No Sense of Decency

Listening to Franken today and a caller was describing something some of the delegates to the Republican Convention are wearing. Here it is: they are wearing Purple Heart bandaids in "honor" of John Kerry. When asked about it, they reply, "I got a little scratch."

I can't even begin to describe how angry this makes me. Anyone with ANY sense of decency would not belittle soldiers' sacrifices by wearing something that demeans the symbol of that sacrifice. Thousands of Americans have gotten Purple Hearts, and I'm willing to grant that every single one of them deserved it, whether it's a superficial scratch or the loss of an entire limb or worse. They served, put their lives in harm's way, and were fortunate not to have been killed (actually, many of them were killed - the PH is awarded posthumously for combat deaths).

By wearing the Purple Heart Bandaid, these people are essentially saying that Purple Hearts are meaningless or a joke, war wounds aren't all that bad, and military service really isn't anything to be proud of.

Yet who toots "the military service" horn? Who wraps themselves in the flag to justify everything they do? Who worships George W. Bush has a strong, courageous leader (A guy who used the Texas Air National Guard as a safe haven to avoid 'Nam and on 9-11 flew to Nebraska to avoid DC at the height of the crisis)? That's right, republicans.

No sense of decency. None. Zero. And they are supposed to be the "moral" party? Give me a f***ing break.

Back with a Vengence

Been away for a few days, but I'm back and on the offensive. Go here and read about George W. Bush's efforts to dodge his military obligation.

After all of this garbage about John Kerry's war record has been banging around the media echo-chamber for the last two weeks, I felt obliged to say something. So that's my motivation for striking back.

Besides, it's the only language that right-wingers understand.

Ted Kennedy a Terrorist?

Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security thought he might be. Surreal.

NY Times Investigates Swift Boat Claims

This article on the New York Times web site answers a lot of questions about John Kerry's war record and the Swift Boat Veterans' accusations. Oh, and I almost forgot, it also details how closely tied they are with the Bush campaign.

I got your 'sensitive' right here.

"When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil. He'll be tough, but he'll be tough with someone else's kid's blood. It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam and said he had 'other priorities' at that time would say that." - Senator Tom Harkin, August 16 2004.

Harkin was infuriated by the veep mocking Sen. John Kerry for saying he would fight a "more sensitive war on terror."

Some Emphasis

I favorite blog of mine is Emphasis Added, and he has a great post today called "Soak the Poor," so I encourage you to check it out. Here's a great portion to wet your appetite:

One would think that in a democracy, the appeal of a system that benefits everyone to a greater or lesser extent would outpoll the naked self-interest of a fortunate few. However, the far Right has hit on a successful formula known in the advertising business as “aspirational marketing” – that is, sell to people based on who they want to be, rather than who they are. In this case, right-wing fatcats have encountered far greater success by getting people to support a tax structure for rich people that you would want if you were rich, as opposed to one that you would want if you were middle-class or working-class, despite the fact that most people are, in fact, middle-class or working-class.

Excellent.

Nuance

John Kerry has been repeatedly criticised for "flip-flopping" because of his nuanced position on issues. He's been criticised about the Iraq war for voting for the $87 billion then voting against it. He's been hit this week for saying that he would still have voted for the Iraq resolution even knowing what we know today about the lack of WMD.

Bernard Kerek, the former Police Commissioner of NYC when 9-11 occurred, was on Hardball tonight slamming Kerry for voting to send troops to war and not voting for the money they needed. Now I think Bernie Kerek was a great leader during the 9-11 crisis, but I don't believe that this fact gives him a blank check to shill for the Bush Administration.

Kerry never voted for WAR. He voted to give the President authorization to take whatever action the President deemed necessary to get Iraq to comply with the UN resolutions. Kerry thought Bush should use diplomacy, UN inspections, and the threat of war to get Saddam to comply. He thought all along that the President should go to war only if all other efforts failed. Kerry has been very consistent in his statements about this. I suggest Commissioner Kerek read this William Saletan article from Slate, which effectively discusses Kerry's position from late 2001 until this past week.

