I hope you’re not suggesting, wolf_meister, that these men deserved to win solely because of their honorable service?
I’ve gone over this many, many times. You seem to not care that Bill Clinton defeated two real, genuine, decorated veterans himself.
Is there a veteran status litmus test, in your mind, regarding military service? Did that lead you to vote for Bush I, Dole, McCain, Gore and Kerry?
I’d like to meet someone who voted for all of these men at various times, but I don’t kid myself that that person will have any degree of political sophistication.
Hello again, Mr Moto.
Actually, I had a feeling you might be replying to my posting.
(We’ve met up in various forums before, and I really don’t think there’s as much difference between our opinions as you might think).
I will admit I’m one of the more notorious “Dubya-bashers” on the SDMB. Perhaps I am lacking in political sophistication (particularly in my dislike for “Dubya”).
Just to give a Cliff’s Notes™ review of my many postings, each of the candidates you mentioned may not be perfect but they do at least have some redeeming quality or qualities. Sure, Clinton “dodged the draft” but he had an abusive, poverty-stricken childhood and became a Rhodes Scholar.
Bob Dole is a disabled WW2 veteran who has had many years of distinguished public service and is a good public speaker.
I could go on about many other candidates qualifications but my point is that I find Dubya has NO positive attributes whatsoever. He had an affluent childhood, he purposely avoided the Vietnam War, his Dad helped him get into Yale, he has a cloudy past of drunk driving and cocaine use, his private business ventures were disastrous, his intelligence is something less than outstanding, his public speaking is downright embarassing. It just bothers me that this goof who has had NO hardships in his life and is so totally lacking in any positive characteristics has been elected twice to the presidency.
Yes, I know this is a thread specifically about Vietnam but to me Dubya epitomizes THE draft-dodger - yet this guy goes on to lead our country. If he had served in Vietnam, that would at least be some kind of responsibility he took upon himself - but he didn’t.
As I have repeatedly tried to say, though not as clearly as I should, is that my objections to Mr Stone’s opinion holding is that he invariably chimes in on the side of America’s military misadventures that holds the most danger for me and mine WHILE PUTTING HIMSELF IN NO DANGER WHATSOEVER! I consider GW Bush, Dick Cheney, John Wayne, Robert McNamara and the rest of the chickenhawks to have gone many steps beyond being obnoxious blowhards into the realm of being actually evil because they followed the same path. Sam is far from the same league, being just another guy shooting his mouth off on a messageboard, but I would have more respect for him and his opinions if he had acted on them.
As for the “chickenhawk” name, does that make me a “chickendove?” Or just plain chicken?
Dropzone: Since you know nothing about me or my past, and since my personal life is irrelevant to the discussion, an inappropriate topic for this thread, and outside the rules of this message board, I would like to invite you to shut your festering cake-hole. Jesus.
It’s tough to look at a monitor through tears. After all the rambling discussions on the topic you still don’t get it. Even now you’re trying to justify Kerry’s record to me. It’s not about what I think of Kerry. It’s what the Veterans think about Kerry. 4 to 1 (against) to be exact. Put another way, 4 times as many Veterans consider Kerry a traitor because of his testimony than those who don’t. And they voted accordingly. You can disagree with their opinion until the cows come home.
I wasn’t of voting age when Kerry was giving his testimony but I do remember watching a group of Vietnam Vets slam their comrades in front of a camera. If Kerry was one of those people then I can guarantee you the veterans who were offended by it would take that opinion to their grave (and the voting booth if given a chance).
Even Kerry understood this. His book tour and mia copa as a war-criminal was intended to purge his closet of those skeletons so he could advance his career. There was no other political reason to bring his past actions to light. I remember watching him (not knowing anything about the Massachusetts Senator) and thinking he must be planning on a run for President.
His entire “I’m John Kerry, Vietnam Veteran” campaign was aimed at recapturing the Veteran vote. It failed because he never made restitution to the voter/veterans who were pissed off. Without the veteran support he was vulnerable on defense issues. You can’t run a campaign as a war hero when the only memorial honoring you (as such) is in a Vietnam museum.
The difference in campaign strategy was simple. President Bush never presented his Guard duty as part of his campaign. By doing so he avoided media attacks. It was never part of his public resume’ so it never grew any feet. Senator Kerry wrapped his entire campaign around a service record that was highly controversial. He painted his own bulls-eye.
Going back to something said earlier in this thread (Sam, I think)…
Right, here.
Um, WTF?
As far as I’ve known, the knowledge was always that the Communists would win any election held. If the people choose to live under communist rule, shouldn’t they be allowed to? Are you suggesting that if an election in a foreign country goes for the people we currently aren’t liking, that we have full right to invade and liberate said country from their self-imposed doom? Does that mean someone can invade America because half of us think Bush is the most dangerous person on the planet?
