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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (1728)	2/12/2004 12:15:22 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 81568

From Guardsman... ___________________________ By Richard Cohen Columnist The Washington Post Tuesday 10 February 2004 During the Vietnam War, I was what filmmaker Michael Moore would call a "deserter." Along with President Bush and countless other young men, I joined the National Guard, did my six months of active duty (basic training, etc.) and then returned to my home unit, where I eventually dropped from sight. In the end, just like President Bush, I got an honorable discharge. But unlike President Bush, I have just told the truth about my service. He hasn't. At least I don't think so. Nothing about Bush during that period -- not his drinking, not his partying -- suggests that he was a consistently conscientious member of the Texas or Alabama Air National Guard. As it happens, there are no records to show that Bush reported for duty during the summer and fall of 1972. Nonetheless, Bush insists he was where he was supposed to be -- "Otherwise I wouldn't have been honorably discharged," Bush told Tim Russert. Please, sir, don't make me laugh. It is sort of amazing that every four or eight years, Vietnam -- that long-ago war -- rears up from seemingly nowhere and comes to figure in the national political debate. In 1988 Dan Quayle had to answer for his National Guard service. In 1992 Bill Clinton had to grapple with the question of how he avoided the Vietnam-era draft. Now George Bush, who faced this question the last time out, has to face it again. The reason is that this time he is likely to compete against a genuine war hero. John Kerry did not duck the war. But George Bush did. He did so by joining the National Guard. Bush now wants to drape the Vietnam-era Guard with the bloodied flag of today's Iraq-serving Guard -- "I wouldn't denigrate service to the Guard," Bush warned during his interview with Russert -- but the fact remained that back then the Guard was where you went if you did not want to fight. That was the case with me. I opposed the war in Vietnam and had no desire to fight it. Bush, on the other hand, says he supported the war -- as long, it seems, as someone else fought it. It hardly matters what Bush did or did not do back in 1972. He is not the man now he was then -- that by his own admission. In the same way, it did not matter that Clinton ducked the draft, because, really, just about everyone I knew at the time was doing something similar. All that really matters is how one accounts for what one did. Do you tell the truth (which Clinton did not)? Or do you do what I think Bush has been doing, which is making his National Guard service into something it was not? In his case, it was a rich kid's way around the draft. In my case, it was something similar -- although (darn!) I was not rich. I was, though, lucky enough to get into a National Guard unit in the nick of time, about a day before I was drafted. I did my basic and advanced training (combat engineer) and returned to my unit. I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky. To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed. In the end, I wound up in the Army Reserve. I was assigned to units for which I had no training -- tank repairman, for instance. In some units, we sat around with nothing to do and in one we took turns delivering antiwar lectures. The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Maybe things changed dramatically by 1972, two years after I got my discharge, but I kind of doubt it. I have no shame about my service, but I know it for what it was -- hardly the Charge of the Light Brigade. When Bush attempts to drape the flag of today's Guard over the one he was in so long ago, when he warns his critics to remember that "there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard today in Iraq," then he is doing now what he was doing then: hiding behind the ones who were really doing the fighting. It's about time he grew up. ------- truthout.org

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (1728)	2/12/2004 1:47:31 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

>>Heiress to the Heinz tomato sauce fortune, fluent in five languages, fiercely independent, often seen fidgeting and yawning during her husband's speeches, she is unscripted, passionate, unpredictable<< Therefore the majority of American voters who polls showed found Hillary Clinton's independence unflattering in a 1st Lady, will flock to voting booths in order to elect a man whose wife fits the above description?? What's wrong with this picture? ***************************************** >>Last year, his aides were frantic about the damage she was doing to his ambitions, after some of the most entertaining interviews ever given by a candidate's wife. Profiled in Elle, she volunteered information that made Democrat strategists shudder: her Botox shots and the prenuptial agreement she made Senator Kerry sign before their 1995 marriage to protect the $US500 million fortune she inherited from her late husband, Republican senator John Heinz III. She persistently referred to her late husband, who died in a plane crash in 1991, as "my husband", and refused to use the name Kerry. Then she appeared to pick an argument with Senator Kerry in front of another interviewer.>> Is the plan to provide Teresa with a muzzle during 9mos of upcoming campaign? *************************************** >>Now using the name Kerry and assiduously referring to her first husband as "late", she flies around the US in a red-and-white jet telling people her life story and why her husband would make a wonderful president. His time has come, she told the working-class audience on Monday night. "I think of him as a late, great maturing wine, just ready for sipping."<< There's a comparison American voters can identify with each evening while they sip their Merlot & munch on a Big Mac. ***************************************** >>Heinz became a Republican senator, and in 1990 introduced his wife to Senator Kerry on the steps of the US Capitol. A year later she was widowed. Long divorced, Senator Kerry was linked at the time with a series of glamorous younger women, including actresses Catherine Oxenberg and Morgan Fairchild.<< Those petite, 65y/o brunettes will win a war hero's heart every time. Morgan & Catherine never had a chance. Ahhhhh, isn't love wonderful.