John Kerry the Braggart: Unfit For Command, Part 4

[Ned]

Originally posted by Agathon
I looked up Kerry on Google News, and the only press that seem to be still going with SWVFT are the foaming-at-the-mouth right wing nutters.

Everyone else gave it up when it turned out there was no proof. Even Bush is having to distance himself from it now.

Agathon, the only people who say there is no proof are people refused to believe the evidence and even the admissions of Kerry.

And, don't cite the pro-Kerry media to support your argument. All they do is smear anyone who attacks their liberal, nay, socialist darling, JFK II.

[Guynemer]

That old canard, the "liberal media." I love it.

All hail the Nediverse!

[chequita guevara]

This story has been totally discreditted. Why is anyone still bothering with this?

[Ned]

Guy, you ARE living in some perverse leftist fairytale land where views left of Lenin are considered "normal" and "unbiased."

[chequita guevara]

Did you read the cartoon strip Non Sequitor today? I think you should, Ned.

[Guynemer]

Wow, you really have gone around the bend, haven't you?

[Ned]

Che, you wish.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Ned
Guy, you ARE living in some perverse leftist fairytale land where views left of Lenin are considered "normal" and "unbiased."

Guynemer is a liberal. At leftmost, he's a social democrat (and I'm not even sure of that).

Anybody left of Lenin would call him either an enemy or a traitor. And the way I see Guy, I don't see him agreeing with anything somebody that left-wing would say.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Che, you wish.

You don't read the Sunday funnies?

[Ned]

Originally posted by Guynemer
Wow, you really have gone around the bend, haven't you?

Guy, if you don't pull your head out of the sand, you are never going to understand what hit you.

[Agathon]

And, don't cite the pro-Kerry media to support your argument. All they do is smear anyone who attacks their liberal, nay, socialist darling, JFK II.

A socialist? He's no socialist.

What pro-Kerry media. Just because a media outlet exposes the facts of the connection between SWVFT and the Republican Party, and shows that many of these people seem to have changed their stories, and points out the fact that Kerry's '71 senate testimony was not his own opinion, but a message he conveyed from members of his organization, does not make them a pro-Kerry organization.

The case against Kerry is very weak. The reasonable conclusion is that the SBVFT are motivated by political reasons (particularly Kerry's antiwar stance). It's fair enough to criticise him for that, but to make up stuff after 30 years is a bit rich.

And from what I have seen the majority of the public aren't buying it. In a recent poll, over 60% found the whole thing distasteful and thought it should stop. I don't imagine all of them are Kerry voters.

In any case, the claims made by Kerry at the 71 Senate hearing were basically true. Many atrocities were committed in Vietnam, the same as most wars, and probably even more due to the nature of the conflict. Soldiers hate guerillas/partisans and tend to be extremely harsh on them for obvious reasons. This was how it was with the Germans in WWII, and it wasn't because the Germans were especially evil, they were not much different from any other group of young men engaged against guerilla forces.

[Ned]

Ah come on now, leftist aparacnik, the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, the big 3 TV Newscasts, and guys like Chris Matthews, are 100% on the Kerry bandwagon. If you don't see this, it is because you are blind.

[AnnC]

Marching to November
by Andrew Ferguson
The Weekly Standard
08/30/2004, Volume 009, Issue 47

FOR THE PAST couple weeks Republican activists have bent themselves to the task of proving that John Kerry, who was awarded five medals during four months of service in the Vietnam war, isn't a war hero, and the marvelous intensity of their exertions started me thinking.

As normal Americans lose interest in politics, and as their moderating influence fades from the general conversation, politics has become increasingly the plaything of obsessives. And what obsessives bring to politics, unsurprisingly, are their own obsessions, rooted in the uneasiness and insecurities that we all share to one degree or another. Punditry may not be a branch of psychopathology - not yet, anyway - but in some cases the most penetrating political analysis should follow the method of Bertie Wooster's valet, Jeeves: "The first essential is to study the psychology of the individual." Both Bertie and Jeeves, by the way, were paleocons.

It's amazing, the mysteries that can be illuminated by the psychological approach. Consider the recent self-presentation of the Democratic party. The party as we know it today was founded in 1972, when its old guard was swept away by the McGovernite revolution. The party's purpose and image were unambiguous. It was the peace party. And it remained such through the rest of the Cold War, even when - as in '72 - it nominated a decorated war hero as its presidential candidate.

