LOL---your pinheadism is reaching new heights shinu, get a clue:
A tip for the Democrats: It's not about Vietnam
DALLAS — It's as if common sense has gone AWOL from the presidential campaign.
Some media players and Democratic Party operatives are painting President Bush as nothing less than a deserter amid questions about whether he fulfilled his obligations to the Air National Guard 30 years ago.
No surprises here. Democrats and a lot of folks in the Fourth Estate who are cozy with them would like to give Bush a first-class ticket out of Washington. Besides, a lot of the people raising concerns about Bush's service record are baby boomers, whose defining experience in early adulthood was opposing the Vietnam War.
That the National Guard accusations have any traction at all has a lot to do with what Democrats have up their sleeve. Judging from primary returns, the plan seems to be to nominate John Kerry and sell him as a rare breed of Democrat: a warrior-statesman with oodles of experience in national security and foreign policy.
It's all about Vietnam. Democrats will transport us back to the late 1960s and early '70s and recount stories of Kerry's heroic stint in Southeast Asia. And there'll be no peace signs on this ride. Some of the same folks who once marched for peace are now consumed with acts of long-ago heroism during the war.
Luckily for them and the Madison Avenue ad agencies they'll be employing, parts of Kerry's adventure have been captured on film. For that, they can thank the senator who, as a young man, had the foresight to take 8 mm movies of his time on a Navy gunboat.
Out with the Man from Hope. In with our Man in Saigon.
The Kerry candidacy is the perfect tribute to self-absorbed baby boomers. Many have spent the past three decades using Vietnam as a measuring stick to assess everyone who lived through it, whether they spent those years protesting the war or fighting in it.
Just don't expect much of this to resonate with my generation of Xers, or the generation that follows it — those now in their teens and 20s.
We have had different experiences, and we've emerged with a different measuring stick. For my part, the decisions made by a George W. Bush as a young man — or, for that matter, by Bill Clinton or John Kerry — are of little consequence.
If the pitch is national security, all that matters is how they responded to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Before 9-11, the baby-boomer obsession with Vietnam may have been tolerable. Now it just seems trivial. My generation and the one that follows don't need John Kerry's home movies.
The measuring stick of Vietnam was OK for a generation that didn't live through Pearl Harbor, didn't win World War II, and didn't defeat fascism on two continents. But it doesn't do much good for those who watched as their country was brutally attacked, thousands of its people slaughtered on their own soil.
I'm sick of Vietnam being the centerpiece of presidential campaigns. The only thing that candidates in both parties should be obsessed with at this point is ensuring that Americans never again feel what they did on the terrible September morning.
And is Kerry up to the task? It is hard to tell with the flip-flops. Kerry opposed the first Gulf War but voted to authorize the second. Then he criticized the second war. Later he cheered the capture of Saddam. Now, amid questions over intelligence, he's back to criticizing.
All the while, Team Kerry has pushed the machismo. The candidate rides motorcycles, talks up hunting and poses with fellow vets who — he assures us — "still know how to fight for (their) country."
It's a good line. But a tad dated. What we need is someone who knows how to defend our country, and who recognizes that the first line of defense is here at home.
President Bush understands this. Here the media are going nuts over Bush having called himself a "war president" — presumably because they think he failed the test of Vietnam. He is a war president, not because he fought in a war but because we are now a nation at war.
If Kerry thinks he can do better, he should put away his scrapbook and start telling Americans what he plans to do to spare future generations the anguish and the cost of war.
seattletimes.nwsource.com
Ruben Navarrette Jr. / Syndicated columnist |
