Look, folks, I am as amused as anybody at the way Pres Bush has been twisting in the breeze over his war record* and am voting for Kerrey as much for his anti-war record as his war record, BUT THE WAR IN VIETNAM ENDED THIRTY YEARS AGO! Can we get over it and judge candidates for what they have done RECENTLY?
I can’t get TOO judgemental about him pulling strings to get into the Guard because I made no special effort to involve myself in the festivities of 1964-75. But then my “war record” is not a point of pride–or shame–for me, either.
George Bush is not the least bit hypocritical. His previous record (honorable discharge and all) is irrelevent and has no bearings on decisions he makes now (30 years later). What is hypocritical is wrapping yourself in the flag as a decorated war veteran with military expertise while neglecting the fact that you participated in anti-war rallies with Jane Fonda.
Having said that, I don’t think Kerry’s Vietnam experience is relevant either. But if the DNC and the Kerry campagin are going to make an issue of Bush’s record, then Kerry’s record is fair game.
Yes, after all Hitler and Stalin killed people over thirty years ago, and we should all get over it and judge them by what they are doing now, which is not causing trouble. (sorry to jump to Godwin’s law so fast, but your sorry ass OP is deserving of nothing less)
The cry of the truly oblivious: all that is history. It doesn’t count now.
What does count now is that Vietnam is a litmus test for many of us about a person’s sense of duty and obligation to the country. It is pretty easy to look at a guy and ask where he was when the bullets were flying and there was a very unpleasant job to be done. Did the guy get off his ass and go when his country called him, or did he find that it was more important to make sure his ass was some place where it was unlikely that some diminutive East Asian gentleman was going to shoot holes in it.
There is a fair argument that a man who was able to serve but for some reason did not put on the green suit or the blue suit and put his life on hold and at risk for two or three or five years ought not be rewarded with an office of public trust and honor unless he has a damned good reason. That goes for President Clinton as well as for President Bush, and Secretary Rumsfeld, and the Vice-president.
There was a time in the late 60s and early 70s when people had to make a decision about what came first, duty or self. We know what choice Senator Kerry made. We might have some questions about what choice the President made.
As far a lumping Senator Kerry in the same pot as the most despicable war opponent you can think of – well the fallacy is too obvious to even discuss.
Twin: Let’s go through this: Bush
[ul]
[li]ducked out of Vietnam when it was time for him, a National Guardsman, to go.[/li][li]got elected by a party which, officially, has no tolerance for draft-dodgers.[/li][li]shoved the US into a war at the expense of our much more important international ties to Europe, Asia, and much of the rest of the world.[/li][li]used lies to get us into the war.[/li][li]is now lying about the CIA feeding him false information.[/li][/ul]
Kerry
[ul]
[li]went to Vietnam when it was his time to go.[/li][li]served honorably overseas and became a decorated combat veteran.[/li][li]decided – after he he had gone – that the war was a mistake and must be protested against.[/li][li]is running for a party which has, in the past, put a draft-dodger into office.[/li][/ul]
Now, given those facts, who would you trust to not fuck up our military and political commitments abroad and not shove us into another useless war?
I am a skeptic about Michael Moore. However, he was right regarding the Bin Laden family being allowed to fly around the US right after 9/11. In the case of Bush’s Vietnam era service, he is on the spot:
Yeesh, when you jump you go with both feet, don’t you? :rolleyes:
And had either demonstrated by their actions since then that they were changed men and regretted their errors then yes, it is my belief that they should be judged by their more recent actions rather than by their actions long ago. Can we now ignore your Godwinization and get on with discussing the topic?
So I’m “truly oblivious”? Hasn’t my record here for the past four years shown that I may be flakey and obnoxious but I am not oblivious? Harumph, sir! Nor am I saying that what happened so long ago doesn’t count but that there are many more recent actions by which to judge either person than what they did during the Vietnam War. In my original post I said that I consider the war records of each to be part of why I would or would not vote for them but all of the Vietnam talk lately has made me feel like I have been transported back to the Seventies. Bush’s actions the past three years are FAR more important to us than his actions thirty years ago.
Though it’s still funny that he acts like showing up for nine days in one year when he was contracted to be there two days every month and two weeks solid that year is supposed to make him look GOOD.
Actually, if you must know (and this is going to make Bush look REALLY bad, but I’m obligated to state the facts here), for Bush to have had satisfactory service as a pilot, as with any aviator he was required to fly. Guardsmen do not generally fly on UTA weekends because there are many things that must get done on that weekend that cannot be done any other time.
Flyers have what are called A-Forms, which is a list of responsibilities that must be done on a regular rotating basis or else you will be grounded. A good number of those things can only be done with the assistance of other Guardsmen, who are only in for that weekend. So chances are that flying is not on the schedule for that weekend. That means that one must come in on their own during the week to fly, and that is very important because one must fly at least one time in every thrity day period or they will become Non-Current, and thus Non-Mission Capable.
So what does that mean? It means that in addition to the one weekend a month and the two weeks a year, a flyer must come in at least one day/night a month in order to remain current. For pilots like Bush, there are also visual/instrument landing requirements, pattern flying requirements, aerial refueling requirements, checkride requirements, approach requirements, and a few others that I can’t think of right now that must be accomplished every six months or you become Unqualified, hence Non-Mission Capable.
