No, the argument was that if the communists won, they would do horrible things to us. And I’ve heard conservatives seriously advance the argument that the fact that they didn’t proves that we actually won the Vietnam and Korean Wars.
But Kerry was actually fighting in the war, and not laying out from a hangover or getting Dad to call him for him. Kerry actually won medals for engaging in combat, not just for showing up for weekend duty with a headache.
Was your time in the guards, a decade give or take after Nam relevant? I’m not trying to be snarky - I simply don’t know.
Let’s not trot out the voted for war meme. The President of the US of A asked for authorization so he would have the credible threat of force during negotiation. Now maybe it was naive or politically expedient and/or both to take the President at his word. That said, the vote was to give the President the option to go to war rather than voting for the war. I don’t think you can spin that into “he was for the war before he was against it” for Iraq with a straight face.
Only relevent in the regard that the people who are convinced Bush was “AWOL” from the Guard are absolutely convinced the records were purged to protect him. This is why Dan Rather thought he hit the mother lode when Col. Burkett faked documents on his Word Program. But the reality is that records are routinely destroyed and the lack of records don’t really prove anything sinister.
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Are you seriously going to try to claim that he gave Bush the authority to go after the man who had humiliated his father and think that he only wanted it for “Negotiation” purposes? Come on, we were sending four Army divisions to theatre.
The point of the Swift Vet’s protests was that Kerry had gamed the system, claiming purple hearts for superficial injuries and then using them to get a free ticket out of theatre. Now, I don’t blame either man for gaming the system, because it’s designed to be gamed, especially by the officers.
Also, Bush did flight training, which was not without it share of risk.
Now, look Bush was an awful president, but he was probably the president we deserved. Just like his father was part of that “Greatest Generation”, he was part of that lesser generation that was all about “me”. The fault lies not within the stars but within ourselves.
Sadam humiliated Bush Sr?
Yes, actually, as I wrote maybe it was naivity, policial expediency and/or a combination, but Bush sold Congress on giving a credible threat. That keeps getting spun along with all of the other spin for Bush’s worst behaviors and mistakes (“they were for the war before they were against it” “no one could have foreseen the financial crisis” etc)
I don’t know how this thread became about Kerry’s Vietnam service, but since we’re here anyway.. What did Kerry say after returning from the war that you think made people get so mad? Did he accuse specific people of specific atrocities? Or just generally point out that atrocities were occurring in Vietnam? Were any of his claims untrue? How many?
I think it went that way when someone claimed that Kerry’s reputation was ruined by horrible evil money by a rich guy, not that some vets had a valid gripe with Kerry or that he was being disingenuous about his past.
Specifically, what Kerry did was testify in front of congress about attrocities that he had ‘documented’ as co-chair of Vietnam Vets Against the War. (His other co-chair was a lying sack of manure who had never set foot in Vietnam and got discharged over an injury suffered in a basketball game.)
Kerry’s specific testimony included the following -
“They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”
In short, if I were a Vietnam vet, I’d be darned upset about this, even 33 years later. I’d be more upset about that than Bush being in the National Guard.
To bring it back to the point, Rightwingers see George Soros behind every corner, and lefists see the Koch brothers.. but the fact is, there has to be some meat on that sandwich.
I think to the degree that Bush Sr. was voted out of Office and Saddam stayed in power, that was considered a humiliation. And then Saddam tried to have the guy whacked.
If it was either, it was inexcusable.
If it was “naivity”, this guy was on the Senate Intelligence Committee. WHich means he was seeing all the reports the rest of us weren’t seeing. If it were obvious a bill of goods was being manufactured, he was the guy in a position to see it. Unless he wasn’t competent enough to realize he was being sold a bill of goods. (Again, his whole claim to fame was to have stood up against a war based on ‘lies’.)
If it was political expediency- that he knew a lie was being manufactured, but he looked at some polls and realized that they’d be putting his picture up with Saddam and Bin Laden like they did to Max Cleland if he objected, and he really wanted to be president, then he was kind of contemptable.
Okay, I’ll admit, it’s politics, it’s a dirty game, and they usually weed out the normal people out of politics in student elections, only the incurables go on to be professional politicians.
It’s been documented enough that these happened to a degree greater than the odd outlier.
The claims of Saddam trying to whack Bush Sr on a Kuwait visit is dubious at best.
Bush Jr publicly sold the American people and their representatives in Congress on the need to have a credible threat in order to negotiate. Seems more than likely he was lying through his teeth and he was going to invade come hell or high water, with or without authorization for the credible threat. You can read it as every person that voted for it was tacitly supporting the invasion. I personally take it at face value. YMMV.
Darned straight, I’d be upset about my brothers in arms committing atrocities, too.
Or is that not what you meant?
