As Bush is giving aid and comfort to Saudis, aren’t Coulter and her ilk then committing treason by proxy?
Scylla:
What a bunch of twisted, lip-flapping, basackwards nonsense that reply was.
First you say that raping and ear-cutting and torture occurred in “every single war” “since the dawn of time.” Then you say that John Kerry simply “pretended” those same atrocities happened in Vietnam. What the hell? Then you try to compare war crimes with driving infractions? Jesus.
The FACTS are there. There are THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of military DOCUMENTS and AUDIO TAPES attesting to those FACTS.
FACTS, Scylla.
Not pretend generalities from other wars. Actual raping and mass murdering and decapitations and shoelace necklaces adorned with ears that “just about everyone had” IN VIETNAM.
Tortures and murders of innocent civilians waving fliers promising them safety.
The military and the government have been COVERING IT UP for decades. These crimes were not uncommon (though John Kerry never implied that they were universal!), they were endorsed and/or overlooked at Every! Level! of Command!, and they were absolutely not punished, which you would know if you’d have bothered to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning expose I linked directly to.
So you give me a break. And don’t tell me what I know. I KNOW that John Kerry was telling the absolute truth because SEPARATE WITNESSES – hundreds of them – attest to the very things he said, and because thousands of pages of documents say the same things. Not in generalities, in very explicit, specific detail.
But we should believe you that John Kerry is a liar because… because… well, because, what, because you say so?? That is utterly, laughably absurd.
Get your head out of the sand and accept reality. It’s ugly and it’s painful, but it’s a fact.
I read this kind of thing, as “I have no real answer so I’ll just make insults.”
No. That’s not what I said.
No. I didn’t do that, either.
When come back, bring some. Your FACTS do not argue what you claim they argue.
Just about everyone?
Very well. Let’s define “just about everyone” as 2/3, a solid majority. If you are arguing facts with me then give me a cite showing that 66% or more of American soldiers in Vietnam had such necklaces and I will concede that Kerry’s testimony is essentially correct.
Let’s boil it down to just one of your FACTS.
Show me that, and you win.
If you can’t, then I expect you to concede that your FACTS don’t demonstrate what you claim. Fair enough?
I’ve read it more than once. It characterizes a specific group.
Then back up your one fact, and I’ll concede.
Because he provably lied.
It is huh. 66% percent of American soldiers in Vietnam made necklaces out of ears.
Let’s see it.
Excuse please, but, huh? Wha? Is there some relevence to that remark? What are you struggling to infer? Are you suggesting that only those soldiers who were directly connected to the Tiger program were guilty of “misconduct”? On what do you base this spectacular cognitive leap?
An utterly dishonest debater, someone entirely unlike yourself, might try to claim that because only the aforementioned Tiger group crimes are verified and documented, and the Winter Soldier testimony does not include such, then the WS allegations must therefore be false in every jot and tittle.
But you don’t, of course, because that would justly expose you to ridicule.
So please clarify. Are you trying to suggest that only the men discussed in the Toledo article were guilty of war crimes? And can you prove that none of the crimes discussed in the WS testimony were associated with this group? And can you then show us why, in the name of all that is holy, we should give a shit?
Just to be clear, things like the cutting off of ears and the like are the sorts of things that happen when an army finds itself fighting not just a uniformed enemy, but a guerrilla force backed by the people themselves. In a situation like Vietnam, which was a civil war, this is inevitable, since some section of the population among which you are fighting is going to be hostile to you.
The result is as follows, which comes from a book, 365 Days, written in 1971 by a pediatrician who served in the medical corps as a Major during Vietnam, recounting a story told him. Hearsay? Yes. But it wasn’t there to prove any kind of point, it was just a war story. The bad stuff happens in between, and in context it’s perfectly understandable; any of us could easily see ourselves doing the same thing. Point being, if you want to avoid the nastiness, stay out of fights that don’t pertain to you:
I trust that’s enough to set the context, and the reason why mere common sense would tell you that Kerry was uncomfortably closer to the truth than most of us would like. That discomfort you feel is from being on the occupying side of a foreign country we had no business being in. In that impossible situation, bad things will inevitably happen, merely as part of going about a typical, typically awful, day.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200410180009
Some excerpts from the Media Matters, the (entirely partisan!) site by David the Apostate…originally appeared in a criticism of Hannity and His Bitch
Granting the this is published on a decidedly partisan site, unlike the paragons of candor and civic virtue so beloved of friend Scylla, the Freepers. the site does post links for those curious enough to track them down.
Besides the aforementioned Mr. Lewy, have the swiftvets and freepers any other substantiation for their claims about Sen Kerry than thier own insistence that it must be so?
