You really should spring for cable or DSL, if you can get it. It’s the difference between (as Twain said of the right and almost-right word) the lightning and the lightning bug. Or between a fire hose and a garden hose.
My feeling on this is that certain vets will/can never forgive anyone who protested the Vietnam War, no matter what mea culpa may be offered them. I doubt there is anything that Kerry could say or do to win over O’Neill, for example – the blinding, relentless hatred is too strong. I believe that some vets (and civilians, for that matter) simply can’t perceive any criticism of the government’s course during wartime as anything other than treasonous aid and comfort to the enemy; that to admit its validity to any degree would wholly invalidate their own experience of that war, leaving only futile hollowness behind. (Please note: I don’t ascribe this irrational emotionalism to ALL Kerry detractors. I DO believe it’s the motivation for some.)
I recall reading somewhere in this morass of a thread an assertion that very little of the home-movie footage Kerry shot actually shows him; most of it is the sort of “lookee this place!” stuff that any young man in a strange new place might shoot. But I stand (sit, actually, cat-lapped) to be corrected.
You might want to ask my old skipper that question, Squink. He grew up in Lower Manhattan. I don’t think he ever saw a Republican until he got his Academy appointment.
What you say makes sense. It was the description of him holding a camera in one hand while steering with the other that caught my eye (I’ve actually tried this in a plane and it was hard to do). It was from a website that was gunning for Kerry so I took it with a block of salt.
With Purple Hearts, you gotta remember: It’s better to make a mistake and award one than to deny one honestly earned. In spite of the fact they they are (or were, anyway) made from 24k. gold.
If you get injured as a result of enemy action, you deserve one. It’s a tight club; there a lot more vets without them than with them. Plus, let’s remember, this is VietNam, not as clean as Wichata, and even a minor wound can be life-threatening. And as to whether the schrapnel was from kerry’s grenade or the deadly VC rice, or from his M-79 round (which generally speaking do not bite back, they throw schrapnel at 90 degrees from the plane of trajectory in 360 degrees around - I had one go off about 15 feet or so from me, but I was behind it and therefore safe {they don’t arm until they have traveled a certain distance from the barrel - hence at point blank range they don’t detonate} it’s real hard to catch schrapnel from your own M-79) or some other cause is irrelevent.
Fact: More people die in hospitals from sepsis (secondary infection) than from the original cause for admission. In combat conditions, infection is probably even easier to acquire, save for the good first aid we got from corpsmen.
I think what you say is probably true. And I really have trouble understanding the attitude.
The bomb group I was in in WWII bombed lots of things. I’ve since come to believe that bombing communication facilities, bridges rail yards etc., close to an area right before planned ground action in that area was useful. However I also think that bombing such facilities way behind the lines wasn’t effective. By that I mean, the effort on the part of the US in conducting the raid was probably equal to the damage that resulted to the enemy. For example we bombed a rail yard near Kaiserslautern so regularly that the railroad put us on the timetable, but I don’t think we interrupted service for long because they got very good indeed at rapid repairs.
However I don’t feel that my service was in any way invalidated. Most people have trouble accepting what a teeney little pimple on the elephant’s ass they are in a war. I did what I was told to do and if I was told to do something that didn’t advance the war effort much, so what?
I’ll take merely ‘excellent’ over ‘grossly incompetent’ every single day of the year.
‘Mediocre’ would be a vast improvement over the lying idiot we’ve got in charge now.
And after having met him, I can now concur that John Kerry is, indeed, inspirational, contagiously enthusiastic, diplomatic, dynamic and “particularly dept in his relations with people from all strata.” I’d also add insightful, charming, witty, intelligent and warm. And apropos of nothing; tall. Very, very tall!
As to Magiver, all I can do is drop my jaw in utter disbelief. Although it should come as no surprise to me that there are people out there like you, who actually believe that the hideousness of war crimes should be hidden from the public, never exposed and only discussed behind closed doors, given that that’s exactly the frightening mentality with which our Despicable Misleader is trying to run our country.
It should come as no surprise that I vehemently disagree with you. What John Kerry did when he came back from 'Nam was honorable. He owes no one an apology for speaking the truth and exposing the criminal activity that some of our troops were perpetrating on fellow human beings. It turns my stomach that you actually condone secrecy over exposure. I thank G-d not all men are like you, or we’d never have learned about the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. And without the public outrage, I have my doubts that those horrifying abuses would have ever stopped (if they even have, seeing as how the monster who wrote the ““Interrogation Rules of Engagement,” specifying that soldiers… may subject prisoners to dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, stress positions and the “presence of mil working dogs”,” is now in charge of all the prisons in Iraq. “Instead of court-martialing the man who authored the plan to subject prisoners at Abu Ghraib to harsh abuses, Rumsfeld has left him in charge of the facility.” [Source].)
And Kerry should have kept it behind closed doors?
Astonishing.