Stories of attrocities were largely lies. For instance, there is the famous story about throwing a VC out of a helicopter…
Never actually happened when they interviewed people where it supposedly happened. ( A dead body was dropped from a helicopter, but it was already dead and in a body bag.) But to hear Kerry and the other anti-war types tell it, it was ‘raining men’ in Vietnam, so many VC being thrown out of helicopters.
Fact is, attrocities were probalby rarer in Vietnam than other wars.
Except as I stated above, a lot of those stories weren’t documented. Everyone knew the guy who knew a guy who saw the VC thrown out of the Helicopter… but then you find out the story wasn’t actually true.
Well, Bill Clinton took it serious enough to launch a bombing attack on Iraqi Intelligence HQ at the time. Keep in mind, this was when Bush and all his folks were gone.
Come on, anyone who has been in the military can tell you you don’t send four divisions to theatre if you are just planning to ‘negotiate’. You simple don’t pull back the hammer that far unless you are fully willing to let it drop.
Again, more likely, Kerry figured taking a moral stand would doom his chances, and that makes him contemptable. Bush at least believed in what he was doing, and give him credit, when public opinion turned against him on the matter, he stuck to his guns and toughed it out.
Kerry was for the war before he was against it…
Not at all. The Koch’s make money by providing a service - storing oil. The actual price of oil is relatively unimportant. You may as well claim that granaries are “speculating” in wheat. You don’t need speculation, though it’s not actually a bad thing.
However, it’s evident this thread has gone off the rails. Feel free to make another if you want to debate the actual OP.
Well, without context, I’m not sure how to evaluate that. This could very well be true for some values of ‘They.’
In this case, “They” were supposed Vietnam Vets who testified to supposed attrocities at the behest of Vietnam Vets Against the War. Except, more often than not, they could have been called “Yardbirds against the War”, because most of them were slackers who never got anywhere near a rice paddy, such as Al Hubbard, who was never in Vietnam, lied about his rank and under what circumstances he was discharged under.
But the best way to take a pack of nasty lies is to get a nice clean cut white guy like John Kerry to spew them in his nice upper crust accent, and give them credibility.
You know what, the longer I’m on this thread, the more I’m forgiving of Bush. Yeah, he screwed up the economy and just about everything else he touched, but Kerry was really sort of a low-life with no ethics.
So bottom line. Kerry tried to rewrite his history from traitor anti-war protestor to rah-rah war hero, and the guys he served with called BS on him. Good for them.
The Koch brothers can scream about Ayers and Reverend Wright all day. Richard Mellon Scaife could scream about Monica. Soros can slander Bush’s drunkeness. But most people don’t care about that. There has to be meat on the sandwich if you make a complaint about someone.
For context, here was the quote I had responded to:
Perhaps I didn’t read this closely the first time, but if ‘They’ in this quote, which I understand to be from Kerry, refers to people who actually testified to committing atrocities, and those people actually did testify to committing atrocities (whether they actually committed them or not), then I’m having trouble understanding the direction of outrage. Kerry’s not making a first-hand claim here, he’s explicitly reporting on what others have said. If those statements are lies, shouldn’t your outrage be directed at those who lied first-hand?
What is your beef with Kerry here? Do you think he knowingly lent credence to stories he knew to be false? Were there atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam? Were any of those referenced by Kerry in this statement? What portion of the atrocities he indirectly refers to actually happened?
What this has always smelled like to me is that some Vietnam vets grew up hearing about how their parents were heroes in WWII, thought Vietnam was their turn to get that glory, and were permanently disappointed that Vietnam wasn’t actually a glorious struggle. But that’s not the war protesters’ fault. The blame goes with their leaders who directed them into a ridiculous war, not the protesters who pointed out its injustice.
I agree that Bush screwed up everything he touched, but disagree with the implication here that he isn’t a low-life with no ethics. As for Kerry, that seems to be more of an IMHO than a statement corroborated with any kind of actual fact in evidence in this thread.
Like so much else you have written here, you have this wrong. In fact, you have it backwards.
Kerry had ethics. That’s why he went from rah-rah war hero to anti-war protestor.
It’s already been shown that you are utterly wrong about “the guys he served with”; at best it was a guy he served with.
Do facts matter at all to you, or do you, like so many other Republicans, just make up shit and then declare it be “truth”? Because so far, even when people show you that your facts aren’t actually true, you fail to re-evaluate your position or opinion, and instead argue more vociferously for an unsupported conclusion. At least, that’s what I’ve seen from you in this thread.
I don’t think he’s recovered enough yet.
The Koch brothers have enough money, power, and influence to use oil to affect the economy. Their speculation has been enough to raise oil prices and therefore keep efforts by the administration ro revive the economy in check. When the economy begins to improve, oil prices rise and the economy tanks again. Speculation on a large scale could very well be doing just that. :mad: