Kerry in Vietnam

[cj001f]

A note: I am not a Republican. I have almost the same level of disdain for George W Bush, though not quite as much. I just really hate politicians in general.

Good, because half of your criticisms of Kerry carry over to W (energy independance, reshuffling a beauracracy to increase security, economic rhetoric,....)

[JoshK]

I am just wondering what specifically that you are seeing about Kerry that bothers you so?

 

jjd blaterhing...

 

My query was in response to criticisms of kerry's war record, not his promised changes.

[jjd]

jjd blaterhing...

My query was in response to criticisms of kerry's war record, not his promised changes.

 

Great...now go fuck yourself.

[JoshK]

jjd blaterhing...

My query was in response to criticisms of kerry's war record, not his promised changes.

 

Great...now go fuck yourself.

 

A witty response, indeed, from the guy who can't track what a thread is about.

[gotterdamerung]

Hey Alpinfox Glad to see you're keeping it real.

 

The problem is that in this culture they really respect a strong arm. It is the kind of culture that would fawn over Arnold Schwarzenegger and laugh at Frederick Nicole. Subtleties are often overlooked (with the exception of deceptive intrigue) and overt shows of force are recognized. Furthermore, My answer spawns from conversations with Iraqi's indigenous to Iraq. Not effete intellectuals speculating from 10,000 miles away connected to the area only via proxy new sources.

 

To restore order there has to be a baseline. Negotiating with people who's sole aim is to derail a society based on sound principals is in effect suicide. In order for elections to take place there must be a strong/stable interim government. We stand in place to put that before them. Then let them take it where it will go with free and open elections. Not car bombings and the murder of every element whatever faction disagrees with.

[jjd]

A witty response, indeed, from the guy who can't track what a thread is about.

 

Thread drift...what's that? Would it make you feel any better if I created a new thread, instead of refocusing the debate in this thread on more relevant issues?

 

My witty response would not have been necessary were it not for your wholesale dismissal of my post.

[Dan_Larson]

It is impossible for me to decide who is the most deceiving. 3 purple hearts in 4 months sounds weird to me . I was under the impression that during vietnam you were sent home after two hits.Maybe the last couple were for the clap contacted from a North Vietnamese hooker?

[Dan_Larson]

It is impossible for me to decide who is the most deceiving. 3 purple hearts in 4 months sounds weird to me . I was under the impression that during vietnam you were sent home after two hits.Maybe the last couple were for the clap contacted from a North Vietnamese hooker?

[JayB]

One of the principal satisfactions that I will derive from a Kerry victory, if it occurs, is watching the current administration's critics come to the realization that most of the rifts between the US and that great vaporosity known as "The International Community" are the result of concrete differences in national interests and objectives - none of which will disappear when there's a new man at the head of the executive branch. This is especially true with regards to the Middle East and the conflict between Islam and the West.

[Bug]

I agree with your statement that poloticians suck. But the rest of the stuff about not coming up with specifics is lame. If every candidate had to come up with specifics we would have an issue oriented campaign. The media will not stand for that. Nor would the public. It would be boring. All poloticians make broad statements about what they are going to do. Reagan was the master at this (or his writers anyway) second only to Goebels (Hitler's propaganda minister (only the mastery of propaganda is being compared here)). Not voting for Kerry because of lacking specifics is the same as not voting for a politician because he is one. Or maybe your post just lacks specifics......

[TBay]

 

...a book the Kerry camapign believes is the "the dirtiest of all dirty tricks ever played on a candidate for the presidency."

 

But yet, the timing of F9/11 isnt a dirty trick, especially when the controversial film-maker sat front-n-center in the 'Presidential Box' next to Jimmy Carter during the DNC first night.

 

hhhhmmmmmm!

[b-rock]

Here ya go TBay, RobBob, from Salon. Who's opinion do you trust, those who served with Kerry or those who barely knew him? I'll say it again, 'dig' and 'google' all you want, IMO it's politics as usual...

 

Different decade, same dirty tricks

 

 

 

With a little bit of help from the Drudge Report, and an ad buy that got their nasty claims in the newspapers, the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are getting more than their share of publicity today. And they'll likely get even more in some quarters (like, say, Fox News) as the group's leader, Nixon-anointed Kerry detractor Houston attorney John O'Neill, publishes his book "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," coming soon from the conservative publishing house Regnery Publishing.

