Still, you can understand why some Congresscritters would want to visit Iraq, and it ain’t to troll for votes or do photo ops; it’s so they can get a firsthand look at the situation.
But BG, why are you upset that someone took some quotes from the congressmen’s speeches and put it on a bio? Unless the quotes were misleading (doesn’t seem to be the complaint), or the members were embarrassed about the content of their speeches, I’m just not seeing what the problem is. In fact, Mr. Moran came home from that trip and told the press that he’s still convinced that we should get out of Iraq.
Mr. Moran should be outraged: first the military, then the Northern Virginia media have smeared him with his own statements!
Hey, I thought the soldiers’ morale was low, and that they all wanted to go home. So why should you be bothered if soldiers are reading bios of politicians that indicate they want to pull the troops out? Surely they’d be greeted with flowers and hugs! Maybe it was some democratic aid who distributed the bills, expecting their people to get a hero’s welcome when the soldiers learned that they were there to help them get out.
Isn’t that the case? Or do you think that maybe the large majority of soldiers there actually support the mission and want to continue to try to make it work?
Geez, Sam, that ain’t the “excluded middle”, you took the middle out back of the house and beat it to death with a hammer!
If you were a soldier on the ground in Iraq and someone handed you one of these flyers…would that really alter your views of any politician?
Or would you take the flyer and think to yourself “why would this putz think I would be persuaded by this cheap trick?”
Good thing this didn’t cost a lot of money, because I feel pretty confident it was wasted.
Of course I can see why they’re doing this. I won’t agree that it’s not about about looking good for voters, nor to do photo ops, but I do agree that it’s not only for those reasons. Whatever the specific reasons, and how they might be ranked in these Congresspersons’ minds, I do agree that they’ve got a reason and a right to be there.
I’d question whether the best place for that ‘feel’ for a situation is going to be from front line troops, but you can certainly make the argument either way.
I thought Republicans thought it was below the belt to speak ill of public servants when they are out of the country. At least that was the rational for their outrage when Sean Penn spoke the truth about the President when he was travelling abroad. I guess that courtesy does not extend to Democrats when they are out of the country now, does it?
Speaking out of country =/= to foreigners.
I don’t know what this means. Please use complete sentences.
To quote what someone says is not “to speak ill” of that person.
So next time Bush pops over to Baghdad, it would be OK to hand out broadsheets about his proposed cuts to the VA budget for 2008, including cuts to prosthetics research, traumatic brain injury treatment centers, and increases in prescription co-pays from $8 to $15. I am sure our troops would be interested to hear the truth about their Commander-in-Chief.
The terribly unfortunate thing is that it does work. You could argue that my experience is biased because I live in an uber-conservative area, but something like this is amateur hour compared to some of the stuff I see around here. Conservatism is fairly widespread throughout the armed forces inasmuch as the Democrats are not generally seen as being “on our side”, if you will. You and I know that that is not necessarily the case (and certainly is not here) but it’s the perception that matters. The military no longer has an institutional memory of Vietnam, so the average grunt sees this withdrawal talk as an affront to his personal honor, that he wasn’t good enough to get the job done. What he can’t do as a 20-year-old is compare the situation he’s in to what his father was doing 40 years ago and realize the fallacy in his thinking.
Goddamn this is a mess. With the exception of American body counts this really is Vietnam redux. How tragic for everybody involved.
I don’t know.
Fear Itself, speaking as someone who’s not really upset about these broadsheets, I’d have no problem with that.
Of course, with my own service having been back in the dark ages*, I remember when the only news from outside the ship were the page or two of AP/UP headlines being posted every day or every other day by the radio shack. I know that troops in permanent bases or semi-permanent bases like those in Iraq are far more connected than ever I was while underway - but that is still part of the background for how I’ve viewing this.
*active duty 1989-1994
Probably The Green slime.
I thought the complaints were that the papers have false information on them that makes the politicians in question look bad.
Or selective quotes… From the WAPO article, and the OP:
They administration is simply distributing opposition research to our troops. Part of a pattern. Gingrich discovered that there were lots of practices that were prohibited by tradition, but not law. Here, the issue is the politicization of the military.
George Bush has many fans, fewer open fans and multitudes of enablers. That’s ok: I accept all of this calmly. But let none say that modern conservatives are defenders of tradition.
Yes, it would. Why wouldn’t it be? Go for it.
I didn’t pick that up from your OP, which simply said “Who the fuck is behind this?!” That made it sound like you objected to the flyers themselves.
But now I see . . . what’s REALLY got you incensed is that U.S. soldiers (you assume) are engaging in free speech.
Here’s a web site that apparently includes a lot of anti-war statements by active duty soldiers:
I trust that you are outraged that armed forces personnel would engage in this sort of activity.
:rolleyes:
Actually, when it comes to discussion of the President and his foreign policy decisions, there are, i believe, specific restrictions on the sort of comments that active-duty armed forces personnel are allowed to make. Our own Airman Doors USAF has been quite clear about this in the past.