Here's the key part:

"Take Kerry's stated principles: inspections, process, allies. Apply these to the trends of the winter of 2002-03: restored inspections and grudging Iraqi concessions. Combine the principles and the trend with the evidence we have today that Iraq's WMD programs had disintegrated. The most plausible conclusion is that if Kerry were president, we would still be doing inspections, as he suggests."

-William Saletan, Slate, August 12, 2004.

I urge everyone to read the whole piece.

Hardball

John O'Neill, the Vietnam veteran who debated John Kerry in 1971 on the Dick Cavett show, is out with a book calling into question Kerry's war record. He was on Hardball with Chris Matthews on Thursday evening. At one point, after a few long diatribes against Kerry, he whined to Matthews about being repeatedly cut off. Here's the whole transcript: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5694561/
Here's the portion of the transcript where O'Neill gets bitch-slapped by Matthews:

MATTHEWS: All of this is true. And you‘re building a case against the guy
on behalf of a guy running for president with absolutely no military experience
in the field. So what is the point?

O‘NEILL: First of all, when you start off with the assumption everything is
true and refuse to allow it to be questioned...

MATTHEWS: No, I listened to every point you made, but the main
point...

O‘NEILL: You haven‘t let me talk about most of them. We talked about his
first Purple...

MATTHEWS: You talked about each one.

O‘NEILL: His first Purple...

MATTHEWS: One of the oldest tricks on this show is for somebody to come on
the show after talking for 20 minutes and say they haven‘t had the chance to
talk.

O‘NEILL: Well, the first...

MATTHEWS: I‘ll be glad to clock you, John...

O‘NEILL: OK.

MATTHEWS: ... on how many minutes you spoke on the show. So don‘t try that
old trick. It is a particularly conservative trick, OK?

So let‘s move on here.

What is the main thrust of it? You‘re saying that all of this is smoke, the
guy is not a hero.

O‘NEILL: You‘re right. I‘m saying...

MATTHEWS: All smoke?

O‘NEILL: I‘m saying that the third Purple Heart was another self-inflicted
wound. I‘m saying he lied about the Bronze Star. And I‘m saying that you, Chris,
could read the documents yourself, if you would take the time.

MATTHEWS: And his crewmen back him up and the Navy backs him up.

(CROSSTALK)

O‘NEILL: Wrong.

MATTHEWS: And you‘re it‘s all...

O‘NEILL: Wrong, Chris. The Navy, his actual commanders, virtually all say
that those awards were improperly issued.

MATTHEWS: Why am I reading these citations all day from the Navy?

What are you talking about? They don‘t exist?

O‘NEILL: Well, wait just a second. What you‘ve done is...

MATTHEWS: I read the citation for the Bronze. I read it for the Silver.
I‘ve studied up on the Purples. And you‘re saying all this is smoke, that he‘s
not really a hero of any kind.

I went to CSPAN's website but could only find a clip of the Dick Cavett show from 1971, not a transcript. I think that this debate between O'Neill and Kerry shows a lot about the motivations of each one. You can judge for yourself.

At a loss...

I'm really at a loss here. Having not been alive during the Vietnam war, it's hard for me to know and understand the depth of passion that many veterans feel when they think and talk about that war. On the other hand, the events in Iraq over the last year and-a-half do give me a sense of what it may have been like in the 1960s and 1970s when the country was so deeply divided.

The level of emotion in our political discourse today is higher than I ever remember it being in my short life. I gather from my readings about current events that it's basically not been this high since Vietnam. So now we've got a lot of really emotional people out there, doing and saying political things, and frankly, some of it doesn't make any sense to me.

I recently saw a "Veterans Against John Kerry" booth. I've done a lot of thinking since I saw it over the weekend. Now, here's what I know (and when I say "know" it means I've investigated the truthfulness of this for myself and have found it to be accurate). Kerry volunteered for combat duty. He didn't have to go. He fought bravely, was recognized by the US Navy and his comrades, and is now running for President partly on his war record.

He also protested against the war when he came back from Vietnam in 1971. He testified to Congress about atrocities being carried out by the US against the people of Vietnam. He earned the undying enmity of some veterans who feel he betrayed his fellow soldiers. Some of them are now actively campaigning against him using this history as justification.