 

Hopefully the media will do their job in exposing O'Neill's longtime ties to the GOP and the fact that, as they admit, none of the men who appear in the ads that will run in some markets in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin today, actually served on Kerry's boat. So how did Larry Thurlow, a vet who appears in the Kerry-bashing ad know, as he claims, "When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry?" Does he know this better than Jim Rassman, who when the chips were down, counted on Kerry to save his life? Or how about James Wasser, a radar man on one of Kerry's swift boats, who says that if Kerry called his band of brothers for one last mission and said they were going to hell, "he'd have a full crew."

 

The facts of Kerry's service don't really matter to O'Neill, anyway. Attacking Kerry has been O'Neill's role since Nixon tapped him for the job in 1971, as Joe Conason reported in Salon in May, and his latest anti-Kerry effort is now funded and organized by Republicans:

 

"Behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are veteran corporate media consultant and Texas Republican activist Merrie Spaeth, who is listed as the group's media contact; eternal Kerry antagonist and Houston attorney John E. O'Neill, law partner of Spaeth's late husband, Tex Lezar; and retired Rear Adm. Roy Hoffman, a cigar-chomping former Vietnam commander once described as 'the classic body-count guy' who 'wanted hooches destroyed and people killed.'"

 

"Spaeth told Salon that O'Neill first approached her last winter to discuss his 'concerns about Sen. Kerry.' O'Neill has been assailing Kerry since 1971, when the former Navy officer was selected for the role by Charles Colson, Richard Nixon's dirty-tricks aide."

 

Media Matters has more on O'Neill's GOP ties, dating back to Nixon:

 

"During the CNN interview [with O'Neill], [Wolf] Blitzer reported that former President Richard Nixon had urged O'Neill to publicly counter Kerry on The Dick Cavett Show, but there is more to the story. O'Neill was a creation of the Nixon administration, as Joe Klein detailed in the January 5 issue of The New Yorker. Former Nixon special counsel Chuck Colson told Klein that Kerry was an 'articulate' and 'credible leader' of those veterans calling for an end to the Vietnam War and therefore 'an immediate target of the Nixon Administration.' As such, the Nixon administration found it necessary to 'create a counterfoil' to Kerry. Colson recounted, 'We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could do to boost his group.' Articles from the April 21 Houston Chronicle and the June 17, 2003, Boston Globe confirm close ties between O'Neill and the Nixon administration."

 

"Beyond his role in the Nixon administration's strategy to undermine Kerry in the 1970s, O'Neill is also connected to Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist (a Nixon appointee) and to former President George H.W. Bush, according to Houston Chronicle articles from March 31 and April 21. In the late 1970s, O'Neill clerked for Rehnquist; in 1990, according to an October 7, 1991, report by Texas Lawyer, the former President Bush considered O'Neill for a federal judgeship vacancy."

[b-rock]

And what does McCain, a respectible politician think about this new slanderous ad campain? Dishonest and dishonorable. Sounds about right to me.

 

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=694&ncid=703&e=3&u=/ap/20040805/ap_on_el_pr/kerry_mccain

[willstrickland]

But the rest of the stuff about not coming up with specifics is lame. If every candidate had to come up with specifics we would have an issue oriented campaign. The media will not stand for that.

 

I think that your assertion that the MEDIA would not stand for it is right on base. Check this out...I was perusing the GovExec.com site for some info, and came across this story with several links about Kerry/Edwards specifics on reducing middle mgmt within govt, freezing the travel budget etc (BTW, I think alot of their proposals are poorly thought out, and are "pie in the sky" bullshit, and will be a major hinderance to doing my job but I do like the idea of reducing the middle mgmt):

 

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0804/080404ts1.htm

 

An excerpt:

 

"In a plan released on Kerry's Web site, the Democratic nominee pledged to "thin out the top ranks of government by restoring the governmentwide target of no more than one supervisor per 15 subordinates." That target was set under the Clinton administration's "reinventing government" initiative.

 

Light's study revealed that as of this year, there are 64 different executive support titles in use at agencies. Six years ago, there were 51; in 1992, there were 33. A survey completed in 1960 found just 17.

 

In his government reform plan, Kerry also pledged to:

 

* Reduce the number of contract workers employed at agencies by 100,000. Kerry unveiled the contractor cut proposal in a speech at Georgetown University earlier this year.