Over the years a few Democrats have objected to this reputation, of course, and the cleverest polemicists have even flipped their party's peacenik image against their opponents in the war party. Beginning in the 1980s, Democrats have delighted in scolding various Republicans as "war wimps" - public officials and think-tank types who advocate the use of military force and who did not themselves serve in the military.

On the kindest interpretation, the "war wimps" charge is based on a non sequitur, linking two things that have nothing to do with each other (military service as a young man, on the one hand, and sound judgment in geopolitical affairs, on the other). On a not-so-kind interpretation, it entails the repudiation of a crucial democratic principle: civilian control of the military. After all, if only men with military experience are justified in ordering other military men into combat, then national security has been ceded to an unsupervised warrior class - something that Democrats used to warn us against. And besides, by this definition, several of the country's wartime presidents, including Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, were war wimps.

As an argument, then, the war-wimp charge is incoherent, even illiberal. It's also inexplicable - until you realize that it isn't an argument at all, but a sign of severe psychological frustration, a means by which a desperate Democrat might overcompensate for years of being called a peacenik wimp. The same frustration led directly to the bizarre outcome of this year's primaries, when Democrats nominated a charmless and undistinguished candidate whom no one seemed to like very much and who displays a dazzling lack of the most elementary political skills, such as being able to deliver a speech without boring half his audience into paralytic catatonia.

But he had a single qualification that overwhelmed his many shortcomings. John Kerry is a war hero. John Kerry fought Charlie in 'Nam. John Kerry wore the brown bar and ate the chop-chop. John Kerry was in the **** and came out alive. (Democrats can speak the lingo too, you know.) So who you calling a "peace party" now? Huh?

Hence the Boston convention - a celebration of hairy-chested militarism that would have made Generalissimo Franco blush. A press release outlined a theme for each night of the convention. Monday: "The Kerry-Edwards plan to make America stronger . . ." Tuesday: "John Kerry's lifetime of strength . . ." Wednesday: "Creating a stronger, more secure America . . ." If you listened close you heard Sousa marches tucked between the rap music interludes. On Thursday night, there was the Parade of Generals and Admirals, each warrior marching across the convention stage to riotous applause. (They had the decency to wear civilian clothes.) Finally, the war hero himself appeared, greeted by a phalanx of former soldiers. He climbed the stage and promptly gave a military salute. He said he was "reporting for duty." Juntas have taken power with less pomp.

The vets in formation, the generals strutting the stage, the teary-eyed tributes to those fallen in battle, even the nominee himself - it is difficult to explain any of this martial bluster except as a function of psychological necessity: Democrats need to reassure themselves they aren't wimps.

But now Republican activists are forcing on the campaign obsessions of their own - almost a mirror image of the Democrats' desperate overcompensation. The dissonance and frustration this year's election rouses in the mind of the dedicated Republican cannot be underestimated. Conservatives actually do revere the military, without reservation. It is not their inclination to debunk combat heroes. Some Republicans, when they drink enough beer, really do wonder whether civilian control of the military is such a great idea. For them, it was never plausible that our boys in Vietnam had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians," and so on, as young John Kerry testified they did.

Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further - and here we'll let slip a thinly disguised secret - Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.

Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn't really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry's record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it's far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It's designed to reassure uneasy minds.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/493kldgc.asp?pg=1

[chequita guevara]

Isn't it refreshing when an arch-conservative tells something close to the truth?

[Kropotkin]

Originally posted by Ned
K, you are more than offensive. 50,000+ Americans and many times that number of Vietnamese died that Vietnam live free. You smear their memory and their cause.

More than offensive? Great, it was exacly this kind of 'democratic centralism'-crap I was aiming for. Good of you giving me a chance to develop my point with a class-act example of it.

First off, to take up a minor point, have you ever asked yourself if your way of making yourself somesort of self-appointed spokesperson for all those dead people. In my humble opinion, that is really to smeat them. A wast majority of them propably just wanted to live their lifes, the fantastic cause your talk about probably a distant second, at most. Frankly, I find your use of their deaths for your political agenda as somewhat sickening. But as I am for an open and serious debate based I'm not going to start waiving flags and those beautiful words you so often use add hoc to support a political agenda in your face.

Now, lets leave your petty-bourgeois morality behind and focus on my main point. So, Kerry spoke to the Foreign relations committe back in 1971 about war crimes commited by americans in South-east asia. One would think that the country that fights for democracy and freedom would care about its troops not committing war crimes, no matter if they agree with the war in general or not. But, no! Democratic centralism rules in the land of the free. You have to be either 100 % behind everything the US does abroad or else your a traitor. Whistleblower are shot on sight. It's all black and white. It usually is in your mind, isn't it Ned?