These are very old wounds, and they go to the bone. But there is more to it than this. The fact is that several of those leading the charge against Kerry have been in fact staunch supporters of George W. Bush for quite some time. I'll put it another way, they've been for Bush since before Kerry was a candidate for President.

So let's be honest about that and not put the cart before the horse. Guys like John O'Neill (he's written a book attempting to refute Kerry's war record) didn't just get involved in this because they have a bone to pick with Kerry. They've been working on behalf of GWB the whole time, and they've been for W from the start. They are working for Bush, not against Kerry.

So now I come to what for me is so incomprehensible. How can some veterans of Vietnam work work on behalf of a guy who used the family name to avoid having to serve? If John Kerry's opposition was dishonorable, wouldn't George Bush's avoidance of combat service (despite supposedly supporting the war) be even less honorable? I could see the logic if Bush had served in combat. But he avoided serving in combat and now passes himself off as some kind of man's man. The fraud is as appalling as it is blatant.

The ring leaders of the Veterans of (fill in the blank) Against (whoever is running against Bush), it seems to me, are nothing more than tools. John O'neill worked for Richard Nixon. The money financing SBVT appears to be coming from a very wealthy Texan whose donated a lot of cash to the Bush campaign. Sure, they may hate Kerry for opposing Vietnam, but some of these nuts think John McCain gave away state secrets when he was a POW.

So perhaps there isn't a real paradox regarding the morality of supporting someone who didn't sacrifice over someone who did. Perhaps it has nothing to do with morality at all.

Update on Swift Boat Ad

On MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olberman, Keith reported last night that the Kerry campaign reviewed all of Kerry's records from 'Nam and could not find a single piece of evidence that Louis Leston had actually ever treated Kerry.

Perhaps Dr. Leston can clear up this confusion.

Posts

Just a comment on posting. In order to post under a unique user name, you'll have to register with blogspot. It's easy and it's free, so don't be afraid.

However, if you don't want to register, you can post anonymously. OK?

Turning the Corner

I heard a clip this morning of the president telling a crowd how jobs were coming back. Then I heard that only 32,000 jobs were added to the US economy in July, far off earlier estimates of over 200,000.

Yeah, we've turned the corner all right, and slammed face-first into a brick wall.

I've been watching the latest spike in oil prices with great interest. See, when the prices first shot up in the spring, I read in several different articles how in the previous ten instances when there was a oil price spike, nine times a recession followed. Seems rather predictable, right?

Now we are seeing a second spike this year, with prices at all-time highs above $44 per barrel. Analysts are saying the prices could go as high as over $50 a barrel by the election.

We also have evidence that job growth is slowing or ceasing all together, consumer spending is down, and the financial markets are really languishing. Doesn't all of this just scream "recession"?

I'll go on the record right now - we will have a recession during the next 12 months. If Bush is still king, he'll tell us we've turned the corner and everything is "superb." If Kerry somehow manages to become President, well, he'll have a disaster on his hands.

Blog troubles

It has been brought to my attention that the blog is not working for everybody - either folks can't post or can't bring it up at all. I'm working on it. My first guess is that those using Internet Explorer can blame that browser as it is a royal pain in the rear.

Deja Vu

NPR had a story this morning about some of the Johnson tapes and Vietnam. On the tape, Johnson is talking with SOD McNamara about getting a resolution from Congress for authority to respond to supposed attacks to US ships in the Gulk of Tonkin. Johnson complained about Hubert Humphrey giving out too much information in TV interviews about military operations. Basically, Humphrey said that US ships were patrolling areas in the Gulf that the Administration had previously stated they were not. Johnson wanted the perception to be given that the US was in no way the aggressor.

As we know, there was some sort of incident in the Gulf, in which our government alleged that the Vietnamese launched an unprovoked attacked on our ships. According to the NPR story, Johnson pressured the military to provide him with solid evidence about what had taken place, so as to be able to pressure the Congress to give him the "blank-check" authorization he wanted to conduct military operations agains the Viet Cong. Although the military at the time had conflicting reports about precisely had happened in the Gulf, they ultimately caved in to Johnson's demands and provided intelligence that made a convicing case that Vietnam had initiated hostilities.