(Actually, I didn’t really need to mention Scylla’s name, but, curiously enough, it seems that when I do mention him directly, he usually reads it. Odd. Doesn’t always work with Sam Stone, but…ooops! I did it again…)
pantom, particularly wrt Scylla, I fear we are speaking to a mind so closed that a mountain of evidence the size of Everest wouldn’t be sufficient – witness his last reply. The facts don’t say what they claim to say. Okaaaaay. Seems pretty straight forward to me, but if he wants to live in his fantasy world where Vietnam was the supposed exception to every war since the dawn of time, and steadfastly refuse to accept outright confessions by men who say that they, themselves, committed these crimes (as opposed to Kerry’s hearsay testimony), well, there’s really nothing that can be done to prevent it.
I’ve been reading through this site, which appears to be the actual Winter Soldier testimony from that Detroit meeting that Kerry based his Senate testimony on – quite chilling. It’s a long read, so I’m nowhere near done, but it’s painfully obvious that these men are speaking the truth with heavy hearts and weary souls. Though I haven’t thoroughly recorded all the names mentioned and compared them to the Tiger Force articles to try to match any up, it seems as though, based on a cursory glance-through, that there isn’t any overlap. IOW, many of these same crimes and atrocities were perpetrated by both groups independently of one another, lending further credence to their “commonness”.
I see this much the same way as I do the current prisoner abuses in Bush’s “War on Terror.” Accusations came out of Gitmo for months and months, describing specific abuses against prisoners. All the while, no one wanted to believe them – we’re the “good guys,” we don’t commit prisoner abuse. Besides, these are war criminals who cannot be believed – liars every one of them.
Then some brave and moral souls came forward to expose the exact same abuses occurring in at least one prison in Iraq, complete with photographic and documented evidence. Now we must believe or be branded fools, and the testimony of the Gitmo prisoners became entirely believeable and credible.
And that’s exactly as it is with the now uncovered, documented evidence about the Tiger Force case as it pertains to the Winter Soldier claims – the evidence of one lends credence to the other.
I also came across this article, which, while neither it nor I make any actual accusations, included this interesting tidbit which I had not previously known:
Sorry, John Kerry is one of our nation’s “elite.” These people have special priviledges not given to most common citizens.
We can expect that John Kerry will be brought to question for his ‘treason’ at about the same liberal level as Jane Fonda was prosecuted for manning (or womaning?) a NVA anti-aircraft gun.
In otherwords, not at all.
The thing that bothers me most about the liberal movement in this country is the push to feel sorry for criminal perpetrators while they make laws that turn honest citizens into criminals. Kerry’s voting record is a great example: he has voted against increasing mandatory penalties for the criminal misuse of firearms. He voted against funding expanded federal prosecution of violent, armed drug dealers. (S. 254) He even voted against the death penalty for terrorists who murder Americans overseas. (S. 1798)
He consistantly votes to restrict the 2nd amendment right “of the people” to keep and bear arms, however. By his own words the 2nd amendment he promises to protect is “as currently interpreted,” that is the 9th circuit court’s interpretation that only the militia has the right.
No. We don’t prosecute traitors in Amerika.
Cite?
And not a cite about Jane posing for a silly photo-op, but a cite documenting that she actually fired the thing at American or South Viet troops.
None of those things are treason even in a moral sense (let alone a constitutional sense). They’re merely questions of political judgment where reasonable people might differ and where Kerry reached different conclusions than you would have.
For a president to lead the country into a disastrous and interminable war based on a pack of lies, on the other hand . . . hard to characterize that as anything but treason. :mad:
And isn’t it about time that Bush, Blair and Cheney were tried for war crimes against the people of Iraq?
Well, Shayna, it’s like this: The point of his testimony, the point of being against idiotic wars like Vietnam and Iraq, is that you only send young people into that hell when you have to, not because some Ivory Tower rube comes up with some crackpot theory like “The Domino Theory” or “preventive war” (as Truman so aptly noted, You don’t ‘prevent’ anything by war…except peace."). And as The Powell Doctrine states,:
All of that minimizes the Hell the soldiers have to go through. They lied about the first bolded part, but that’s not nearly as bad as screwing up the second bolded part as thoroughly as they have, because screwing that up has placed all those soldiers smack in the middle of another war where you once again have a hard time separating your friends from your enemies, and once again that’s an open door to abuse and worse.
Actually, it all boils down to one simple saying: don’t let your mouth write a check that your body can’t cash. Of course, in war, the neat thing if you’re the Maximum Leader is that you don’t have to cash that check with your own body.
As to the closed minds, in all of history they’ve never won a lasting victory, and they never will. Winning this election - assuming he does - doesn’t mean that Bush the Second won’t go down in history as a lying, war-mongering, spendthrift demagogue.
Nixon won re-election too, after all. If this boob does, the Democrats will sweep the Republicans out of both houses of Congress in two years in a 1974-style landslide. There’s a limit to the damage he’ll be able to pull. And you can take it to the bank that he’ll leave office disgraced, because he’s too immature to figure out that that limit exists.