Republicans & Conservatives Archives

Kerry has managed to make a major issue out of an event which occurred over thirty years ago.

I’m sorry, but who brought this up? It certainly wasn’t Kerry!

Aaron Brown said it best tonight on CNN’s Newsnight when he pointed out how Republicans have dredged up an issue over a minor point that happened over 30 years ago.

Maybe there’s little in the present that they have left to criticize?

ABC News “dredged” this up, not the Republicans, though it’s true that Kerry’s immediate response (as though somebody had pulled his cord and he were some kind of talking doll) was to say “Republican attack! Republican attack!”

But how long will Kerry get away with calling any scrutiny of his record whatsoever a Republican attack? I wonder if Democrats themselves aren’t starting to get a little uncomfortable at this tendency to avoid not only criticism but scrutiny.

The truth behind the medals flap is less important that Kerry’s refusal to give a straight answer, which is why the story is so damaging—Kerry’s percieved weakness among voters is that he’s a flim-flam artist whose story (whether about medals, his family’s—not his—SUVs, his voting for the war before voting against it, etc) changes with every change of the wind.

Ooh, a chance to quote myself again on this issue.

The more I think of it the more it occurs to me that the most telling symbolic action Kerry took during that time was throwing other men’s medals over the fence onto the White House lawn. (At least that’s what he said he did.)

Here is a man with ambition. A man willing to throw away the honor and valor of others, but still retain his own medals. Symbolic, I think, of the craven unprincipled politician willing to sacrifice others to get and keep power.

Again, it is relevant. Democrats have made it relevant by seeking to create Vietnam out of Iraq.

This is one where democrats and Kerry himself are just handing the Republican Attack Machine, and little attack marrionettes like myself, gifts on a silver platter, gift wrapped, with a bright shiny bow on top.

The Vietnam protest movement may be real popular in liberal circles but for the majority of red blooded americans it was embarrasing. That is what Kerry is trying to run from here. The more he does so, the more it will draw attention to these ‘inconsequential’ issues.

I mean, come on. You first want to draw the distinction between Iraq and Vietnam but when people start doing that, and remembering Kerry’s participation in the protest movement, and start questioning inconsistancies and lately outright lies, you cry foul. This is a classic example of getting bit by your own dog.

I wonder if Democrats themselves aren’t starting to get a little uncomfortable at this tendency to avoid not only criticism but scrutiny.

Nope. We’re just disgusted by Republicans who have to quibble about whether a ribbon is a medal to divert attention from the lack of a plan in Iraq, and Rumsfeld complaining that the administration is doing very little planning for fighting terrorism.

And then there’s Bush’s lack of coherent policy on domestic issues like health care, fiscal responsibility, education, and an energy policy that doesn’t put more money into the hands of Middle Eastern terrorists.

Democrats have made it relevant by seeking to create Vietnam out of Iraq

Eric, Bush created a Vietnam in Iraq through poor (or no) planning. I still don’t know what the specific goals are in Iraq. What exactly needs to be done before we can say “mission accomplished” for real? What is our exit strategy?

Kerry has a plan. A couple Democrats in the House just put forth a detailed plan. I still haven’t heard of anyone in the administration or any Republicans in Congress who have a plan.

The Vietnam protest movement may be real popular in liberal circles but for the majority of red blooded americans it was embarrasing. That is what Kerry is trying to run from here. The more he does so, the more it will draw attention to these ‘inconsequential’ issues.

I don’t know how unpopular it was, seeing as how Nixon ran on having a plan to get us out of Vietnam. He won. Therefore, an exit of that kind was popular.

As for this whole Medals controversy being a Republican tactic, my response is who else? Karen Hughes shows up yesterday to lambast Kerry on the same day he defends himself against the smear. Am I to believe this a coincidence, or part of a coordinated campaign? I pick Coordinated campaign.

Am I angry about that? No, it’s what I expect of the sides in this. I just wish Republicans and conservatives would stop acting as if there side doesn’t engage in coordinated attacks on political enemies. I mean, you got the GOP distributing talking points, and lo and behold, all your talk radio hosts are singing the same tune. But no, you guys want to have it both ways.

You want to present yourselves as the unbiased, objective, rugged individualists who don’t rely on any expert to tell them what’s right and what’s not.

Yet at the same time, you back one party’s set of candidates and criticize the other party’s, you continually pull for people even when the evidence, as viewed objectively, is troubling, and you continually appeal to protection of majorities, groups of people you consider right thinkers, and experts saying what you want to hear.

