I ain’t jumping down your throat Mr2001, but this is sticking in my craw. Kerry wants to run on his Viet Nam service. The same service that allowed him to come back to Washington and testify in a Congressional hearing that his fellow soldiers raped and pillaged innocent civilians.
We all know there were horrible acts commited against the Viet civilians. Like Abu Graihb (sp?) there were some personnel that went too far and acted out in the worst way. And it wasn’t on orders from the
Dammit, lemme quote the last post to finish it. :smack: :smack: :smack: :wally
I am not sure what Congressional testimony you are talking about. The transcript I read indicated that Kerry was reporting on what other vets had reported on during testimony in an investigation in Detroit. Kerry was not reporting what he had seen, or done, or what he stood by idly and did not stop. He was reporting what other vets said in sworn testimony back in the states.
Which congressional testimony are you referring to? Is this a different occasion? Could you be more specific?
White House. The current President sends human beings into war. No, let me restate that. The military takes in recruits that rise up the ranks and earn positions of authority. They become military leaders, and being a country that doesn’t manufacture robots, we take a risk with human fallibility.After all, when you join the military, you’re agreeing to risk your life. It’s cold, but true.
As some may remember, my father was a 1st Lt. and Tank Commander. His oders for VietNam had him on a plane 6 days before MLK, Jr was killed. (This was in Baltimore, can’t remember the base but they lived in Glen Burnie). Best thing that ever happened for my family, though I have pics my mom took out the back window of deleted color gangs throwing Molotov Cocktails at the car.
The riots kept dad out of Viet Nam, and I appreciate the “people” that kept him here, but to think he was any less a hero disgusts me. I hate racism, but MLK being shot may have saved my dad’s life.
And before anyone hits me for the race part, keep in mind it’s not a current belief, rather a fact of what happened to my innocent mother decades ago.
Note what wmulax93 said about the bill being underfunded. That is the problem. If you set up all sort of new standards for schools to achieve and then don’t give them the means to do that, you are dooming them to probable failure.
In fact, here is what Kennedy had to say back in April:
Cite?
We’re still waiting for you to read our posts. I told you exactly the ways in which I believe that Kerry would handle things better.
As my post noted, it is not a matter of hindsight or foresight. It is a matter of having the right approach to leadership. Bush is screwing up because his approach is the antithesis of good leadership. And, many of us here on these boards have predicted most of these screw-ups in advance.
Happily more specific.
Well, really not happy about it.
I’ve already said it’s possible that he didn’t commit any of the acts he stated to the US Congress. I won’t go so far as to say he has tortured or raped anyone. I have a little sense of decorum despite what other posts from me will lead you to beleive.
However, I haven’t heard a word from him yet that shows the crimes he’s witnessed while in Viet Nam were mitigated in any way by him. McCain and dozens of other POW’s were abused, tortured and coerced for years in Hanoi while ole Johnny testified about the evil Americans. Testimony that was replayed to Americans while they sat in Hanoi prison cells hearing their captors play this shit to break their will.
I can either get worked up over this, or Bush “missing” 2 months in Boston for the ANG.
Yes, but:
(1) This is why you shouldn’t go to war unless you have exhausted all other options and determined that the war is really necessary. Horrible things tend to happen in wars and thus wars are seldom the way to achieve the sorts of things the naive neoconservatives seem to think we can achieve in Iraq (stabilizing the Middle East, causing a flourishing of democracy, …)
(2) While the White House may not have ordered it, the general culture is to at least some extent influenced from the top-down. And, this Administration has often acted like the Geneva Convention is a quaint document that doesn’t really apply to the U.S…Or at least that we should try to find the loopholes in that we can.
It’s a different debate, but I still want to comment on that. People who sign up for the military understand that they may see life combat and that in such a case their lives are at risk. Fighting unnecessary wars based on lies is nowhere in the job description though.
Being a soldier or a policeman or a firefighter entails facing a risk for your own life. However that doesn’t give the president or anyone else the right to use their lives as bargaining chips in some sort of personal game.
OK, I’ll make the question a little simpler.
What, exactly, will Kerry do to make America better? I keep seeing that Kerry should be elected because he’s not Bush, but all the reasoning is that Kerry is, well, not Bush.
Even if Bush is elected again in November, the republic will not crumble. You’ll still have clean water from your tap, you won’t need a gas mask to leave the house, you’ll still have trees to admire, and the US President will have to submit policy to Congress for a vote. Republican or Democrat, the president isn’t a dictator. The hatred is almost amusing.
I was no fan of Clinton (why did I know I’d be saying this again?) but I never thought the US was going to wither on the vine when he blew up the aspiring factory in the Sudan or the Chinese Embassy in Europe.
