Originally Posted by Theodore Roosevelt, on May 7, 1918
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American Public.
Why does Teddy Roosevelt hate America?
As appealing as Ol’ Teddy’s sentiments might be, to be fair the President that he was dealing with was a guy that he did not like much and had an interest in criticizing. However, it is my recollection that four of T.R.’s sons served in France in WWI and one was killed. Another son was the second in command of the Fourth Infantry Division in WWII, landed on Normandy with the early assault waves and suffered a fatal heart attack while in the field within a few days after the landings.
I suppose on of the first instinct of a leader when his leadership starts to lead to unpleasant consequences is to wish people would quit pointing out that things are not going as well as one might hope. An appeal for all to march in lock step with the leadership and otherwise keep their mouths shut is a pretty standard political ploy. Sometimes the call “women and children first” immediately precedes the ships officers putting on frocks and looking for lipstick. The demand that everyone rally around the flag is almost instinctive, like the impulse to lie yourself out of trouble. It takes a fair amount of moral courage to resist either impulse – a quality of which both of our most recent Presidents have been a bit short.
Stayed away? They were locked out for years! The AL and VFW can get fucked, as far as I’m concerned.
TR was the last Republican president (except Ike) I respected.
I remember guys I knew who were Viet Nam vets who were refused admission to the VFW on the grounds that Viet Nam didn’t qualify as a “foreign war”, this being said by Korean War vets with straight faces. They didn’t want thier purity sullied by anti-war vets. But I don’t think that it lasted years, just months.
Of course, by this time, anti-war vets wouldn’t have been caught dead at a VFW meeting, so the only guys who actually ended up joining were the kinds of guys who like Chuck Norris movie festivals. So the VFW ends up moving even further to the “right”!
But, now that I think about it, I don’t really know for sure what the difference is between the VFW and the American Legion. What is it?
Dammit Luc, you have to ask this late on a Friday night but Friday is my night for drinkin’ to excess and my Google skillz, which are normally godlike, are for shit? As I recall, it wasn’t until the 80s that they were “honored” by admission into either org but, as you may suspect, I may be wrong. I still resent it all to hell.
They’re just different organizations. The VFW limits its membership to veterans of wars outside the boundaries of the US (which, at the time of its formation, excluded Civil War vets, but now is essentially moot, since there are no living veterans of any war inside the borders of the US). The American Legion is much more actively right-wing and generally political, I think (see their endorsement of Mussolini, mentioned above in the thread), while the VFW mostly limits its political activity to veterans affairs. On a local level, as someone posted earlier, they’re just bars where old people hang out.
King of the Hill did an episode with Hank trying to convince the old WWII vets at the Arlen VFW and a group of Nam vets to get together. It led to violence.
Oops. Thanks for correcting me. See you on the other side. Feed your head.
Another hindsight special - Lenin thought Mussolini was wonderful, in the days before Benito took that, um, slight right turn. I guess that proves Communism and Fascism are identical, or some such.
“He (the American Legion bozo) explained, “No one respects the right to protest more than one who has fought for it, but we hope that Americans will present their views in correspondence to their elected officials rather than by public media events guaranteed to be picked up and used as tools of encouragement by our enemies.” This might suggest to some, however, that American freedoms are worth dying for but not exercising.”
It might suggest to some that Editor and Publisher staff cannot tell the difference between reporting and editorializing.
IMHO, TR was the last decent president the Republicans gave us.
Of course, TR didn’t like the party and formed his own.
Could someone explain to me again what the war in Iraq had to do with fighting terrorists again??? Cos either I’m confused about it or some are yet again deliberately trying to blur the distinction. Either that or they are just idiots who don’t know what they are talking about.
Iraq was full of potential terrorists. This is evidenced by the fact that, once we invaded their country, blew up their stuff and killed their relatives, they started attacking the liberating troops with sneaky terrorist tactics like leaving bombs by the road and blowing themselves up, rather than fighting like real men and dropping high explosives from the sky or firing it gallantly from inside a tank. In the abscence of any rule of law, once we’d helpfully removed the government and then run away to hide inside fortified bases, they also started killing and blowing up each other for various reasons. If we hadn’t invaded, all of these terrorists would still be potential terrorists and we wouldn’t be able to kill them, so the world would be far more perilous.
I dunno. When you’re on staff at Editor and Publisher, you might be forgiven for thinking that editorializing is a part of your job description.
I guess you missed the word NEWS in the upper left hand corner of the page. And one might expect “America’s Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry” to know the difference between a news story and an editorial.
The temptation to “educate” readers can be overwhelming.
To be quite candid, I did miss it. I don’t see how it changes what I said, though.
That excuse won’t fly. Even at the time, people who did their homework on the issue knew better. I’m afraid they’re stuck with their Bennie the Moose endorsement.