Theres also a big difference between 'killed' and 'killed or wounded'. Normally, wounded rates run many times higher than killed rates.
You're right. My apologies.
Still, it remains the case that Kerry, after originally getting a relatively safe assignment, went from having one of the safest assignments in the conflict to one of the most dangerous, exhibited great courage and earned medals for distinguished service.
Clinton, and many of the top players in the Bush Administration and their fans, tweaked the system to keep their behinds out of the war. He was in a category with lots and lots of Republicans. Dick Cheney is in the category. So are Ashcroft and Karl Rove. Ari Fleischer, too. Also Ken Starr, Justices Scalia and Thomas. Oh yes, and of course Rush Limbaugh. Google Chicken Hawks, there'll be a long list.
Clinton's particular combination of attitudes was, overall, ignominious, and the only characterization I've ever given of him on SI is as a "scumbag rapist." But an ethicist might conceivably postulate that perhaps it's just slightly less ignominious to attempt to evade serving in a war of which you disapprove than one which you're waving the flag for. There's something special about a chicken hawk.
Possibly some of those people including Bush were against the Vietnam War, as Clinton was and Kerry ended up being. That would make them not chicken hawks.
I'm quite willing to grant Lt. Kerry war-hero status. But it's no substitute for having a foreign-policy, and Candidate Kerry is trying to use it as one.
You think if Bush were a war hero, he (and most of the people on this thread) wouldn't be mentioning it? ho ho.
It wouldn't take much to conceive a better approach to foreign affairs than Bush and his puppet masters have presented us with. It's ad hoc. They're improvising! He's launching grand imperial projects without having the money to pay for them. Yoo hoo, we're a debtor nation and getting more and more in debt every day! That war is getting a lot of people killed (and some of them we're not even keeping a count of) and the post war planning was a joke. A war has been foisted on the American people on the basis of nonexistent WMD, and I notice that nobody in the intelligence community has been punished. My next door neighbor could come up with a better foreign policy than Bush's! What we have now is a wet dream of foreign policy, an assumption that we can control everything in the world-- and oh yes, space too-- plant democracy everywhere, and find the money... someplace... to pay for it. He cut funding to the VA, for chrissake! Take a look at Afghanistan now! We don't have the money we promised them and look what's happening there. Foreign policy my a**. No nation building!/Yes, nation building! Bush's foreign policy is a series of lurches. And he's so strangely sanguine! The man is post modern!
Everybody feel free to say how great and brilliant GWB and his "foreign policy" are. I'm outta here for a while. |