Just admit it: you’re human. I do some of those things to. But I’d like to think I can resist those impulses, rather than give into them. Sometimes I manage it, sometimes I don’t, sometimes, I don’t want to. But I’m not kidding myself that I can approach these issues from a purely political standpoint. Context is important. Qualifiers should be including, and the facts should be the basis of our opinions before our personal sentiments. If we are unwilling to allow other person’s sentiments to sway us, we are merely individual thinkers. If we are unwilling to allow the facts to sway us, we are worse than mistaken, we are stubbornly mistaken. It may not make for great political theatre, but it does make for sounder political decision making.

Kerry threw other men’s medals. Yes. Because those men asked him to do it. Not because he wanted to masquerade those as his. He threw ribbons of his own, which are referred to as medals by servicemen, and a few of which come with the medals in question, and count as part of the award. So he is telling the truth. There are little technicalities here and there, but that is what he was doing.

Bush led us into a War that we would not have even thought of going into on 9/12. From his position of priveleged information, as the boss of the CIA, FBI, NSA, and every other intelligence agency, and as one of the those people who could determine what congress saw, he made the case to our representatives and senators that war was necessary, and then used that same priveleged position to make the same case to the American people.

And so we invaded, and so we found out the hard way that our motivations for going to war were unsupported, and not a thing has happened in the past year to demonstrate otherwise. No new evidence has surfaced to say that Saddam had control and authority and initiative with the terrorist groups, or that he possessed WMDs at the time we said he did, much less that these two threats ever merged as one. That may change, but every day that goes by makes that less of a possibility. Those are the facts.

Bush’s explanation for this has been simply to maintain a consistent facade of justification on WMDs and terrorist, while his supporters and staff have moved the goalposts from Saddam being a imminent national security threat that needed pre-emption, to him being simply a murdering despot who needed a little deposing.

These are the matters I consider important. The rest is just symbolism and political rhetoric. Soldiers are dying for Bush’s decision to go to war, and many more may follow than necessary, if we continue Bush’s policies.

This criticism about nuancing things makes me want to both cringe and laugh, because a nuance is just a small detail of great importance, and if recognizing or making use of such small details is somehow forbidden, then I wonder what kind of stupid mistakes will get committed simply because we don’t want to get too detail oriented. All this stupid debate about nuance is about is trying to give the advantage to shallow thinkers, who don’t explore the implications of the details of a item when they speak about it. It’s trying to give these people a blank check on blanket generalisms.

Some raise issues of the dishonesty of nuanced language, but I’ll tell you right here that one can lie in bold face as easy as one can lie in Italics. Just because somebody isn’t lying to you with details doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth in general.

Stephen,

—I mean, you got the GOP distributing talking points, and lo and behold, all your talk radio hosts are singing the same tune.—

The right has talk radio, and the left has every major newspaper and television station save Fox news, so get down from the soap box on that issue.

Anthony,
Haven’t you ever gotten in an argument with your wife or girlfriend or gay lover or whatever, where you just asked a simple what happened issue? The result becomes a tiny world war three in your home…

The same is happening here, candidates question each other’s backgrounds and voting history ad nauseum. What you won’t admit or sadly fail to realize is that it is Kerry who is inflating the situation. If he just made one statement and stuck to it, whatever it is, it would become boring and thusly be old news. The people would move on. Bush did this by finally releasing his full service record. No average joe really cares what he did with his medals, but people are very wary of someone who talks in circles and doesn’t make a point - and that’s Kerry through and through.

I’m conservative, and republican, and I don’t think Bush is either, but the problem with both candidates is that they have swung and stuck at opposite poles of the please pendulum. Kerry tries to please everyone and be on all sides of everything, and Bush has his own ideals and doesn’t give a rat crap what even his own voter base thinks.

I fear for this country under the guidance of either one, but I don’t fear more attacks as long as Bush is in office. Kerry wants to turn it over to the UN and if that happens, we are all doomed.

Republicans keep referring to Kerry as a “Flip Flopper”. What do you call going to war for WMD’s, that don’t exist, changing it to Democracy for Iraqi but they cannot have sovereignty; Medicare “change” that beneifts the drug companies and not the elderly?

There is an expression -“He who accuses another, is actually accusing hmself”. This is holding eminently true for all the Republican meaningless attacks. By the way, I truly resent George W wasting my tax paid dollars for his re-election campaign. This adds injury to the gross insults of 6 trillion dollar deficits so that he can dress up in fly suits and play “war.

As to the UN - we all live together on this planet and technology has made it exceeingly small, so we had better learn to work alongside other countries instead of being the best recruitment ad Osma bin Laden ever had.

Further - I believe the war criminals in Wahington DC will incite another attack on America, just before the 2004 election, so they can cancel the elections,and not have to go to prison for their actions.

