hoping (maybe vainly) that people have rational and logical reasons for their opinions.

I have another question for you then, Colly. It's just an either/or question, really.

Does your objection about Kerry's protesting stem from

Option a) the manner in which he protested

or

Option b) simply because he protested

I understand this is obviously a difficult and deeply personal subject for you, and I'll understand if you don't wish to answer, but I'm still trying to understand your viewpoint on this. I'm trying to narrow down exactly where it is you stand.

Firstly, nothing you say in a political thread will ever upset me Raphy. I have known you too long and too well to ever assume something you said was aimed at me in a hurtful manner. I also know you well enough to know that our views on politics are not exactly birds of a feather.

On this subject I am more narrow minded than on many others. I don't apologize for it, but I did ackowledge it in my post. Nothing anyone says is likely to change my opinion on it. The influences on me that brought about this view, while far in the past, were imparted to me by people who still hold enormous respect in my eyes. A level of love & respect no poster here has, nor is likley to ever have, barring me marrying someone here.

This is the opening of Mr. Kerry's Statements to the U.S. Senate:

Statement of Mr. John Kerry

...I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony....


WINTER SOLDIER INVESTIGATION

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.

There is more to it. In fairness he does question the leadership near the end. I think he takes one paragraph in doing so. If you are really digging for the historical perspective on his actions & activites it would behoove you to read the rest. I have the strange feeling that on liberal sites you will get his statement after his opening and on conservative sites you will get little more than the opening.

The answer to your question is A. Raphy. It is the way in which he protested. If his opening statements weren't fuel for the "small" portion of protestors who hated and spit & wrote hate mail etc. then they very well could have been.

-Colly

 

[dr_mabeuse]

An apology to KarenAM. Although my first paragraph was in response to your post about anti-Viet Nam war activity leading to liberals being branded soft on defnese, the rest of the post was not in respoinse to Karen, but rather to this business of all the returning Vets being spat upon, which seems to have become accepted as gospel now, but in my recollection was a very rare occurance; so rare that the once occurance I remember was reported in Time magazine. When I said “You probably don’t remember…”, I should have made it clear that it was meant as a general “You” and not directed at Karen in particular.

And I’m sorry that Colleen feels my response to her was in any sense mean-spirited or that I implied that anyone was a fascist. I’ve read the post several times and don’t really see how she got that impression. It certainly wasn't one that I intended.

---dr.M.

 

[cantdog]

Clinton was a bloody handed bastard. A lotta people were massacred during his tenure. East Timor, for one example. Haiti for another. He expanded Gitmo after running on the premise that holding the Haitians there was illegal and wrong. The only thing he went to the mat for was GATT and NAFTA.

All these corporate jamokes eat shit from tin plates. Not one of them deserves your vote.

cantdog

 

[KenJames]

The current presidential election has torn the scabs off our national wounds, and we're again seeing just how deep and bloody those wounds are.

Vietnam left deep emotional scars on everyone involved. There never has been and, I fear, never will be any real reconciliation between the people holding opposing points of view. The best we can hope for is individuals agreeing to disagree.

Colly, I believe I understand why you and so many other people consider the war protestors to be traitors, betraying our soldiers. I respect your feelings and admire your courage in sharing them.

Many of us in the anti-war movement protested because we really honestly believed it was our government itself which was actually betraying our soldiers. At the time, it was extremely painful to be despised and called a traitor for taking a principled stand against our government following a disastrously wrong path. After more than thirty years, it's still painful.

 

[raphy]

Colly..

I may dig out and read the rest of that statement - On the other hand, I may not, because the issue itself isn't very important to me. I can't vote in the upcoming election, and I wouldn't anyway, for reasons discussed elsewhere, which I do not want to go into here.

So why was I prodding at you? No other reason than the one I originally stated. I wanted to get inside your head. I wanted to see your motivations, your rationalizations, your reasons.

You see, I have a reason for every little single thing I do or say, and I tend to assume that everyone else works the same way, too - And I feel that it's in understanding those reasons that we gain a greater understanding of each other as friends and people.

That's why I asked.

