braintree, I’m a longtime conservative Republican. I’m pro-life. While I’m disappointed with Bush’s free spending, I see no indication that Kerry would spend less.
I think we should have gone to war with Iraq a long time ago, and I am skeptical that the U.N. can ever do anything substantive to bring about collective security or guarantee human rights.
These are honest political differences with John Kerry that would keep me from voting for him in any case. I was up front about this right from the start.
The medals are not more important to me than other political issues. But they are important in their own way, for the reasons I spelled out.
I can certainly understand why a lot of people look at this issue and don’t think it’s a big deal. But it is a very big deal to very many people. If it wasn’t, John Kerry wouldn’t have thrown the medals in the first place. He knew what a powerful image that was.
We’ve moved, since the early 1970’s, to an all-volunteer military force. The low pay involved means that these volunteers are drawn overwhelmingly from the working class strata of American society. They are natural Democratic votes, in many cases. There ate lots of African-Americans and Hispanics among these new veterans, and they are all very proud of their military service.
How will the medal-throwing by a rich white officer look to them?
I think you ought to retire your “Most Offensive Hypocrite on the SDMB” title undefeated and give someone else a chance. braintree seems your heir-apparent.
There is no sense in which a rational mind could conclude that Mr.Moto has presented his OP as a “phony voting concern”. He stated up front that he did not intend to vote for Kerry. And the notion that you “don’t give a shit” about a thread questioning Kerry’s action is belied by the instantaneous reaction you bring - the same reaction as you bring to all political threads - reflexive, unquestioning Bush-bashing. Drop in the dime, hear Diogenes spit out the same boilerplate as he has a hundred times before.
Kerry wants to renounce his decorations when that is popular, and take them back when that is popular. If he wanted to disavow what he had done in Viet Nam, why has he changed his mind now? He accepts the decorations, then changes his mind and throws them back. Now he has changed his mind again, and wants to reap the benefits. Why? I can think of no other reason than his run for President. In other words, as soon as it is to his benefit, he switches back and attempts to pretend that he was always proud of the decorations he once rejected.
The fact that you cannot debate the OP except with desperate attempts to hijack the thread back to Bush-bashing (as you do every fucking political thread you post to) is an indication that you feel this is a genuine issue. And so you attempt your usual hijack.
Are you really constitutionally unable to debate anything political without regurgitating your standard rant against Bush? Don’t you have any other ideas beyond that?
Then too, Shodan, there’s the time-honored debating tactic of demanding cites, answers and responses, and then saying you’re a fanatic and that nobody else cares when you do reply.
If responses are anything to go by, Diogenes cares as much about the medals as I do.
Could someone (Mr. Moto maybe?) explain the hypocrisy angle to me? I’m just not seeing it. John Kerry earned his medals through blood and valor. I don’t think he disregarded them. I think he took his valuable medals and said, “I love these things, I love my country, I love the men I served with, but I fucking HATE you, Mr. Nixon (and others) for making my love be the result of a travesty. Vietnam was abysmal, and tarnish these medals.” So he throws them.
Now put this in the context of the anti-war protest movement. Insert Watergate and all the Shit Hitting the Nixon Fan. After years of struggle, the entire country finally realizes that truth Kerry and his crowd had reached earlier – Vietnam WAS bad news (understatement).
Now, Kerry can be wholly proud of his medals. “These medals… are clean.”
Least, that’s my take. Help me out if you’ve got another.
To Moto and others of the same ilk (you know who you are).
I have read the responses to your OP and I have found many of them to be very thoughtful and reasonable when it comes to explaining Kerry’s seemingly contradictory position regarding his ribbons and medals. I have intended to construct my own ideas to this question but others have been able to answer this more effectively than I am able. (Besides, how dead do you want to beat this horse?)
What gets me is how, in the face of simple reason, you can maintain your contempt for a person who made a choice to go to 'Nam when he very well may have been able to skirt it somehow. I don’t mean to imply that everyone who served willingly is automaticly above contempt, but ths is an issue that reflects directly upon his service to this country.
