Salon: Viva National Guard! (Military families support *)

[kskiska]

You'd think National Guard members and their families might have some doubts about Bush's credibility. But when the president spoke in Las Vegas, 4,000 of them roared approval.

By Tim Grieve

LAS VEGAS -- The Elvis impersonator had just left the building -- and George W. Bush and Karl Rove had not yet arrived -- when a speaker at the National Guard Association's annual convention called for a moment of silence to honor 99 members of the National Guard who were killed in active duty over the course of the last year.

Sherwood Baker was one of them.

A 30-year-old man with a wife and a young son, Baker was killed in an explosion in Baghdad in April 2004. At the time of his death, he was providing security for the Iraq Survey Group, an outfit assigned to find the weapons of mass destruction that provided the casus belli for Bush's war. "I don't want to get into clichés about whether my brother died in vain," says Baker's younger brother, Dante Zappala. "But I hear people say that he died making us safer, and I honestly do not believe that is true."

Zappala was in Las Vegas Tuesday for a press conference with an antiwar group called Military Families Speak Out. If Zappala had made his way out of the Las Vegas Hilton where the press conference was held and into the convention center next door, if he had weaved through the Secret Service and the celebrity impersonators – Dolly Parton and the Temptations, among them -- he might have heard the president speak. He would have seen Bush stand stiffly while the band played "Hail to the Chief," he would have seen Bush wave sharply when the music ended, and then he would have heard Bush say that U.S. troops in Iraq are "defeating the terrorists where they live, and that makes us safer." And when Bush was done speaking, Zappala would have seen a few thousand Guard members cheer wildly for their commander in chief.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/15/vegas/index.html

[saigon68]

1. WAIT UNTIL THEY ARE SITTING AT HOME WITH NO $ TO SEND THEIR KID TO SCHOOL

Recovering from wounds or PTSD and getting the usual runaround from the VA

Their wife needing to work overtime for $7.00 an hour to pay for their kids dentist.

They won't be cheering then

MORANS

[xray s]

2. I doubt many in that hall were active duty NG

They are all fighting Bush's Iraq war.

[JSJ]

3. fascists of a feather flock together- self-interest rules post mod mil nt

[Bridget Burke]

4. The Guardsmen (& women) in Iraq couldn't make it to Vegas.

And how many returned from Iraq could afford National Guard Association dues & the expenses of a trip? Retired Guard members can join; how many attending were retirees--in no danger of being sent overseas?

The National Guard Association also sells insurance & offers special corporate memberships (military-industrial complex). How special.

www.ngaus.org/whatisngaus/whatisngaus.asp