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

I can certainly see how you could see this as fuel for anti-soldier protestors. Note, I'm calling them anti-soldier protestors. I don't see Kerry pronouncing judgement on those acts - Fuck, he probably committed a number of them himself - I just see him reporting them as historical fact.

That said - I don't think you and I see so differently on this issue. Maybe I'm not as far out there on the edge as you - I rarely am - But I don't think we're that far apart.

To be absolutely honest - I don't think anyone on this thread is oceans apart in terms of opinion about what's going on.

No one here likes what's happening. No one here likes that our soldiers are dying for senseless and stupid reasons. (I can say 'our', the British Army has its share of soldiers over there). No one here is anti-their-country. From everything that I've read, I think every single person here believes themselves to be patriotic. And I believe it, too.

Whether you think Kerry's actions disqualify him from being a valid presidential candidate is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. I certainly wasn't trying to villify you for it - I just wanted to know the why of it .. That's where my questions stemmed from

 

[Wildcard Ky]

I hope there aren't a lot of people who equate telling lies down at the bar with your fishing buddies with manufacturing evidence and invading a country under false pretenses. You may be right, though. In which case I might as well stay home from the polls in November because there really is no hope.

I wonder: if Clinton had refused to be questioned under oath, and later his lie about Monica had been revealed, would it have been okay? Is there no suspicion down at the bar about Bush/Cheney's reasons for refusing to take an oath before their testimony?

Once again I ask this question since it wasn't answered the first time I asked. What were Clinton (and Kerry) talking about in 1998 when they said that Iraq had WMD's and that Saddam needed to be removed? Everyone accuses the curent administration of "fabricating" WMD evidence. The WMD story was there a full three years before GWB took office. When the story came to light that possibly some of the evidence had been little more than stretched truth on the part of intelligence agencies, Clinton was one of the first ones to speak out. He said he believed 100% that the WMD's were there up until that story broke last year. He said that he saw no reason why the current president would think any different based on the information being given by CIA, SIS, Mossad and others.

To say that Bush made up this evidence is misleading at best. It was there three years before he came into office. If anyone can offer any evidence to refute that, I'd love to hear it. I'm no fan of Bush, but to place the blame squarely on him for something that was in place three years before he was is simply wrong. One might say it shows a level of bias so deep as to make the truth irrelevant for the sake of serving the bias.

 

[KarenAM]

An apology to KarenAM.

Accepted. I respect you and everyone here too much to hold a grudge.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

The current presidential election has torn the scabs off our national wounds, and we're again seeing just how deep and bloody those wounds are.

Vietnam left deep emotional scars on everyone involved. There never has been and, I fear, never will be any real reconciliation between the people holding opposing points of view. The best we can hope for is individuals agreeing to disagree.

Colly, I believe I understand why you and so many other people consider the war protestors to be traitors, betraying our soldiers. I respect your feelings and admire your courage in sharing them.

Many of us in the anti-war movement protested because we really honestly believed it was our government itself which was actually betraying our soldiers. At the time, it was extremely painful to be despised and called a traitor for taking a principled stand against our government following a disastrously wrong path. After more than thirty years, it's still painful.

Thank you Ken. More than you can know, at least someone hearing what I am trying to say, rather than listening, not hearing and firing another salvo at me means so much.

You chose to protest. I think you did so out of the honest conviction that the government policy was wrong. Standing here virtually alone in this forum so many times, feling like the fox with the hounds nipping at my heels, I think perhaps I can understand how you must have felt in some small way.

I made a blanket statment, that I hated protestors. When I made it, I meant it. It is however, wrong, to tar everyone with the same brush. Individual reasons for actions are as varried as the individuals who make them. Standing on your principles is something I should and do respect, no matter that those principles are far from my own.

I will never see protest as patriotic. But I will trash my preconception that every protestor is a hateful, spiteful and vile enemy of my country's servicemen. I don't think that of you and you protested.

Thank you for that too. I know most here still consider me a Nazi, but I feel like I am a little better off as a person than I was 30 minutes ago.

*HUGS*

-Colly

Edited to add: Thank you too Karen, for hearing what I was trying to say. I should have mentioned and thanked you too. I'm just not real sharp tonight and apologize.