Albeit coming from a highly suspect and biased source, 4 million dead civilians, huh? All that carpet bombing and napalm sure went far to liberate people who didn’t necessarily want to be liberated.
Already addressed
Citing the Wikipedia entrance above, it seems pretty clear to any sane, neutral observer that the United States made for a power play in both Viet Nam and Cambodia, dragging the entire region into a bloody civil war with ensuing dictatorships and accompanying slaughter of civilians.
The Viet Nam war started because France didn’t decolonize right and the US pressed the war button, the war in Cambodia started with a US-led coup. Looking around, I’m not seeing much but the US triggering wars. If, on an alternate time line, the Viet Namese elections were held and Viet Nam peacefully transitioned to Communism, there is no telling what the scene would look like today. Perhaps Cambodia would have eventually fallen to the same party for the same reasons. Maybe the same slaughter would have taken place, but maybe not. You can’t just say all of that happened because of the Communists - it happened because the US stuck its big, oily nose in and thought it could play those people like puppets. They were horribly wrong
No, we don’t understand it and never will, Magiver. To you Kerry betrayed his comrades. To me, Nixon, Kissinger, etc betrayed Kerry’s comrades, as well as the American peple, and Kerry called them on it. And after that his opponents lied as to what Kerry said to convince you and others like you that he said things he didn’t. You have had it explained to you repeatedly, WITH EVIDENCE, that you’re perception is not accurate yet you continue to to believe it. Were the discussion about evolution or ghosts we, as a group, would accuse you of being resolutely, and perhaps purposely, obtuse. As it is about Vietnam you and your cohorts get to wrap yourselves in the flag and bemoan your role as misunderstood. You are not misunderstood. You are wrong.
And Sam, if you cannot understand why I have no respect for your opinions as to American political and military policy then you, too, are being, possibly deliberately, thickheaded, though I have no expectations of anything else from you. You are wrong about Vietnam and Iraq and, I presume, Greneda and Panama and whatever other foolishness you have supported over the years and until you are willing to sacrifice your own children, instead of mine, on the altar of Conservative Wrongheadedness I will continue to despise you.
Okay, I’m starting (starting?) to foam at the mouth and I am sorry. Sam, I don’t despise you. You piss me off (the set of people who piss me off is large) but I should control my emotions better.
What a missed opportunity! That’s precisely where you put your cite, especially after you use a word like “exact”. The exact pluperfect spot for the ol’ citereeno! So, you know, people don’t get the wrong idea, like maybe your pulled this figure off some wing-nut site, or maybe bent a few statistics. Pity.
Really. I was of voting age, and followed the events of the time closely. As I recall, there wasn’t a whole lot of TV coverage. I very much doubt you were subjected to hour after droning hour. Be that as it may, an honorable soldier who condemns brutality and crime, in the name of common decency, is not betraying a comrade.
Point of fact, he wasn’t. Kerry did not testify at the Winter Soldier investigation. He was invited by the Senate committee to testify as to what he heard. The ad you see on TV is carefully elided to give the impression that it is Kerry testifying as to events. But he isn’t, he is testifying about what he heard. Any man, of any political persuasion, and for any agenda, if he told the truth would have said the same things, because that was the truth: that is what the soldiers who testified at the WSI said!
You may be gifted with a stunning combination of perspicacity and psychic powers, the capacity to peer into the mind of a man you’ve never met, and inventory the motives therein. Either that, or your just guessing. My money’s on the latter, pending proof.
Yes. It was very modest of GeeDubya not to flaunt his heroic war record. On his watch, not so much as a single Viet Cong bombing mission violated the big skies of Texas.
Come to the Dark Side, and the set of people who piss you off will get smaller. To speak with one of our counselors, draw a pentagram on the floor in goat’s blood, and then…
Perhaps, Zagadka, you can point out to me the last free election Vietnam has had since unification. Or the last free one North Vietnam had before that.
It isn’t democracy when you vote in folks who then end free elections.
There are lots of countries that ban certain parties from running, because they are hostile to the constitutional order. Germany has permanently banned the Nazi Party because they are an undemocratic party. Does that mean Germany is not free?
Of course it is. If the voting public, in a free and fair exchange, decides to enslave themselves it’s prefectly democratic. Blitheringly stupid, yes, but democratic. The voters of America are eventually going to vote the country into bankruptcy, but that’s not undemocratic, they’re getting exactly what they voted for.
If you hold a democratic election wherein the voters are idiotic ninnies, you will wind up with an idiotic, untenable, but perfectly democratic result.
I don’t know about magiver, 4 out of 5 figure, but I can speak for one veteran. In the winter of 1970-71 when the conference was held in Detroit and John Kerry went in front of Congress, I was still on active duty as a pretty junior army officer. My only access to information about it was the Paris Herald-Tribune. I don’t remember Stars and Stripes printing anything about it and I’m reasonably sure that there was nothing on Armed Forces Radio and TV. When Mr. Kerry went before Congress the effect was electric – the “How can you ask a man to be…” line resonated among my comrades many of whom were recently returned from Vietnam. It was regarded as a case of someone speaking truth to power.