Steven Daugherty,

I am from the “liberal” era of of 60’s and 70’s and did my share of marching, protesting etc. I am also a fiscal conservative, registered Independant, and socially aware teacher.

Please don’t give us that redneck bunk of Un-American in relation to the protests aganst Vietnam. Go do some research and you will find that the facts are:

The undereducated, lower class Americans, were being used as Canon Fodder (58,000 of them) so that the Bushes et al could make lots of money throught the Carlyle Group. Nixons own son-in-law (who served) did not get any closer to Vietnam than 384 miles out in tne Bay of Tonkin on a ship. Bush never served in any war. There are no Bushes, Cheney’s, Powell’s, Rumsfeld’s Perle’s nor Wolfowitcz’s in Iraq.

Unfortunately this is where the Vietnam analgoy is apt- a rich mans war and only the poor and disadvanaged get shot at. Again huge deficits, this time the biggest in history. Now they are talking about a “draft” that we worked so hard to bury, and it will have the “priveleged exclusion’s” that make it grotesquely unfair.

I am from the “baby boomer” generaton who worked to make the world a little fairer. None of us will forget what we did, nor why we did it. We also will remember on election day that the Republicans have stolen the Social Security Surplus, their buddy Kenny Lay ruined thousands of peoples retirement savings, the drug comapnies are getting the benefits from Medicare, our granchildren are being killed in a needless war, that most of the world now hates us, where a few short years ago we were admired globally, and our envioronment is a disaster, where most of us are acquiring respiratory infections.

So before you judge - get your facts - not the Republican sound bite distortions, correct.

Vietnam again! Two and a half million were exterminated as a result of the “peace movement” hamstringing the war effort and achieving American withdrawal. I guess those victims of genocide were all white rich men, huh? Nope, poor Indochinese peasants.

The victory of the “peace movement” is best represented by a pile of skulls. That’s true when we talk about either Vietnam or Iraq.

Honestly, I don’t even know how Vietnam era “peace” activists can even sleep at night.

Martin,

So, Pol Pot is the fault of peace activists, and you get to hang 2.5 million deaths on the liberals. However, you scream bloody injustice when Democrats have the temerity to suggest that maybe possibly something could have been done that might have increased the chances 9/11 wouldn’t happen. You complain that we blame Bush instead of the real perpetrators, Al Qaeda.

Well, blame Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge for what happened in Cambodia if that’s your standard. At least try to be consistent.

As I recall Martin, it was our military incursions into Cambodia that destabilized the country and allowed Pol Pot and his Genocidal Maniacs to begin their reign of terror.

As for Vietnam, just please stop. What killed our war effort there, was the mismanagement of the war. We didn’t take ground and keep it. We just didn’t use the military for what it was meant to be used. But also we failed to pick the right war to get into in the first place, “we” meaning Democrat and Republicans of the time. The protestors only became the carriers of the mainstream message after opinion turned against the war. As I said before, your Richard Nixon campaigned on having a plan to end the war. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t think there was a political advantage to that.

Maureen, I think you aren’t responding to Stephen. I think you meant to address your post to Eric.

-Cf

> The victory of the “peace movement” is
> best represented by a pile of skulls.
> That’s true when we talk about either
> Vietnam or Iraq.

The genocides in Iraq occurred mostly during the period of time when Bush Senior and Reagan were still chummy with Saddam - and quite happily (and most likely knowingly) supplying him with the weapons to commit those atrocities. In fact, there were no allegations of - or evidence uncovered since - genocide or mass killings in Iraq in the last decade:

From the State Department site:

Most of the graves discovered to date correspond to one of five major atrocities perpetrated by the regime.

- The 1983 attack against Kurdish citizens belonging to the Barzani tribe, 8,000 of whom were rounded up by the regime in northern Iraq and executed in deserts at great distances from their homes.

- The 1988 Anfal campaign, during which as many as 182,000 people disappeared. Most of the men were separated from their families and were executed in deserts in the west and southwest of Iraq. The remains of some of their wives and children have also been found in mass graves.

- Chemical attacks against Kurdish villages from 1986 to 1988, including the Halabja attack, when the Iraqi Air Force dropped sarin, VX and tabun chemical agents on the civilian population, killing 5,000 people immediately and causing long-term medical problems, related deaths, and birth defects among the progeny of thousands more.

- The 1991 massacre of Iraqi Shi’a Muslims after the Shi’a uprising at the end of the Gulf war, in which tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in such regions as Basra and Al-Hillah were killed.

- The 1991 Kurdish massacre, which targeted civilians and soldiers who fought for autonomy in northern Iraq after the Gulf war.

