Reply #109: The Bush ad was clearly misleading, but it is also a fact that when...

[IndianaGreen]

you join the Guard, you are on active duty when you undergo your initial training. You are still a Guardsman, but an activated one.

If we are going to resurrect all of the ghosts of Vietnam, which I think has been a horrible mistake all along by everyone, one must remember that it applies to both parties equally. Children of the elites, Republican and Democrat, were always able to get into champagne units as in the case of Dan Quayle. How many children of the leaders of Congress went into the military during a criminal war, such as Vietnam? The fact that Kerry and Gore served was the exception, not the rule!

How many went into seminary? How many were lucky enough to afford college and get student deferments every year they attended school? Oliver Stone could have done the same thing Phil Gramm did, but he volunteered.

Should we demand that people serve today in Iraq? No, never! And if it is wrong to expect and demand that people go to war in Iraq, it is also wrong for us to expect and demand that people should have gone to Vietnam, a war that is just as criminal as Iraq, but was far bloodier for us and for the Vietnamese.

Being antiwar means precisely that, being against the machine of war, and that includes the draft!

Let us remember that Vietnam started as a Democratic war, and our involvement began with a Democratic President, Harry Truman. Opposing a criminal war was noble then in Vietnam, and it is noble today in Iraq. Otherwise we fall into the trap of calling traitors those that served in the Peace Corps, or fled to Canada, because they did not want innocent blood on their hands.

As to embellishing a military record, as the Bush ad appears to be, it cuts both ways for even Iowa Senator Tom Harkin embellished his own record when he campaigned:

Only last week, voters were treated to the spectacle of Kerry point man and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin fulminating about the Swift Vets' ads. Yet Harkin is himself an exposed fabulist, having once claimed to have jousted in his F-4 Phantom with North Vietnamese MiGs.

The truth? He never saw combat, spent his war ferrying military planes from Japan to the Philippines for routine servicing, and apologized for his fictions when subsequently exposed by fellow Senator Barry Goldwater.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5797120/