The incidents Mr. Kerry related to Congress and the testimonies at the Winter Soldier conference on which his statement was based were common knowledge in the active army. Also common knowledge was the corrosive effect of Vietnam and conscription and SE Asian drugs (heroin, hashish and others) on the core morale of the Army. By 1971 the whole thing was circling the drain at an accelerating rate. I can’t know what the generals were telling the President, but I know what the junior officers were telling each other, and the word quagmire was often used, along with futile and doomed. I can’t speak for 4 out of 5 veterans, but I can speak for one soldier who thinks Mr. Kerry did not betray anyone, that he stabbed no one in the back, rather he said what that one soldier could not say.
Incidently – stab in the back was one of the arguments made by German and Austrian die-hards after the end of WWI.
[sportscaster mode]
That was a heck of a drive by Spavined Gelding but there’s a flag on the play. The officials are discussing how subtle a Nazi reference needs to be to not invoke Godwin’s Law. And the ruling is: A lot more subtle than that one. Too bad! And to stumble that badly so close to the goal line!
[/sportscaster mode]
While this may skirt the issue of this thread, it is a response to dropzone’s somewhat amusing sortie. All sorts of people go out looking for scapegoats when thing don’t turn out as they hoped and expected – stuff like World War One and the 2004 Presidential Election. In the years following 1918 there were any number of political factions in Central Europe whose hopes and ambitions and sense of right were offended by the collapse of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of those people turned on the internal revolutions that tore both governments at the end of the war and pointed to them as the real reason that Germany speaking Central Europe was reduced to impotence. The National Socialists were only one of the factions engaged in laying blame – other parties were out right monarchists, factions of Prussian aristocracy and industrialists, precisely the people who lost the most when Kaiser Bill went to Holland and the Danube confederation was broken up. To say that all the “Front Fighters” were Nazis is simply an over simplification of a terribly complex political situation that did not turn into a Nazi take over of Germany until some 12 or 14 years after the war was over.
We have the same thing with the current sorry controversy about Senator Kerry. The war was not lost because of the Winter Soldier Conference or because John Kerry took its stories to Congress. The war in Vietnam was lost because the enemy was willing to endure beyond the expectation of the US and because that effort to give the enemy more than it could endure cost more in blood, treasure and self respect than the American public and the American military were willing or able to pay. There was no way to “win” the war in Vietnam short of giving both North and the South to the treatment Sheridan gave the Shenandoah Valley – turning it into a place a crow could not fly over without carrying its own rations. To our credit we didn’t do that.
Your post reminded me of the 5 stages of death (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) so I searched under it and found a blog on Paul Krugman’s post-election column. Maybe his words will comfort you in your hour of need.
Point of fact, Lieutenant Kerry made enough of a public spectacle of himself to warrant a Doonesbury cartoon about it. He was absolutely a public figure when he testified. Trying to rationalize that his testimony was unknown to veterans because he missed a particular event is illogical. Word of that kind of behavior gets around pretty fast in military circles. Trying to excuse his testimony because he relayed what he “heard” just makes him out to be a bigger jerk for doing it. Ignoring the feelings of the vets he insulted was fatal to his campaign. This topic was debated extensively but few people understood the issue. It was never about the magnitude of Kerry’s testimony. It was about how Veterans perceived it. It was not perceived well.
Lieutenant Kerry launched his political career on the back of his public notoriety. He progressed all the way to Senator. The same events that brought him there also kept him there. Had he reversed the ratio of the veteran vote he would have won. He didn’t and he lost . Get over it.
Point of fact, indeed. Yes, thank you, I’m quite aware of Doonesbury’s satire on Kerry. Saw it in the original, in the moment, as it were. It was good stuff, those of us who liked Kerry then and like him now are not delusional, we weren’t looking for a plaster saint. A good man, possessed of common decency, will do nicely, thank you. We all knew that Kerry was a born political animal, like Clinton, he was “born to run”. His ambitions stuck out all over him.
But there’s the rub. Kerry returned with his ticket punched: he was a war veteran, articulate, good looking (in a knotty pine sort of way). The smart thing to do was to soft-pedal his opposition to the war. That way, he would keep from actually offending the right, while making soft noises of support for the anti-war wing. Lots of politicians at the time did exactly that.
But Kerry didn’t! He was willing to sacrifice his ambitions and associate himself with a very unpopular cause out of principle. There was no advantage to be gained, politically, by associating himself with the VVAW, it was not a savvy move, it was a principled move.
Another “point of fact”. There is no such thing as “veterans”. They vary as widely as any other group of human beings. It would seem that when you say “the veterans” you don’t include such persons as the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. Are they not “veterans”? Or are we to assume that only such persons who hew to a particular political stance are really veterans, and the other guys are…something else?
