The Kerry moment

There is a time and a place for such demonstrations and doing so while others are still fighting that war is a disgusting act in my opinion.

The records show that Mr. Bush was suspended from flying beginning Aug. 1, 1972 because he failed to take the exam. His last flight exam was on May 15, 1971.

Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush missed the exam because he felt there was no reason to take it. Mr. Bush, he said, had begun his training in 1968 with the Air National Guard in Texas, where he flew a fighter jet, the F-102. When he moved to Alabama in 1972 to work in the Senate campaign of a friend of his father, Mr. Bush transferred to an Alabama unit of the Guard that did not fly the same plane. Because there was no way Mr. Bush could fly planes in Alabama, Mr. Bartlett said, he did not bother to report for the medical exam.

Mr. Bartlett acknowledged that his explanation would probably not stop Mr. Bush's critics. "They're never going to be satisfied," he said. "Their intent was not the truth. Their intent was trolling for trash."

So when, in your opinion, was "the time and place for such demonstrations"? Before the war, it would have required skills in fortune telling that humans don't have. During the war, the time and place is wrong according to you. So wrong as to make demonstrations "a disgusting act." After the war, there's no point in demonstrating against it anymore.

Which time and place do you have in mind? I don't see any left. I'm mystified here.

America is all about free speech, but to come home from a war and to turn around and call ones brothers in arms rapists, murderers, etc, turns my stomach. I am not the only one either.

NOTEBOOK
Military Record

http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040223&s=notebook022304_2
Post date: 02.15.04

With John Kerry making his service in Vietnam a staple of his campaign, it's hardly surprising that Republicans are making Kerry's subsequent antiwar activities a staple of their attacks on him. And the first salvo, it seems, is to deliberately misconstrue Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It was in that testimony that Kerry, representing the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (vvaw), uttered the now-famous question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" But Republicans and their allies in the press have lately been paying more attention to another part of Kerry's testimony. As National Review put it on the cover of their February 23 issue, plugging a story called "the senator's other vietnam war record," Kerry testified that day, "American soldiers 'raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, ... cut off limbs, ... randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside...'" A January 30 article in the The Washington Times reported that Kerry testified, "They ... raped, cut off ears, cut off heads," etc.

The quote, as rendered on the National Review cover and in the Times article, makes it appear that Kerry himself was, as the Times put it, committing "slander of the GIs he left behind in Vietnam." But that's only because National Review and the Times use their own language or ellipses to omit critical elements of Kerry's testimony. Months before Kerry's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vvaw had held what it called the "Winter Soldier Investigation" in Detroit, at which more than 100 Vietnam veterans testified to war crimes they themselves committed while serving in Vietnam. Those are the crimes to which Kerry referred in his Senate testimony, as a fuller version of his remarks--which, to National Review's limited credit, it did print in its actual article--makes clear. Speaking of the veterans who testified at the "Winter Soldier Investigation," Kerry said, "They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war." So, far from making the allegations himself, Kerry was simply repeating what other veterans themselves had admitted. Too bad for National Review and the Times that none of them are running for president.