From the NY Times (registration required).
This is nothing new, and if you remember any of my posts, it is exactly this sort of two-faced hypocrisy that is driving me crazy. “Coward from Crawford” has a nice ring to it.
This is really the only vietnam era mud I’ve heard from either side that bothers me, even if the rest of the accusations all turn out to be true. I don’t really care if Kerry exagerated his combat experience or not; or if Bush goofed off during his national guard service. Similarily, I imagine Bush probably did use family contacts to help him get in the guard, but then I probably would’ve done the same.
But to use family contacts to avoid combat service, and then use that time to work for the campaign of a man who is trying to prolong the war does bother me, even if it was a long time ago. If you took extraordinary means to avoid fighting but still supported the war, thats fairly cowardly, but after 30 years, I can forgive and forget. But Bush not only supported the war, he activly worked to continue to send other peoples sons and fathers to die in it, and even after 30 years, thats a powerful enough hypocracy to make me hold my nose a bit. It still a long way from deciding my vote one way or the other, but it will be a factor.
Well now, if it were a war veteran running against John Kerry, would that make it all right?
I seem to recall some veteran hawks running, not so long ago. George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole come to mind instantly. I don’t recall that they got large amounts of Democratic votes, and ultimately lost to a man who avoided the draft.
This is all rather silly, and a distraction from true issues.
Well said, Mr. Moto.
Could be because the man who avoided the draft didn’t dodge questions about it, wasn’t working to prolong that same war and couldn’t be called a chickenhawk in the present.
The great thing about voting is that we all get to decide for ourselves what the “true issues” are. And one true issue in my mind is that your boy ran like buckwheat through a goose when his country asked him for help.
How come most of your rebuttals boil down to, “Yeah, but Bill Clinton was worse!” :rolleyes:
I didn’t say Bill Clinton was worse.
I am saying that it made little difference to the American public how he served in Vietnam, if at all. What makes you think the American public cares about George W. Bush’s service in more forceful terms.
Let me clue you in on a little fact. They don’t care. And trying to make them care about it, to the exclusion of legitimate issues, only makes the other side look desperate.
Look, I’m an idiot.
Can someone explain to me what Clinton did that earned him the title of “Draft Dodger?” Did he actually get called up and fail to show up? or did he just stay in school and receive a college exemption? If that’s the case, then fuck all y’all who keep calling him a dodger–he worked with the system without going AWOL like the Crawling Cowardly Coyote from Crawford. He seems somehow to have escaped the wrath of the judicial system on this account despite living a fairly public lifestyle. And I don’t think he did it by employing the powers of his powerful and privileged family ties.
I’m confused because, I’m an idiot.
Clinton avoided the draft, by his own admission.
He used student deferments as long as he could, then obtained a ROTC deferment to use while he attended law school. Unfortunately, he never enrolled in ROTC.
When that fact was made known to the draft board, they reclassified Clinton as draft eligible. By then, though, a lottery was in place. Clinton drew a high number in the lottery, and was not drafted.
Clinton used every angle he could to avoid the draft, including some influence peddling of his own. The draft board was very accomodating to him because of his ties to Senator Fulbright.
Clinton at the DNC, this year:
Oddly enough, the folks who call Bill Clinton a “draft dodger” never apply the same term to folks like Dick Cheney.
Hell, often the folks doing the calling are draft-dodgers themselves (coughRush Limbaughahem).
I hope that wasn’t referring to me, rjung.
I called Clinton a draft avoider, which, strictly speaking, he was. I’ll happily concede that Cheney likewise avoided the draft, by seeking and getting lawful deferments.
I don’t think this disqualifies either one from seeking elected office. Whether it is an issue that animates a particular voter is something that voter needs to decide.
I will say, though, that to vote for Bill Clinton over a war hero (each time) and then fault Bush for not being a combat veteran himself, is going a mite far. Hypocrisy was mentioned above. This would be a clear example of it.
Of course, if you were voting according to the issues at hand, you’d have a clean conscience.
I have one, myself.
:dubious:
Interesting. Thank you.
I still don’t like the Crawling Cowardly Cokehead Car-Crashing Chortling Coyote from Crawford.
Again, I really don’t care who went to vietnam, or how they avoided it. This includes both Cheney and Bush. What does bother me is the bit in the OP about Bush working for the election of a hawk while allowing his family to help him avoide combat service. Not going to war if you don’t think its right is OK with me. Not going even though you do think its right is cowardly, but after 30 years it doesnt bother me. What does bother me, even after 30 years, is having worked for the election of a man who would vote to have others go after you’ve already avoided it. If this is true of Clinton or Cheney, then its equally bothersome.
As I said, I dont care about almost all of the vietnam era mud thats been flung, and even this issue is just a minor thing to me. Just one con in a long list of pros and cons about either candidate.
You still don’t get it. It would only be hypocrisy on our part if your cute little strawman was our actually beef with Bush. However, our beef is not that he avoided the war but that he was so God-damn hypocritical about it…He avoided the war, even likely using his family’s influence to do so…and yet he actively worked for the cause of the war, i.e., he thought other people should go off and die in the war. He just didn’t want to be one of them. Contrast this to Clinton who protested against the war.
Of course, on top of this is the added fact that to this very day, Bush seems willing to send people off to die in a war that he sold to the public with lots of sleight-of-hand and deception, if not outright lying.
Get the picture? You can still disagree with us…But, you should at least argue against our actually arguments rather than your own pathetic caricature of them.
Ah, that wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, it requires actual thought and a moral center.
It does have a certain Roy Cohen stench to it. On the other hand, we have to take into account that the OP’s article is a deeply poisoned well. Its author, an extreme leftist feminazi named Sara Rimer, routinely writes her hysterical editorials as news, including and excluding whatever serves her purposes. The full article can be read here without registration. It truly is a trophy to her style. In it, she notes that Bush, as campaign director, failed to say anything negative about Blount’s campaign. (Oh, say it ain’t so! Why next, we’ll have John Sasso refusing to say that Kerry is a flip-flopper!) Meanwhile, her own article fails to say anything positive about Bush. She even tells us that he, as a young bachelor, left a mess in his apartment when he moved. What an imminently slappable bitch.
I really wish George W. Bush were a war hero. He’s not, though, and has never claimed to be.
We have to take our candidates as we find them, not as we’d wish they’d be.
I’ll take George Bush as he is, despite some things that trouble me about him and his policies. He’s a decent guy at the heart of it, his policies synch up with my preferences relatively closely, and I could never vote for a liberal Democrat like Kerry.
If Kerry is your preference, after a similar evaluation, so be it. Vote accordingly. But after all analysis, if Vietnam is your animating issue, you are either employing rhetoric to bolster a candidate you favor for other reasons, or you’re voting for a shallow reason indeed.
I dunno. I didn’t read that as “making a mess” (as in “left an empty pizza box on the kitchen table”) but as “George trashed the place pretty good and, when the landlord had to have it professionally cleaned and sent George the bill, completely ignored it.”
Also the fact that he was 25 years old at the time – ostensibly an adult – not some callow teenager.
Maybe not something that would make me change my vote if I was a rabid Republican, but certainly YET ANOTHER card in my index of “He’s a Fucking Arrogant Asshole” reasons.