Posted on 04/28/2004 5:51:57 PM PDT by Norman Arbuthnot
When you celebrate an author, i.e., Ann Coulter, who asserts that anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan has been, is and will continue to be a traitor, you are perplexed by this John Kerry fellow. He is, after all, a liberal Democrat from that breeding ground of treachery, Massachusetts. He is from an elite background, so you know what that means: He is out of touch with the decent, flag-waving people of the American heartland. For God’s sake, the man speaks French! Where did he learn that? In some commie-sympathizing cell in Cambridge, no doubt.
Here’s the problem: John Kerry, as we can’t help but know, is a Vietnam veteran. More than that, he is a legitimate war hero, winner of the Bronze Star. But wait, there’s more: He was wounded three times and so was awarded three Purple Hearts.
This is a pretty impressive record of achievement, especially for a liberal Democratic traitor from Massachusetts. It calls to mind some other liberal Democratic traitors who tried to fool us by risking their lives in combat. George McGovern—a man whose very name stands for Ms. Coulter’s idea of treachery—survived 35 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe as a B-24 bomber pilot. Harry S. Truman was an artillery officer in France during World War I. Lyndon Johnson, father of the wretchedly liberal Great Society, won a Silver Star for his service in the South Pacific. And then there was that skinny P.T. boat officer from Massachusetts. He did a bit of service during World War II, as you may have heard.
In the world of Ms. Coulter and her readers, these men are villains, not heroes; traitors, not patriots. So when yet another liberal Democrat shows up on the national stage bearing a chest full of medals, it is hardly surprising to learn that some people just don’t know what to think. Turning to their radios, cable-television shows and journals for instructions, they find certain answers to their troubling questions.
John Kerry, liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, didn’t deserve all those Purple Hearts. Yep—somehow this ambitious traitor figured out a way to scratch himself up a little and get some bleeding heart to give him an undeserved Purple Heart. Whoever signed the commendation no doubt soon will be exposed as a secret Democratic operative, just like those tiresome 9/11 widows from New Jersey who have the nerve to question the wisdom of the current administration.
This is the state of debate in 2004: John Kerry’s campaign felt obliged to release his medical records to support his right to three Purple Hearts in Vietnam. This came after another officer claimed that one of them wasn’t deserved. The complaint was picked up in the right-wing media, and so a controversy was born. You see, said Mr. Kerry’s critics, you can’t trust a liberal Democratic traitor with a chest full of medals. Those decorations most likely are frauds.
Political strategy is not my strong suit, but I wonder if this is the best tactic that President Bush’s supporters should take. Aligned as they are with a man who risked his life in the air over Texas while Mr. Kerry fought in Vietnam, complaints that the Senator doesn’t deserve one of his three Purple Hearts sounds, well, a little less than gracious.
When Presidential campaigns were fought between members of the G.I. generation from World War II, few questioned the military-service bona fides of another, even when one of those G.I.’s, Ronald Reagan, performed less-than-arduous service in the Hollywood theater of operations. With Vietnam-generation boomers in charge now, however, the old code of conduct doesn’t apply. Questioning what an opponent did in the war is fair game.
And that, wouldn’t you know, ought to favor Democrats.
Since the torch was passed to the boomers in 1992, four men who wore a uniform during Vietnam War have been nominated (or are about to be nominated) for national office. All four hailed from privileged families, which is a way of saying that they might have found a way to avoid service at all.
Two of them joined the National Guard—Dan Quayle and George W. Bush. They are Republicans. They stayed at home.
Two of them served in Vietnam—John Kerry and Al Gore. They are Democrats. True, Mr. Gore wasn’t exactly slogging through the Mekong Delta, but he was there, stationed outside Saigon with the 20th Engineers Brigade, and he didn’t have to be. Suffice to say, it would have been safer to put on a uniform in Texas and Indiana.
Does any of this matter? It shouldn’t, unless you believe that only Republicans or only conservatives have the nation’s best interests at heart, and that Democrats or liberals hate America and are, in Ms. Coulter’s formulation, traitors.
Unfortunately, that’s precisely the sort of thing we seem to be arguing about in 2004.
Whoa there, pardner! Read Robert Caro's biography of Johnson. The WW-2 mission that Johnson went on was a photo-op aimed at getting his ticket punched for political purposes.
He was an opportunist who went to Vietnam after he couldn't get into France first. He got 3 chicken scratches, killed a mostly dead already VC who was no threat to anyone, took advantage of technicalities to 'cut-and-run' after 120 days in Vietnam, then came home and told vicious lies about the 'band of brothers' he had just skipped out on.
In other words, he is a typical Dim slimeball.