I’m sorry I seem to have missed this earlier. I do so wish I could help, but besides not really having an “in” with elucidator, myself, I’m finding myself a bit distracted by that bright, shiny smile on your horse.
[sub][sup](I have the feeling I’m being whooshed, somehow. But since I miss most of the inside jokes around here, that’s no surprise at all.)[/sup][/sub]
And the little light goes on! A long abused synapse fires!
The phrase “And the horse upon in which you rode” is a jocular response to “Little David” Simmons paraphrase of Churchill’s example of syntax tortured to confess! “Some shit up with which I will not put” or somesuch.
No personal reference to any equine intercourse was implied. No hostile or retributive implication was intended. I have no more animosity to English teachers than any other high school graduate, and even that has faded. For the most part. Until know, I hadn’t even thought about how much I hated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Fucking Austen, page after page of inane verbiage about people who don’t fuck, or fart, or do much of anything for a gazillion goddam pages Jesus Christ how I hated that book…
(Wasn’t it Twain: about how he was in an empty library, but it had no books by Ms. Jane Austen, so was a pretty good library over all…?)
Heaven knows, I want no trouble with the Professional Organization of English Majors, I still got a couple of Mensa goons on my case…
Let’s face it, if Kerry didn’t make such a big deal of his Viet Nam record, perticularly in his nomination speech, Swift veterans ads would never make such an impact.
[QUOTE=Frostillicus]
So I did, and it appears to be quite a beautiful one, as usual. I shall inform my solicitor to contact Webster people and offer them to include that word in their dictionary or face legal action.
By the by, to avoid the sins of needless cross-posting, I will merely point out that testimony by the man who rigged GeeDubya’s Texas Guard trick is available over at Talking Points.
Real Time with Bill Maher last night had John O’Neill as a special guest. John spent a good bit of time, as Bill pointed out to him, answering his own questions instead of those put forward by Bill.
One of the arguments that O’Neill attempted to refute is one offered by elucidator on the first page of this thread.
I found the argument above quite persuasive. But O’Neill took it head-on.
The gist of O’Neill’s argument was that while an anti-war stance was generally unpopular across the heartland of America, it played quite nicely into the politics of the Boston area at the time. IOW, O’Neill put forward that Kerry’s congressional testimony of 1971 was that of a political opportunist.
Now, back in those days, I was yet only a little tyke, and living the heartland, so I really have no personal frame of reference for the political environment in Boston in the early 70s. So I’m curious - can any doper support either argument here?
Outside of activist enclaves like the People’s Republic of Cambridge, the anti-war protesters were just as controversial as anywhere else in the country. Pro-war sentiment was still high enough among a sizable portion of the Massachusetts population to make an anti-war stance not exactly a career-enhancing move for any politican not running in a strongly liberal district. As has been pointed out before, Massachusetts is not monolithically liberal, or leftist, or whatever else happens to be the epithet du jour. So no, Kerry’s testimony wasn’t politically calculated and motivated; if anything, he was choosing to do what he believed was right even though it was highly likely to dash any political hopes he nourished.
In other words: O’Neill’s just offered up yet another heapin’ plate o’ steamin’ road apples.
You might also note that Kerry ran for Congress in the Boston suburbs in 1970 at the age of 26 on an immediate-withdrawal platform. He was planning to run even while still in the Navy. Father Robert Drinan won the nomination and the seat on a similar anti-war platform but with some age and priestly gravitas that Kerry didn’t have. The Congressional testimony episode was the year after.
There is a huge difference between defending less then perfect personal record (and not for the first time) and abusing almost perfect personal record (and not for the first time).
The question is not whether Bush has got something to hide, the question is whether Kerry has got something to show.
I think battlefield reconstructions have to be left exclusively to the Veterans, and I have no opinion on Kerry activities in 1970-s, as I wasn’t in US back then.
However, there seems to be a discrepancy. Kerry ran for Congress in 1970 on “on an immediate-withdrawal platform” and was beaten by more qualified candidate running on the same platform. The platform must have been popular, then. In addition, there seems to be a clear path from running for office on such a platform and giving the well-known testimony a year later. Plus the unfortunate penchant for melodrama, of course.
This thread has gotten to be downright insane. And one side is responsible. When I made a wisecrack to the effect of that it’s amazing just how far a little cognitive dissonance will propel a thread I had no idea the extent to which that’s true.
Why are we still arguing this? The Swift Boat Veterans for Character Assassination have been utterly discredited. Either they were not in a position to know what they claimed to know, misrepresnted the evidence, contradicted themselves, or outright lied.
What the hell is going on here?
So far ALL the documentary evidence supports Kerry.
So far ALL the surviving witnesses not with the Swifties support Kerry — and, unlike most of the Swifties they were actually on hand.
I mean, if I attacked somebody’s character and came up that screamingly short, I’d be too embarassed to go on. I’d feel ashamed of myself. I’d even apologize.
But you guys (and you know who you are) are STILL at it.