Yes, you can either get worked up over the fact that Kerry served in Vietnam with distinction, saw what was really happening there and came back and spoke out eloquently and truthfully about what he had seen and others told him that they had seen (some of which have subsequently been verified) in order to get us out of that war so other young Americans would’t have to die for what he (and, now in retrospect, many others including Robert McNamara) view as a mistake.
Or, you can get worked up that the President of the U.S. avoided serving in Vietnam by going into the ANG (and quite possibly pulling strings in order to do so) and subsequently shirked some of his duties. And, that this same President and his Vice President and Defense Secretary, who avoided service altogether because they “had other priorities,” now seem more than willing to send young men and women into harm’s way based on a combination of poor intelligence, lies, and deceptions…and an unwillingness to entertain new evidence (such as that coming from the inspections) and change their desired (I would say “predetermined”) course of actions based on this evidence.
That is your choice.
Wow…What high standards we have. You’ve convinced me. “Vote for Bush…He guarantees won’t roll back environmental regulations to the point where you have to wear a gas mask to leave your home!” Sounds like a campaign slogan to me.
Again, you are simply ignoring our posts. For example, Brain Glutton has given you a post that shows you that Kerry has a forward-looking environmental and energy policy, unlike Bush’s backward-looking one. Starting to wean ourselves from fossil fuels is one of the most daunting challenges facing us and Kerry wants to start facing up to that challenge. Bush does not.
What a relief, who cares about foreign wars, scandals, torture and all that other unimportant stuff when there’s clean tapwater!
Yet another reason to vote FOR Kerry instead of AGAINST Bush.
I started this thread thinking it would turn into a joke. But I really wanted to know what specifics would make Kerry the better candidate. Alas, the left-wingers made it a joke themselves.
The best I’ve seen is people saying Kerry would have done things differently. Considering the whole hindsight angle, I would voted have for Gore if he could have told me in '99 what would happen in the future. And prevented it.
Optihut, considering all the enviro’s, clean water seems a valid mention.
Now get your neighbors to use a lot of hairspray to warm us up! 
That precisely the testimony I was referring to. Kerry makes clear, from the outset, that those specific atrocities were not things he witnesses. He said he was repeating what he heard other vets report in Detroit. From there on, I assume he is using the collective “we.”
several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia
It isn’t clear to me that Kerry witnessed these things as they were happening in Vietnam. Nor that he stood by and did nothing. If that’s one of your greatest issues with him, I think it should be a comfort to read his testimony closely and see that he is not talking about what he did, or what he say. But rather what he heard in Detroit, Michigan.
I thought you are dead set on voting for Bush anyway - nothing Kerry does is going to affect the quality of tap water anyway, so what could he possibly do better?
Come on, you’re ignoring all the good reasons other people - granted, not I - gave and bring up inane stuff that is in turn ridiculed. But what did you expect would be the response for bringing up tap water and not having to wear gasmasks???
It’s a case of “what you give is what you get.”
Duffer, in my post I was attempting to point out the things I disagreed with Bush about and that I thought Kerry would fix. As far as wanting more than campaign promises, we can’t give you much more since Kerry has not been president yet.
If you could answer me just one question duffer, why is “Anybody but Bush” such a bad reason? Saying that “AbB” means that the person objects so highly to whatever Bush has done that anything would be an improvement. If a person feels that strongly about the current administration, why should they have to give another reason?
Now, I myself was an AbB person up until Dean came along. Then I was an AbB/D person. 
I was riding my lil wave of “well, I don’t like Kerry that much but he beats the alternative” up until the DNC. Kerrys speech pretty much hit all the points that I had against Bush. Reading what he has planned (brainglutton posted it here in case you missed it) has further enthused me about Kerry as a president.
Simply put, I think Kerry would make a better president than Bush imho. I shouldn’t need to say more than that.
Also, Kerry plays hockey. Gotta respect that!
Oh, it’s the vision thing again. You know, the one that tripped up Bush 41. Now I think I’m beginning to get it. Duffer’s main objection seems to be that Kerry is insufficiently visionary for his tastes, and that the people who have bothered to answer his loaded questions about the man’s proposals are somehow covering up for this deficiency. In a last, desperate attempt to finally get things moving here, I’ll ask the OP: do you think being ‘visionary’ is the really most important quality of a President, and assuming Bush 43 is such a visionary (surely a bit of a stretch, no?) is his sort of vision what’s really best for us? To Godwinize the proceedings yet again, both Hitler and Stalin were considered visionaries by many; did that make them great leaders?
I’m also completely baffled by Duffer’s seeming to argue that we should vote for Bush simply because he’s already President, but whatever; maybe I’m misunderstanding here.