The story goes on to discuss the congressional vote for the resolution giving Johnson a free hand in Vietnam. By an 88-2 vote, they gave the president, in the words of Bob McNamara, a "blank-check." The story then reflects on how several Senators later confessed that, had they known that the Gulf incident was not what they had been led to believe, they would not have voted for the resolution in the first place.

Sound familiar?

Ohi-don't think so...

If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times. Ohio is the new Florida in this presidential election. I don't think so. I expect Bush to win Ohio, but it won't matter because he'll lose New Hampshire, Missouri and Florida. Do the electoral math, it spells doom for W.

What I don't understand is, in the discussion of Red states and Blue states and what either candidate would have to do to win in the battleground states, why don't I hear much about Bush's slide in some of the Red states. I hear a lot about swing voters, can Kerry hold on to Minnesota and Oregon (barely Gore states in 2000), or can Kerry win without carrying any southern states.

I was watching Hardball tonight and they actually did, for the first time I'm aware, talk about a state typically considered solidly Republican - Colorado. Polls show Bush is only slightly ahead there. Same is true of Virginia. The latest Zogby poll actually has Kerry ahead in West Virginia. These are all states Bush won in 2000.

Funny how money has kind of disappeared as an issue in this campaign. Kerry's amazing fund raising has done a lot to mitigate the Bush advantage, but I also think the fact that Bush has had to spend so much already just to stay slightly behind has really hurt him. True, he can spend freely all August long while Kerry's got to adhere to public funding limits, but Bush is still going to need every dime not to lose any of the close states he won last time.

Furthermore, if Bush is faced with having to spend cash in Colorado, Virginia and West Virginia just to make sure he doesn't lose those states, is that not a reason for the GOP to be really concerned?

Oliver Twist

I'm in a fantasy baseball league (also know as roto or CDM) where you can pick any players for your team as long as your roster fits under the salary cap. You also have a limited number of roster moves. Well, I've been rolling lately and moved into 3rd place (out of 25), I had been sixth.

One reason is a couple weeks ago I picked up Pirates' pitcher Oliver Perez, a young flamethrower they acquired in the Brian Giles deal. He's cheap, and he strikes out a ton of hitters. I think in his last 40 innings, he's mowed down 60, which is Randy Johnson territory.

Well, looking at my league today, three of the four other teams in the top five picked up Ollie this week. I guess they want to quash one of my advantages.

It's nice to see my competitors getting nervous....it's what CDM is all about.

Not so Swift

This is my first post, and I'm going to make it count.

I've heard reports on NPR and Air America Radio today about Vietnam-era swift boat veterans who "served" with John Kerry. Basically, they claim in this ad they've put out, under the name "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" that John Kerry has lied about his service and betrayed his comrades.

Now we all know that both political parties have stooped pretty low in the past when it comes to negative ads. We also know that Karl Rove is pretty much the current master of attack politics - remember the garbage in South Carolina during the republican primary where Bush campaign surrogates phoned folks in the Palmetto state and claimed John McCain fathered a black baby? Classic, eh?

This ad by SVT, however, may be the lowest of the low. First problem, no facts, none, zip. Read it.

Second problem, none of these clowns actually served with Kerry - that is none of them were on the same boat with him when it was getting made into swiss cheese by vietcong guns. Not shipmates, didn't share a bunk, none of that. Under their criteria, my uncle served with Kerry even though he was in the army, not the navy. Here's a list of the guys who actually did serve with Kerry and what they say about him, courtesy of the blog 'Daily Kos'.

Third, Louis Leston, who claims to have treated Kerry's injury for his first purple heart, says Kerry is lying about how he got it. What he doesn't say is that, according to Navy rules at the time, Kerry deserved his purple heart. Here is Salon's Doug Brinkley on the issue. I heard on the Al Franken Show today that one of the people now criticising Kerry, Grant Hibbard, is on the record praising Kerry when he sustained the injury. Here's the offical award letter to Kerry for the PH, so I guess my question is this, is the US Navy lying too?

Kudos to Senator John McCain for condemning these jerks and doing the right thing.

Like I said, this is my first post, and I have about a million things to say about this campaign so I'll save them for future posts.

Thanks for reading.