Phineas!
::looks again::
Ohhhh…John Fowles, not John Knowles. Carry on… 
Don’t fall for it, Kimstu. If you try to judge him by his intentions, he’ll belittle you for your supposed clairvoyance (as he will now probably do to me). Besides, it’s not possible to judge someone else other than by your perceptions.
Liberal It is interesting that you judge yourself by your intentions, but me by your perceptions.
Nonsense. I didn’t merely “intend” to apologize for the lack of clarity in the post that Biff was concerned about, I did apologize for it. Let’s see you apologize—in a straightforward way, without backhanded sniping or condescension—for something you said that was obscure and confusing.
For some reason, I’m currently perceiving Lib as a junkyard dog. 
How odd. I’m perceiving him as a pedantic pain in the ass.
I missed this earlier. There’s a version that Kerry told in the in the Senate where it’s his boat that gets hit by a mine, than Kerry accelerates away, and in making a sharpt turn Rassman falls off the boat and then Kerry goes back and gets him.
I can look for it, if it’s important to you. Gonna go watch the debate.
Ok, now quite some time has gone bye and Sam Stone still hasn’t turned up here. He’s posting over in the Beuty and the beast, VP debate thread though, happily as ever.
I can’t believe the cowardice and hypocracy of a man who gladly runs around dropping innuendo and smear about a greater man than himself, but the minute he gets called on it he dissapears, looking for the best hole to put his sorry little head into. Twice already in this thread. The first time he was gone for a good while, then came back, pretending no-one ever pointed out his lies, and instead tried to peddle some new ones. This time, I asume he has ditched this thread for good.
Why? He has no comeback, he knows it, and rather than being forced to admit to his deception he flees.
This is the guy you thought was battling it out like “Neo”, Liberal?
What the hell is your problem? What, I have to make daily appearances in every thread in which you choose to insult me?
Tell you what, sparky: You run along and learn about the issue, compose an eloquent rebuttal, and I’ll be happy to come back and discuss it. In the meantime, aren’t you late for school or something?
Might I point you to post #188, in which JohnFowles does indeed make a rebuttal (for the second time I believe) to your claim about the army and Gengis Khan quote?
Maybe if you answered it, it wouldn’t look like you were, ya know, ducking the issue?
Regarding the parts that I bolded, this fable about a pot and a kettle and the color black comes to mind, but I will disregard it since this is surely a diversionary tactic, designed to go on the offensive without ever addressing the content matter in JohnFowles post that so clearly contradicts the claim that you’ve made, right?
Right, why don’t I just go and fuck myself, eh? It really sucks when you know you’ve painted yourself into a corner and there’s no way out…
The fact of the matter is that I have twice called you on your little innocent smear lie and you have twice put your fingers in your ears and pretended that it never happened. What’s the problem, can’t you read?
It’s right here in posts 113 and 188. But maybe you missed those, huh.
Don’t worry pal, I’ll do it once again, just for you:
And I proved you were lying, by reprinting what Kerry really said.
I think that makes the case pretty fucking clear. Eloquence or lack of eloquence on my part is totally fucking irelevant. What’s relevant is that you tried to peddle a smear lie, and I expect you to retract and appologize when I call you on it!
Or you can just check out post #210.
And there he goes… Gone again.
That’s the thing about junkyard dogs. You’ll be fine unless you get too close to 'em.
He’s over at Lib’s, getting his arm untied. I’m sure he’ll make Neo look like a *Neopet* upon his righteous return.
I work for a living, thank you very much.
Oh. I see your attempted point now. I ‘lied’ because John Kerry didn’t say the U.S. Army was ‘like the armies of Genghis Khan’ - rather, he said that he had talked to over 150 people, and THEY said that they had raped, cut off heads, and razed villages reminiscent of the armies of Genghis Khan - "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. "
This is a distinction? Kerry took a bunch of stories from people who said they were vets, and repeated them on the floor of Congress as fact. Those stories depicted an army that behaved this way - not a few isolated cases, but widespread behaviour.
