Kerry supporters policing net for Bushie lies/smears:
Just found this?
Who's Patriotic?
A friend of mine just sent me a link to a web site that I suspect is only the beginning of a massive effort to smear John Kerry, now that he is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president. Smears are to be expected. It was the issue they chose to smear on that surprised me.
The site, purportedly by veterans, depicts Kerry as "the radical, hippie-like leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the early 1970s." It used a doctored photo that makes it appear that Kerry spoke in front of a large North Vietnamese flag. It says he "used a loophole in Navy regulations to leave Vietnam and his crew [he was a naval officer on a river patrol boat] before completing his tour of duty."
Kerry's "betrayal of American prisoners of war, his blatant disrespect for the families of our missing in action, Vietnam veterans, the military, his support for communist Vietnam and his waffling over the issue of use of force in Iraq proves he is a self-promoting chameleon senator who cannot be relied on to protect the best interests of the United States," the web site goes on.
Some of this is a rather desperate distortion of the truth. The "loophole" that Kerry used, for instance, was a regulation that said any man who was wounded in combat three times could go home. Kerry got his third Purple Heart (to go with a Silver Star) and cashed in that ticket.
I suppose some of the venom in this attack stems from the still unbridged chasm that opened in the 1960s between those who supported the war in Vietnam and those who opposed it, those who grew their hair long and those who cut it short. Kerry, by joining the anti-war opposition after coming home, may arouse special bitterness because he is perceived to have switched sides.
I have to wonder about the logic of this thinking, though. What do the people who hate Kerry think would have been the patriotic thing for him to do? To go to Vietnam, become convinced that the war was futile and misguided, and then come home and be silent? To say nothing while the government continued to draft men and send them to that war?
But what really puzzles me is how any reasonable man could oppose Kerry on the grounds of what he did during Vietnam and then put forward George W. Bush as a better alternative. Bush and Kerry finished college at about the same time. Both faced Vietnam. Kerry chose to serve in combat and then dissent.
Bush chose to use the influence of one of his daddy's friends to get himself a safe billet in the Air National Guard. With his butt thereby protected from hostile fire, he chose to blow off most of the last two years of his training obligation. Now he surrounds himself with people like Dick Cheney who used deferments to keep themselves out of Vietnam. Of course, whenever they make a speech, or use an aircraft carrier as a prop in a photo op, they make certain to surround themselves with American flags and pay lip service to military values.
I guess that's enough to to persuade a lot of people. But in my opinion, the Bush-Cheney style of patriotism is to patriotism as TV wrestling is to sport.
(Full disclosure, in case anyone cares: I got a high number in the draft lottery and was happy about it.)
1/27/04 |