 

* Freeze the federal travel budget - also a proposal introduced at the Georgetown speech. Kerry's plan notes that federal travel expenses "continue to grow more quickly than inflation."

 

* Implement Government Accountability Office recommendations to reduce the government's fleet of 387,000 vehicles, and improve management of the fleet.

 

* Eliminate the Office of Thrift Supervision, which was created in the late 1980s to deal with the savings and loan crisis.

 

* Consolidate many of the 70 different federal statistical agencies into one new entity called Statistics USA.

 

 

* Merge the Commerce Department's Telecommunications Administration and National Telecommunications and Information Administration into a single agency.

 

Many of Kerry and Edwards' proposals originate in a February paper by Paul Weinstein Jr., a senior fellow with the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. Weinstein has been involved in efforts to set up a group of Kerry advisers on government reform initiatives.

 

This article appeared yesterday. There are plenty of specifics out there for Bush and Kerry, but our short attention span, sound-byte happy, drama queen, TV remote clicking society isn't interested.

[b-rock]

Hey RobBob, I'd be interested in your thoughts on this new 'Swift Boats...' organization. Still think these are valid criticisms?

[Jim]

Seems pretty quite out there.

[RobBob]

quite.

 

Look, you guys aren't going to be convinced if you've already made your minds up. But there are any numbers of individual veterans' or small groups of vets' websites that catalog Kerry stuff. If 99% of them are anti-Kerry, think about the meaning of that before you dismiss it. Where are the pro-Kerry veterans' sites? Almost nonexistent, compared to a slew of ones with anti-Kerry into on them. You can go on and on reading them, many pre-dating Kerry's emergence as presidential nominee.

 

Here's a typical one http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=Articles

 

Now I ask you, where are the vet sites---the ones who were there in Vietnam--- that go on for pages about how Kerry's a hero? They don't exist.

[b-rock]

So you're counting web sites now? 99 to 1 eh?

 

Most of those criticisms you'll find by veteran organizations have to do with Kerry's outspokenness after the war, not with his service there... Pretty important difference.

 

I guess that ad just really got to me. New lows every day!

[rbw1966]

Where are the sites lauding Bush's war record? I bet that 99-to-1 figure works both ways.

 

What exactly are you trying to convince people about?

[Jim]

While you can go one way or the other, depending on what you thought of Vietnam, on Kerry's position on the war after he served, he at least served.

 

So the guy gets shot up, those who actually served with him say he did well and saved a buddy's life. He got the purple heart.

 

On the other side of the aisle is Bushie, who looks like he dodged and kinda joined the reserves, didn't show up most of the time, and ran a political campaign on the other side of the country while supposedly "serving his country". Yea, let's count websites. That's a logical construct.

[cracked]

Where are the sites lauding Bush's war record? I bet that 99-to-1 figure works both ways.

Gee, I musta missed that Bush is basing his entire campaign on his war record!

 

What is it exactly that would make Kerry a good president? Oh, yeah, he's not Bush.

[rbw1966]

Gee, I musta missed that Kerry is basing his entire campaign on his war record!

[Jim]

Latest on slimeball GOP ad:

 

The Kerry campaign fired back by saying none of the people quoted and/or interviewed in the ad ever served with Kerry when he was in charge of what is termed a 'swift boat' along the Mekong Delta in 1969.

 

"I deplore this kind of politics," McCain told AP.

 

"I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is, none of these individuals served on the boat (Kerry) commanded. Many of his crew have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam."

[cj001f]

Gee, I musta missed that Bush is basing his entire campaign on his war record!

 

What is it exactly that would make Kerry a good president? Oh, yeah, he's not Bush.

 

Have you ever been to Kerry's campaign website? There isn't that much on his war service. Don't mistake media coverage for the substance of the campaign.

[JoshK]

OK, call me crazy, but I am willing to trust the men who SERVED ON KERRY'S BOAT over some jackass who happened to be downriver when some shit went on. It isn't the people on his boat that are critisizing him, in fact they are supporting him heavily, dem or repub. The fact that people (apparently some of you) buy into the random trash spouted by people that simply claim they were there is amazing.

 

cracked, if you dont call showing up on a carrier in a flight uniform (since he was a highly decorated fighter pilot after all ) as showing off your "war" record then I don't know what it is. Obviously the first term for a president is a 4 year reelection campaign and that was a cheap stunt if I have ever seen one.

 

Kerry doesn't even have to campaign heavily on his war record. Other people are doing it for him.