Wow! The new slur against the anti-war faction on DU is "peace purists"

[Savannahmann]

138. Is it me, or have more and more Democrats started moving to the right of the Tea Party?

President Obama for one. As a Community Organizer he certainly saw the travesty that is justice for the poor who can't hope to afford the finest legal council. Yet he has issued about sixteen pardons and commutations during his Presidency. That is less forgiving than anyone who held the office except William Harrison who died shortly after taking the office and didn't have a chance to pardon anyone.

The why is obvious, he is terrified of being labeled Soft on Crime like Dukakis was.

The same is true of the idea of military action. So many of us run to the cameras frothing at the mouths shouting bomb them that I can't tell the difference between our side, and the Republicans. Here on DU, the Hawks pound at their keyboards giving justifications that are as equally lame as the ones given by the Neo-Cons during the Iraq War Debate.

All I want to know is what happened to my Democratic Party? What happened to the Party that told President Ford that we would not go back into Viet Nam even though the North Vietnamese had broken the peace treaty?

On 14 January 1975, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger testifies to Congress that the U.S. is not living up to its promise to South Vietnam's President Thieu that we would defend the South if the North attacked.

One week later, after consulting with Congress, President Ford said that there was no way we were going back into Viet-Nam.

A Democratic Congress stopped the war from our point of view, and let the Vietnamese settle their own problems. An outcome we had stalled for over ten years with so many young lives wasted on both sides.

If we had these Democrats in the Congress, not only would we have gone back in, we would have marched north until we occupied the entire nation of Viet-Nam.

What happened to that Democratic Party? What happened to the ones who realized the futility of trying to pick a winner in a civil war? Have we all forgotten the problems associated with an illegal war?

I swore months ago after getting into an argument with a DU user about Syria that I would not post about that topic. To this day, I have not violated that promise. But this is not a post about Syria, this is a question about our party and our values. We stopped standing on principle, and we stopped standing up for core beliefs. Now, we're rushing to the right so fast that my hair is being snatched out of my head by the buffeting wind.

So I'm not talking about Syria, all I want to know is what happened to my Democratic Party?