Correction: Does any of this matter? You better believe it does, because primarily Republicans or conservatives have the nation's best interests at heart, and Democrats or liberals hate America and are, in Ms. Coulter's accurate formulation, traitors.
One of the greatest heroes in American military history is Lt. General Benedict Arnold. Without his bravery and leadership in the middle of the Battle of Saratoga, we might have lost that critical battle. And if we'd lost that battle, we might have lost all of New York, and Washington's army, and the Revolutionary War itself.
But Benedict Arnold is not known as a hero today, his name is now a synonym for traiter. Why? Because he sold out to the British, truned his coat, and joined the enemy.
The point, of course, is that being a hero is a status that must be earned. But it can also be lost. The writer is deliberately ignoring all the years between 1971 and 2004. And he also takes a slap at those who serve in the National Guard. They, too, give their lives.
And flying a combat jet is not the world's safest occupation. Far more people are killed doing that, even in training, than those who sit at a computer taking potshots at the National Guard.
A classmate of mine was a Navy pilot in Vietnam. He made General, and along the way he trained hundreds of other Navy pilots. He told me once that the loss of pilots IN TRAINING ALONE was about 1%.
This writer is just selling the Kerry Vietnam mantra -- he was a hero then, therefore he must be the best man now. The author is a moron. Four months in country does not constitute a lifetime.
Congressman Billybob
Listen to this, folks.
Here is their idea of "achievement".
I suppose if he was wounded SIX times, he would have had TWICE the "achievement"?
Being wounded is NOT an "achievement".
Fighting on, when wounded, is an achievement.
Begging your C.O. for a Purple Heart is NOT an "achievement".
Or Republican draft-dodger Bobdole who as everyone knows wanted to become President so he could starve school children and freeze old folks.
You don't say.
It may or may not occur to the author that what a fellow does after his military service tends to count too. I'm thinking of a certain enlisted man, a guy who acted as a courier in WWI and got gassed, earning the Iron Cross for bravery, a fellow who has precisely the same claim as John Kerry if all you look at is war service and not what came afterward. I'm speaking about Adolf Hitler.
What came afterward for Kerry was an abominable campaign of slander and demagoguery that launched his political career by stabbing his fellow servicemen in the back. The author is laboring under the illusion that we've forgotten. We haven't.
From all credible reports, he did at least tolerably well. Perhaps is exploits were not as heroic as he makes them out to be, but the fact that he went and served is more than most of my baby boomer generation [myself included] can say. This is particularly true when in all probability he could had some deferment for the asking. If that what we are talking about, then GWB does not look too good by comparison. When we make this argument, we are fighting on Kerry's field, not on a field of GWB strength.
Where the Republicans get traction from Kerry and Viet Nam is his betrayal of his "band of brothers" when he got back and accused them all of atrocities. Kerry needs to be asked over and over and over, what he meant by accusing every soldier who fought in Viet Nam of hooking hand cranked generators to civilian gonads and cranking the generator; what did he mean when he said that U.S. soldiers routinely cut parts off of civilians; why did he call the everyday grunt a war criminal. That is where we make headway.
War is a damned messy business. Everyone who has half a brain cell understands that. Kerry knows that war is messy, but he does not believe that the rest of this country understands that fact. Certainly there are soldiers who go beyond the pale just as there are police officers who step very far over the line, but Kerry issued an indictment of every soldier in Viet Nam (which, contrary to conventional wisdom, was a macro-victory [and micro-defeat] for our side). We need to attack his statements about his comrades who were with him. That line of attack will trump any losing comparison from 35 years ago about which candidate did more on the battlefield.
I think Kerry's a traitor for his votes in the Senate, and what he's saying on the campaign trail. I couldn't care less about his service in Vietnam beyond his wearing his service on his sleeve.
Which I find odd. THAT makes me wonder, because my father flew combat in Vietnam as a non-Com Marine F-4 driver with the VMFA 314.....and I didn't even know it until I was 13 or 14 because he never discussed it and our family friends didn't harp on it.
Even today he won't discuss his exploits without prodding, and swears up and down that his GIB earned the two of them an Air Medal and that he'd be dead from his own stupidity had he not listened to that Weapons Officer on a particular night sortie. I've known a lot of warriors like that.
And there have been plenty of dishonorable individuals who've acted honorably in the service of the US military. I'm fairly certain that right now, there's a pedophile, or thief or rapist servicing with distinction in Iraq or elsewhere.
Serving with distinction and honor is not a "Get out of being labeled a sh!thead for the rest of your life" card and the left needs to stop behaving as if it is.
If you want to prance around your service, it had better be impeccable....but warriors with impeccable service rarely prance that fact around.
It all makes me wonder.
The Navy doesn't have generals. We call flag officers admirals.
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