But wait, there’s more!

Human Rights Watch, who did not oppose the invasion, made a statement in February of 2003 that they also did not support any invasion, either — because they did not believe there was a humanitarian crisis in Iraq:

The sole exception that Human Rights Watch has made to its neutrality on the decision whether to go to war is in the case of humanitarian intervention - the military invasion of a country to protect its people. We have advocated military intervention in limited circumstances when the people of a country are facing genocide or comparable mass slaughter. Horrific as Saddam Hussein’s human rights record is, it does not today appear to meet this high threshold - in contrast, for example, with his behavior during the 1988 Anfal genocide against the Iraqi Kurds.

In other words, the picture you paint in which the heartless liberal Bill Clinton stood idly by as Saddam commited genocides until the compassionate conservative George W Bush came along and finally brought the slaughter to a screeching halt is almost entirely inaccurate. The facts show that Ronald Reagan and G.H.W. Bush are, in fact, the US leaders who not only provided the tools for the killings, not only stood by while Saddam slaughtered and buried 300,000 innocents, but, in many cases, brazenly and publicly supported the effort.

-Cf

So you kill upwards of a million of your citizens and poof—all is quiet in your country, the pacified populace keeps their mouths shut because they’re in constant fear of that knock on the door in the middle of the night, and this allows leftists and the inaptly named “Human Rights Watch” to think that everything is hunkey-dory?

Well, things are peaceful now because all the dissenters HAVE BEEN KILLED. Glad to have that cleared up. At best, Hussein transitioned to killing by the hundreds instead of the hundred thousand. But now he’s in jail. Of course, if John Kerry were president today, he’d be president of Iraq—a great victory for human rights and the left that would be.

Nobody said anything was hunkey-dory. It’s just that (1) the deaths you’ve been blaming on Democrats and liberals were, in fact, all done with the support and blessing of Republican Presidents… and (2) that the idea that the invasion was meant to stop them was incorrect.

All that other stuff you just posted is smoke and mirrors. Your initial arguments are still false and your [flame-baiting comment reference deleted - WatchBlog Manager] counter-accusations don’t change that.

-Cf

Martin, you’re trying to avoid the real subject. If you want to make genocide the standard, Then your people have a horrible record, failing to go to into Bosnia during the ethnic cleansing, opposing interventions in Somalia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. And of course your people looked the other way during the Reagan Administration as governments friendly to you in the Phillipines, Central America and other countries killed tens of thousands of their citizens and brutally suppressed their populations. Heck, you guys didn’t even cut off aid or help to Saddam Hussein when he gassed the Kurds in ‘98.

I’m not saying the Republicans are guiltier than Democrats necessarily, but if you are trying to show that the Republicans care more about mass deaths overseas, then the evidence for that caring is simply miserable, especially in the context of America’s foreign policy under Republican White Houses and Legislatures.

Oh, yes, and let me ask you : who was president when we withdrew from Vietnam? Who was president when Saigon fell?

You got a pop history understanding of the war, one where liberal opposition, and not incompetence on the part of the generals fighting the war result in it’s loss. You know, if those generals and LBJ had gotten the job done, had prosecuted the war with some clear idea of what would achieve the ends they were looking to achieve, perhaps we’d be speaking of the war differently now. In the end, most American’s loyalties would have followed our patterns of victories. With no clear progress, but hundreds of soldiers dying, people rightly wondered what kind of good America was doing there. If weren’t pushing back the North Vietnamese, weren’t holding and keeping ground, if we were trying to fight a “new war” without winning the real one, then it’s natural that the war becomes unpopular.

Martin, I don’t think you give people enough credit about their ability to make up their minds. I think there were many people who believed that Vietnam was a moral war.

But as the details filter back, as people learned the ugly secrets about how the war was being fought from the Pentagon’s own documents, and as Americans came back in the hundreds from Vietnam dead and maimed, people’s sense of the war changed. Should people hold on to favorable beliefs about the war even in the face of the best evidence out there? Should we expect that they put politics above what they believed right? In the end, we left Vietnam because the average joe, the person you are so enamored of, became convinced the war wasn’t right.

I wrote a pretty serious typo up there. The year that Saddam gassed the Kurds should read ‘88 not ‘98.

Instead of saying [flame-baiting comment reference deleted - WatchBlog Manager] I should have simply said “sarcastic”.

-Cf

Hey Stephen, don’t forget Liberia. Bush dragged his feet for quite a while as the killing was going on, before finally sending a few Marines ashore. Then pulled them out ten days later.

We broke a lot of hearts in Africa over that. Of course no one in the US noticed. Certainly not the Republicans.