You may not agree with this, but Vietnam was a god-awful, fucked-up, nasty, “EVIL” situation and if Kerry throwing his ribbons helped in some small way to end that war then it was a noble act. Period.
“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what"s right.”
I’m a bit afraid to jump into this train-wreck of a thread, but…
First of all, to Diogenese, Braintree, and others of a similar ilk… I agree with you 100% that Bush is a terrible president. I might even go so far as to call him evil. However, it doesn’t do anything for the level of discourse of the board if, every time any small issue concerning potential presidential candidates is brought up, you say “Well, X isn’t even worth discussing when compared with a president who lied to start a war!!!”.
As for Shodan and Moto, what bothers me is that you are both assigning motivations to Kerry’s actions without justifying those claims. In particular, you claim that he acted as he did, then and now, because those actions were “popular”, and that his throwing of the medals was “cavalier”. Can you in any way support those claims? Are you honestly claiming that John Kerry, freshly back from combat experience in Vietnam, threw his ribbons as a crassly calculated political act? Doesn’t Occam’s Razor tell us that a far more likely reason is that he was genuinely outraged at the war?
And what makes it cavalier? I’d say that protesting an unjust war is about as important an action as an American can take. If he burned his ribbons to protest Arbor Day or something, or threw them out the window in a hissy fit after having a bad day, that would be cavalier.
As for any hypocrisy, please spell out precisely what the hypocrisy is. That he’s proud of the bravery that he, personally, displayed, and proud of any lives that he, through his valor, saved (did he get the Silver Star for saving lives?), but is also proud of the anti-war protesting that he later engaged in? What on earth is even slightly wrong with that stance? I can’t think of a better stance for a Vietnam vet to have.
(And if your only complaint is that he’s been a bit evasive in explaining it all, well, how heated this thread has gotten should show you that it’s not a simple, black-and-white, cut and dried issue. If his feelings on the topic are complex and conflicted, as they should be, then it’s not something which is easily answered in quick sound-bite form.)
The only real substantial claim I can think of that you might be making is that “throwing a medal in protest” is such an irrevocable and final action that the one who does it severs all connection they have with those medals. But I see no justification for that claim.
If someone burned a flag in protest in the 1960’s, that doesn’t make them a hypocrite for showing respect for the flag now. (Granted, such a person could obviously never be elected president…)
First off, zoo, I don’t have contempt for John Kerry. On the contrary, I have a lot of respect for John Kerry. I have demonstrated such respect in this thread.
Second, MaxTheVool, I hardly think throwing the medals is irrevocable and final. I do think, though, that the throwing of the medals was of such a public and political spectacle at the time, and that John Kerry is of sufficient public stature now, that an explanation is warranted, especially given the newfound respect he’s showing the medals he won all those years ago.
That’s all I’m asking. It’s hardly an unreasonable request.
You’re being intellectually dishonest. It’s obvious to me you have no interest in “an explanation.” You want this to be a “talking point,” not a conversation. Kerry could say nothing that would mollify you. You could get every detail of the history of the medals from the time they were forged until the present moment, and you would still claim you had “questions.” But you don’t have questions. You have a slander meme. You’ve been given your marching orders by the bosses. “Let’s use this to taint Kerry’s image.” It’s only the taint du jour, to be sure. Tomorrow you will have “questions” about Kerry’s intern, and the next day you will have “questions” about whether or not he paid taxes on some real estate earnings in 1978, and then you will have “questions” about whether or not he has received money from Tibetan monks. Nobody’s fooled by your pretense of “concern,” and nobody believes for one second that you want or expect an “explanation.” If you wanted an explanation, you wouldn’t be here, you’d be on the Kerry website e-mailing the Senator.
There is no explanation necessary, because anyone who did not already have an agenda would see the explanation on their own.
He was protesting. He threw the ribbons.
Therefore he thought the protest was important enough to justify throwing the ribbons. Was that so hard to figure out?
Does that mean he isn’t proud of his service? Does that mean he has no right to be proud of the lives he saved? No.
There is no hypocrisy or contradiction here, and you are becoming increasingly dishonest and selective with your responses as the thread continues in order to avoid admitting as much.