A pilot cannot, repeat cannot get all of that done flying only once a month. So Bush, in order to truly fulfill his committment, would have had to have come in for a total of no less than four days per month (counting UTA weekends) to remain current, and that’s if there were no maintenance aborts or weather problems so everything went perfect every time.
Add that up and you get 48 days of training plus two weeks. Flyers obviously have many more responsibilities. I know, I am one.
I’ll let you decide what this means to you. I’m just reporting the news, not commenting on it.
Yea, except for the fact that Kerry had less than four months service in country , and two of the wounds for which he received the Purple Heart were so slight that he didn’t miss a single day of duty, real Frank Burns “Shell fragment in eye” type wounds. He spent little time in combat and a lot of time getting assigned to non-combat posts.
I’m not denegrating Kerry’s service to his country, far from it, but if he’s going to play the role of “decorated combat vet”, you can be damn sure that his exact record is going to be brought out in detail, and serving the majority of your duty time on an Admiral’s staff isn’t all that impressive.
George Bush: all the stuff people have said. I was too young to know much about all that.
Kerry: Same thing. OTOH, there are going to be issues now that haven’t been discussed.
His April, eh, 1972…[search]…comments Mainly this quote
He basically admitted to being complicit to war crimes, didn’t he?
IANAML – I am not a military lawyer. But, as an officer, if he really saw that stuff, wasn’t he responsible for stopping it?
Also, apparently Kerry has some Vietnam - family money problem.
BTW, the Communists in Vietnam made the place and it still is a hellhole. Yes, I quoted Harvard and Berkeley on that one.
So, anyway, I don’t see Kerry as the Vietnamese immigrants candidate, or the Vietnam veterans candidate, unless they cut off ears.
Where did I say he HAS? My gripe with this Nam shit is that it has taken many people’s eyes off the REAL problem, Pres Bush’s behavior while in office. We don’t NEED to go back thirty years to find perfectly good reasons he should not be reelected. :rolleyes:
Although I find Bush a hypocrite on the issue, my vote goes to the person who feels the same way I do on more of the issues. If I agreed with Bush more than Kerry, he’d get my vote, pretty much no matter what happened in Vietnam.
dropzone: If you read my post, you’ll see that his past conduct and his future conduct go hand-in-hand. He was a lying yahoo then and he’s a lying yahoo now, and we don’t need people who won’t go to war sending soldiers off into battle.
Should Presidents be forced to fight the wars they create? Maybe, if that’s what it takes. Presidents should, at a minimum, feel themselves personally ready to die for the wars they make. Johnson wasn’t ready to die for his political interests in Vietnam, and Bush certainly would have skipped out on going into Iraq had he been handed an M-16 and told where to shoot. Franklin Roosevelt, I think, did feel strongly enough about getting rid of Hitler to be willing to go to war himself.
But how do we keep the Theodore Roosevelts out of office? If a President is war-crazy, he’d be willing to charge up San Juan Hill for the Dole company. His devotion was admirable, his cause was not.
I will say that I am about 95% with you on this one. What I will say, though, is that this issue points to a very real problem in our society, namely that we seem to be willing to allow the rich and connected to send the poor out to die. I want to be up front and say that I think that Bush’s “Desertion” is as indicative of this as was Clinton’s “Draft Dodging”.
As I understand it, during the Vietnam war Guard duty was highly sought after by folks that did not want to go to war, but were not willing to go so far as allow themselves to be tossed in jail. The fact that he was ushered in (with horrible aptitude scores) as well as his dizzyingly fast promotion smells.
This is to say nothing of the added slap in the face to our Guardsmen in that he is now deploying them overseas, when at the time that he was called to serve he sought out the guard to avoid this very thing. No sir, I don’t like it.
Well there is this blue dress with a stain on it that I want to show you…
Kidding aside, I say let’s just spend as much time, effort and money in to investigating Bush’s past (alleged) Military service and past (alleged) drug use as we did investigating Whitewater and Knobslobgate and I will feel that things have been handled in a fair and even handed way.
Aw, CHRIST! You people have now managed to work Clinton into this?
Looks like we need dropzone’s law to go with Godwin: The first person to mention or allude to Bill or Hillary Clinton in any thread that is not actually about them has to leave the thread immediately. Binarydrone, I don’t care if you do agree with me 95%. You are outa here.
I actually agree with the OP here; Bush getting out of his military duties is pretty low on my list - there are just so many better reasons to hate him. I’ll be honest, I’d probably put on a dress if it meant getting out of the draft; I have no desire to die just so some county halfway around the world can have the same economic system as us. I would have done exactly the same thing as Bush if I could have gotten away with it. Fortunately, I was born late enough that I didn’t have to make the choice. And can we really blame him for not coming clean now? If he did admit it, it would be political suicide for him. I can forgive lying about something that happened 30 years ago, to a certain extent. What I can’t forgive is lying to justify sending Americans off to war, right now.
But here’s the thing, and this is strictly IMO - if Bush gets re-elected, it’s going to hinge on ignorant people voting for him - people who can’t see the obvious evidence that he’s a terrible president. If he wins, it will be because he captured the vote of those who think only with their emotions, because that’s the only thing that Bush appeals to - emotions. And this draft-dodging issue is just the kind of emotional topic that might serve to sway those voters away from Bush. So if this issue serves to tarnish Bush’s “good ol’ boy” image, and turns voters away from him, albeit for the wrong reason, it’s still a good thing.
