Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (45270)	10/25/2005 4:03:03 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362495

What Kerry would have done is pure speculation. What Kerry did do is on the record. He voted to enable war. Do you see his name here? Message 21822613 Uh, uh; spin til yer dizzy, he voted for war. Shudda listened to Byrd. He voted for war; let's hope he shares Byrd's regret some day. Iraq Debate: "This is Another Gulf of Tonkin" by Jeff Elliott A remarkable moment in Congress Whatever happens (or doesn't happen) in a U.S. conflict with Iraq, the historic moment came on the Senate floor on October 4, 2002. On that day, three senior members of the U.S. Senate stood in that chamber and debated what President Bush has recently insisted is the most pressing issue before the nation. The colloquy that unfolded on that Friday afternoon was remarkable -- although the event was scarcely noticed at all by the press. Pressing the White House case for war was Senator John Warner (R- Virginia). On the other side was Sen. Robert Byrd (D- West Virginia) and Ted Kennedy (D- Massachusetts). If America should indeed make its first-ever preemptive attack on another nation, Warner laid out the best case for it. But it was the elderly Byrd, his palsied hands seemingly barely in control, who scored points with a chilling comparison: Let's go back to the war in Vietnam. I was here. I was one of the Senators who voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Yes, I voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I am sorry for that. I am guilty of doing that. I should have been one of the two, or at least I should have made it three, Senators who voted against that Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But I am not wanting to commit that sin twice, and that is exactly what we are doing here. This is another Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It was the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson carte blanche to wage war in Vietnam. The famed "incident" led to an immediate escalation in the war -- a conflict that left millions dead, including about 60 thousand U.S. soldiers. As Norman Solomon noted in a 1998 column, that incident was a cynical PR operation by the White House. Murrey Marder, the reporter who wrote much of the Washington Post's coverage of August 1964, told Solomon that the news coverage of events in the Tonkin Gulf "was all driven by the White House. It was an operation -- a deliberate manipulation of public opinion. ... None of us knew, of course, that there had been drafted, months before, a resolution to justify American direct entry into the war, which became the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution." Senator Byrd does not choose his words lightly. Regarded as the greatest historian in Congress, he knows full well how they were manipulated by Johnson, and he thus makes a damning accusation against the sitting president.