I have an Armed Forces Service Medal and a Nato Medal for service in support of Operations Sharp Guard and Deny Flight in the former Yugoslavia.
I also have overseas service and sea service deployment ribbons.
Unit awards include the Joint Meritorious Unit Award and the Battle “E”.
Personal commendations include the Navy Achievement Medal, with two gold stars to indicate subsequent awards, and the Navy Good Conduct Medal.
I accumulated these awards for five years of enlisted service.
Reeder you’re free to wear those fatigues. Nobody’s going to bother you, least of all me. The rules say you shouldn’t wear them to a protest, but as you can see, they are very loosly enforced.
I think I get it now, you are only interested in what Kerry himself has to say about this. I have read many “simple” and “reasonable” responses on this from members of this board. Somehow we got into this amazing train-wreck regarding uniform dress codes. What do they have to do with the price of tea in China?
Are you looking for someone to direct you to a cite of Kerry’s official explanation?
As far as the contempt comment, I have watched you take this issue and spin it as far as you can as an example of Kerry’s lack of character. To me that demonstrates contempt.
You served you country well. You were willing to put yourself on the line in defense of your country. Yet you support a man who thumbed his nose at his country when it was his turn to defend it.
I work with a lot of veterans, (not surprising, considering that I work for a defense contractor), and I’d estimate that about 75% of them will be voting for the guardsman over the war hero.
My reasons for doing so are spelled out pretty clearly in my earlier posts.
Keep in mind, some of our greatest wartime leaders had no combat experience at all. Abe Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt come to mind here. And some of our military hero presidents have been disasters, like Grant. With this in mind, why would I mindlessly vote for Kerry?
It’s not the experience. It’s all in the hemming and hawing about it. It’s in the denials.
I just find it appalling that a man who did not have the fortitude to even seriously complete his Guard stint, has the balls to send our troops into harms way.
Lincoln never served but Roosevelt did serve as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
True enough, and yelling “Cite!” and then ignoring the point after it has been proven is a time-honored tradition here on the Straight Dope.
The thing to understand (in my opinion) is that there is actually relatively little support for Kerry on the SDMB. There was some furore for Dean before his campaign headed south, but relatively little mention of Kerry’s name before the primaries got going. And even now, Dopers are generally not so much in favor of Kerry per se as falling in line behind the last Democrat standing. It would be the same if Clark or Edwards had won as many primaries.
And many of the more vocal posters are people who yell “BUSH LIED!” instead of “Oh God” at the moment of orgasm.
But this explains much of the reaction, and part of the reason why political threads about Kerry and others inevitably are dragged back to Bush-bashing.
Dopers only care about Bush. They don’t support Kerry because of anything particular in his positions, just because he isn’t Bush. This is why they spend so much time attacking Bush and so little time defending any of Kerry’s positions. They don’t really care about Kerry. They care very deeply about Bush, and spend practically all their political energies on thinking about how bad Bush is, and how rotten he is, and how evil he is. And they have almost no energy left to think about anything else, including Kerry.
Kerry is an empty suit with an expensive haircut and a rich wife. He talks a bit about health care, but, as Dean pointed out in the South Carolina debate, in 19 years in the Senate, Kerry sponsored 11 bills about health care, none of which passed. Hell, he has sponsored 371 bills in his Senate tenure, of which less than two dozen passed, and six of those were “ceremonial” in nature (by which I assume they were declarations of National Artichoke Week, or the equivalent). (This is from the latest issue of Time magazine, and Dean mentioned it in the debates. I can probably find the cite online if you like.)
Kerry wants to be seen as strong on national security, but votes against the first Gulf War. He wants to get support from Deaniacs, but voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He wants to be seen as pro-veteran, and almost the first thing he did upon returning from Viet Nam is throw away his decorations and go before Congress to accuse his fellow soldiers of war crimes.
As I have posted elsewhere, the campaign is starting up. And the hard core of Kerry “supporters” are people with relatively little more to say in his favor than, “He isn’t Bush”. That goes well for the usual suspects on the SDMB, but it is hard to beat something with nothing.