WS: Marching to November [Bombshell!!!]

[grytpype]

The Weekly Standard finally grows a pair and tells the truth about Bush!

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/493kldgc.asp?pg=1

Marching to November
From the August 30, 2004 issue: The politics of chest-thumping.
by Andrew Ferguson
08/30/2004, Volume 009, Issue 47

FOR THE PAST couple weeks Republican activists have bent themselves to the task of proving that John Kerry, who was awarded five medals during four months of service in the Vietnam war, isn't a war hero, and the marvelous intensity of their exertions started me thinking.

<good stuff on the Swift Liars, no one is buying that shit>

...

Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further--and here we'll let slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.

Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn't really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry's record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam in the first place.

Needless to say, the proposition will be a hard sell in those dim and tiny reaches of the electorate where voters have yet to make up their minds. Indeed, it's far more likely that moderates and fence-sitters will be disgusted by the lengths to which partisans will go to discredit a rival. But this anti-Kerry campaign is not designed to win undecided votes. It's designed to reassure uneasy minds.

[dweller]

1. GWH Bush military escapade

http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm

chapter 6.

dp

[gumby]

2. The PNAC crowd has not grown anything

This is how extremist world dominators always act.

When Dub executed their wild fantasies of world domination and, D'OH, it didn't turn out according to their preconceived delusions, they are doing what they always do ----- Blame That Other Guy.

"They" are NEVER satisfied. "They" will NEVER take "personal responsibility." Instead, they are blaming their vessel. HA!

If they are dissin' the Dub, it's only because they see him as failing the Reich and they want a replacement.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. Mr. Ferguson just doesn't get it

EDITED for typing and grammar

He's right about Bush and the gang shooting themselves in the foot trying to make a bona fide and well-documented war hero out to be something else for crass political gain. However, this paragraph stands out:

On the kindest interpretation, the "war wimps" charge is based on a non sequitur, linking two things that have nothing to do with each other (military service as a young man, on the one hand, and sound judgment in geopolitical affairs, on the other). On a not-so-kind interpretation, it entails the repudiation of a crucial democratic principle: civilian control of the military. After all, if only men with military experience are justified in ordering other military men into combat, then national security has been ceded to an unsupervised warrior class--something that Democrats used to warn us against. And besides, by this definition, several of the country's wartime presidents, including Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, were war wimps.

It's true enough that military service as a young man doesn't necessarily endow one with sound judgment in later years, nor does avoiding military service as a young man preclude later sound judgment. For now, we'll lay aside the fact that the neoconservatives typically avoided military service while advocating for the Vietnam War in campus organizations while in college and that, coincidently, they demonstrated as older men no sound judgment invading Iraq on pretexts they knew were false.

Mr. Ferguson doesn't understand what their avoidance of military service while pushing an unpopular war really says about the neoconservatives: they are universally contemptuous of democratic principles. As far as they were concerned, the war was a noble cause, but it was the duty of the lower classes to fight and die in it while they, the children of aristocratic privilege, were to study at Yale so that they might lead America as they were clearly born to do. As they advocated one boneheaded war in which they felt they had no obligation to fight, they led us into another with a pack of lies that they feel their own children have no obligation to fight.

We can leave Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt out of this argument. There was no draft when they were young men; moreover, the Spanish-American War lasted on three and half months when Wilson was over forty and Roosevelt was in his mid-teens. By the time the US entered World War I, Wilson was President and Roosevelt was over thirty. So much for the wars of their youth.

And then we can bring Clinton's draft dodging into the matter. Personally, I voted for Clinton twice and have no objection to characterizing his activity during the Vietnam War as draft dodging. However, what puts a draft dodger like Clinton above draft dodgers like Bush, Cheney and Dan Quayle is simply that Clinton dodged the draft saying that no American should have to fight and die in Vietnam, while the others dodged the draft saying that other Americans should have to fight and die in Vietnam because they were too good to risk trheir lives for their country.

That leaves Mr. Kerry, who made going to Vietnam a personal choice in spite of his own misgivings about the war. One should be surprised that the Bushies, instead of vainly attempting to deny his valor, aren't charging that he flip-flopped. Yet Kerry as a young man demonstrated the nuanced thought that will make him a superior leader to the simple-minded Bush when he weighed the conflicting aurguments in his own mind and elected to go to Vietnam and protest the war upon returning home.

What the neoconservatives really fear about men like Kerry is their moral authority. Kerry may be wrong about some things and right about others, but when he asks young people to fight and die for their country, as we hope he will not do, we will know for certain that he is not asking them to do something he was not willing to do himself or, in spite of his own wealth and privilege, something he thought was beneath him.

[Sugarbleus]

4. Good post...especially love last paragraph...

What the neoconservatives really fear about men like Kerry is their moral authority. They may be wrong about some things and right about others, but when he asks young people to fight and die for their country, as we hope he will not do, we will know for certain that he is not asking them to do something he was not willing to do himself or, in spite of his own wealth and privilege, something he thought was beneath him.

:thumbsup:

[gumby]

5. Wonderful post.

.

[coda]

6. Good post

That was such a good rebuttal to that one paragraph...you now need to add some more and turn it into a column. :thumbsup:

[MISSDem]

11. And many feel that Clinton was right. One of my brothers

who was in Viet Nam(I have two who were) said that the current war makes more sense than the war in Viet Nam did. At least there is the oil, he says. And he also says that what Kerry said (after his tour in the war when he was speaking against it) is true. Many vets feel that way but they just don't talk about it.

[Skittles]

7. grows a pair?

are you insinuating that male body parts are required for courage? :(

[NV1962]

8. Since when are boobs exclusively male? (n/t)

[Skittles]

9. imagine if the phrase really was "grow a pair of boobs"

would that be or not be sexist?

[Larkspur]

10. There are Democrats who feel the same way about Kerry/Edwards

as the aforementioned Republicans feel about Bush/Cheney. A lot of us will be holding our noses and voting for K/E because the alternative is a disaster well underway.

we'll let slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing.

[Vincardog]

12. Republican support for GW CUSTER

How many republicans really support the policies of the NeoCon's?
I think the republican party has been hijacked by a small militant splinter group. These right wing fanatic are attempting to do great harm to our country and our constitution. We need to reach out to the true conservatives and help them rid their party of the malignant growth that NeoCons and their PNAC represent. We need to let the true republicans know that if they can not bring themselves to vote for a Democrat they can write in Dudley Doolittle or easier still vote with their asses and stay home election day. Oh think of the possible outcomes. Imagine the true die hard conservatives voting for every republican but Bush. Can you imagine the shrub's face? He get's less votes than the republican dog catcher? Live the dream.