Sorry, but it doesn’t wash. Kerry stepped forward as a representative of those men, to repeat their stories to Congress. Stories which, by the way, turned out to be largely bullshit. In fact, many of those ‘decorated veterans’ turned out to not even have been in Vietnam. But Kerry didn’t bother to check. The responsibility for those claims rests just as much on his shoulders as theirs.
Your charges are full of trapdoor qualifiers, Sam.
One has to assume you mean than some number of men, claimed to be vets and spoke of personal experience of…well, shall we call it “misconduct”? You imply skepticism on each, that the number is accurate, that the actual number of authentic vets is suspect, and that they were telling “stories”. You pack a lot of innuendo in those grey areas.
But why not cut to the bone. I very much doubt that you are going to suggest that all of the reports of Viet Nam “misconduct” by American troops are universally lies. What you want to fuss about is the sense that these reports are somehow exaggerated, perhaps wildly, perhaps out of all proportion.
How do you propose to support such a suggestion? What would you seek to prove, that these horrors only occured at some acceptable level, a level to be shrugged away? Would you quantify that level in the tens of thousands, the thousands, or the hundreds?
John Kerry reported a ghastly truth, but it was the truth. I don’t see where he quantified it, save that he regarded it as “commonplace”, a description as innocent of precision as your own. How many Vietnamese victims would you require before you would accept “commonplace”? And “everyday” occurance, perhaps? A minimum of 365 victims per year? Twice that? Ten times? A hundred?
There are indeed men to hold accountable for the awful things Kerry said. But Kerry is nowhere near the top of that list.
I have said repeatedly that atrocities were committed in Vietnam. They are committed in every war. You take a bunch of young men, put them in a situation far from home, put them in conflict with strange people trying to kill them, and you will sometimes get extreme behaviour.
The difference between a statement like that and John Kerry’s testimony is that Kerry painted with an overly broad brush, intentionally leaving the impression that the army was basically out of control, ravaging the countryside, raping and pillaging, and that the command structure knew about it and looked the other way. In fact, that was NOT the case. The average soldier in Vietnam was like the average soldier in any war - a young man trying to do his job within the best of his ability. The Swiftboats, for example, used tactics that minimized enemy casualties at the expense of increased risk to themselves. Accidentally killing a civilian was a traumatic experience when it happened, and they went way out of their way to prevent it.
Even in the Iraq war there have been numerous cases of atrocities - Abu Ghraib, a couple of civilians pushed off a bridge (one drowned), a general killed by an overzealous interrogator, etc. I’m sure there are more that we haven’t heard about because the perps didn’t get caught. But would it be fair to say that the American Army in Iraq is behaving like the armies of Genghis Khan? Would you even dream of tarring the average soldier in the field based on the actions of a few? That’s what Kerry did to his fellow Vietnam soldiers.
How many of those 150 stories were true? I have no idea. I assume a few were. Maybe more were half-truths, or ‘foxhole stories’ about a guy someone heard about, repeated as a personal observation. And as I said, a number of those ‘veterans’ turned out to be anti-war activists in disguise.
The best you can say about Kerry is that he was reckless with his language, incautious in repeating wild stories as fact, and uncaring of the damage he was doing to POWs, soldiers in the field, the war effort, and the families of those who had died. Hell, Jane Fonda admits this today about her own behaviour, which was about the same as Kerry’s. She says that although she still believes the cause was right, her behaviour crossed the line and did harm to people who didn’t deserve it. She blamed it on youth, zeal, and ignorance, and accepted responsibility for what she did and apologized.
Kerry has not done so. He should.
I meant ‘minimized civilian casualties’…
Sam, kindly go and fuck yourself with a rusty cheese grater. Jane Fonda actively SUPPORTED the Viet Cong, you partisan hack. Kerry simply pointed out that the many soldiers were out of control, that higher ups knew about it, and did nothing.
How is that even remotely in the same catagory, you shrill fuck?
:mad:
If you’re going to start repeating this claim, I’d like a cite, please.