Mitt Romney, draft-dodger

By Comrade Misfit

In the campaign for the presidency in 1992, there was no shortage of Republicans bleating that the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, was an immoral draft-dodger.

In 2012, the GOP candidate, Willard Romney, used several deferments to avoid having to serve in the Vietnam War.

The same war that the GOP was sooo upset that Clinton didn't serve in.

Worse, Romney was such chicken that he ducked out of an appearance on The View, fearing his reception by women who are not GOP drones. So he sent Wife Of, also known as Queen Ann, who stated that to Mormons serving as Mormon missionaries is the equivalent of serving in the armed forces: 

[W]e find different ways of serving, and my five boys and my husband did serve missions, and did not serve in the military.

It's good to know that according to the Romney Worldview door-to-door proselytizing in France was the same as spending a year humping a rucksack and carrying an M-16 in the Mekong Delta.*
__________________________________________________
* Not that the son of a powerful politician would have done anything like that in the first place.

 (Cross-posted at Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I.)

Romney: Once a chickenhawk, always a chickenhawk.

By Comrade Misfit

Seems that ol' Mittens supported the Vietnam War. But being that he was a true chickenhawk, he was happy to use successive deferments to avoid having to serve in it.

Just like a typical right-wing chickenhawk: Always willing to run his mouth to support a war, but never willing to send either himself or his kids to fight in one. 

(Cross-posted at Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I.)

This day in history - May 4, 1970: The Kent State shootings

By Richard K. Barry

Four unarmed students were killed and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 at what many called the Kent State Massacre. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds.

Some of the students shot were protesting the American invasion of Cambodia, which President Nixon announced on April 30, 1970.

The good news from the event, if you can imagine there being any, is that it further eroded public opinion of the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground.



(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

This day in history - April 30, 1975: The Vietnam War formally ends

By Richard K. Barry

On April 30, 1975, communist forces gained control of Saigon, and President Duong Van Minh formally offered the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam.

This date marked the end of the Vietnam War and the formal reunification of Vietnam into a communist state.

As I grew up, it seemed that the war in Vietnam was always there. Through my early teens I didn't recall a time when Walter Cronkite wasn't delivering the evening news with American casualties listed on the screen. I missed the draft by a only a few years, but remember well the older neighbourhood boys worrying about the draft and then, later, the draft lottery.

It does make me think of children who have now grown up not knowing a time when American soldiers were not deployed to places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

This day in history - April 28, 1970: Nixon authorizes the invasion of Cambodia

By R.K. Barry

On April 28, 1970, President Richard Nixon authorized American combat troops to invade Cambodia to engage approximately 40,000 troops of the People's Army of Vietman (North Vietnamese army) and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietman (NLF, also known as the Viet Cong) who occupied the eastern border regions of Cambodia.

A total of 13 major operations were conducted by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN or the South Vietnamese army) between April 29th and July 22nd and by U.S. forces between May 1st and June 30th.

The stated goal for the U.S. was to strengthen the position of the South Vietnamese army to enable it to carry on military operations on its own, after the withdrawal of the American military -- the so called "Vietnamization" process.

Some things never change.

In response to American military action, demonstrations erupted on American university campuses, with protestors expressing opposition to the expansion of the Vietnam War into another country. On May 4th, Ohio National Gaurdsmen shot and killed four unarmed students (two of whom were not protestors) during what became known as the Kent State shootings.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

"I want to make amends for what I did": Reflections on military service

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Today, the day after Remembrance/Veterans Day, I want to direct your attention to this post at ProseBeforeHos by a vet looking back at the Vietnam War and his time in the military. Here's an especially powerful passage:

I recognize the need for a military, and I no longer blame the men and women who choose to serve, although I believe their service is misguided. I do blame our elected officials and corporate leaders who carelessly risk the lives of our military and slaughter millions of innocent civilians overseas solely for profits, and it’s for that reason I continue speaking out. The country is no safer because of my service, mainly because we were never in any danger in the first place, but our leaders knew that. I’ll just keep working and hope I can pay back all that bad karma in this lifetime so I can start anew the next time around.

My most profound wish is peace for all, especially those who fought our hegemonic wars and suffer the torment of PTSD. I hope you all find the way back.

Make sure to read the whole thing.

"The score is four / And next time more”

By J. Thomas Duffy

This news broke yesterday, and it is big ...

I mean BIG!

Here's the background, in the event you were born after the 1970's;

The Kent State shootings – also known as the May 4 massacre or Kent State massacre – [2][3][4] occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.[5]

Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, which President Richard Nixon announced in a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.[6][7]

Now, here's the blockbuster news;

New analysis of 40-year-old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire

The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on students and antiwar protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 were given an order to prepare to shoot, according to a new analysis of a 40-year-old audio tape of the event.

"Guard!" says a male voice on the recording, which two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds pass. Then, "All right, prepare to fire!"

"Get down!" someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, "Guard! . . . " followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds.

Why is this a big deal?

The previously undetected command could begin to explain the central mystery of the Kent State tragedy - why 28 Guardsmen pivoted in unison atop Blanket Hill, raised their rifles and pistols and fired 67 times, killing four students and wounding nine others in an act that galvanized sentiment against the Vietnam War.

The order indicates that the gunshots were not spontaneous, or in response to sniper fire, as some have suggested over the years.

I was not-yet 15-years-old when this went down, the tipping point, after the blizzard of nightly news footage of the carnage in Viet Nam, and the handful of older guys from the neighborhood that came home in body bags.

Now, our government was shooting at us.

For, merely, expressing our 1st Amendment rights.



Digby, on her blog Hullabaloo, has a great post up, in which she quotes from the book 'Nixonland', showing, chillingly, the parallels between the red-faced, crew-cut conservatives, the ones who bought, at retail price, the tainted American Dream, the ones who in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings chanted "The score is four / And next time more”, and today's political climate;

The country eventually disengaged from Vietnam. But that was only one skirmish in our ongoing tribal struggle --- it still rages today. History can now record what really happened that day at Kent State. But I think we can assume from the Nixonland excerpt that whether or not the Guardsmen shot under orders was never really the issue anyway.

The funny thing is that the same Real Americans who believed the protesters deserved it would join the tea parties today and complain mightily about government overreach. In fact, many of them probably have.

(Susie Madrak, over on Crooks and Liars, has a post with video, and audio)



And, there is still pain;

In Pittsburgh, Doris Krause has been waiting 40 years to find out who killed her daughter Allison, and why. Now 84 and widowed, she said Friday the presence of the prepare-to-fire order doesn't surprise her.

"It had to be," she said. "There's no other way they could have turned in unison without a command. There's no other way they could fire at the same time."

She is frustrated, though, that the recording can't identify the person who gave the order. "I wish there was better proof," Krause said. "We have to find a man with enough courage to admit what happened.

"I'm an old lady," she said, "and before I leave this earth, I'd like to find out who said what is on that tape."

"Courage to admit what happened ..."

Hopefully, it won't take another 40-years to find that out.

Crosby Stills Nash Young Teach Your Children - Iraq



(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

Walter Cronkite -- Congruence

By Carol Gee

Walter Cronkite passed away on Friday. The voice of the nation for so many years was 92 years old. From the time he was named the "anchor" of the CBS evening news program, he began to build a reputation for honesty and integrity than set a standard for all the major news anchors who were to follow in his footsteps.

His legacy for me was one of congruence. For decades his reports on so many of the key events here and around the world turned out to be congruent with the eventual meaning we all took to be the core significance of the most important events. In both emotional tone and the facts, his reporting was in agreement and coincided with that of most of the rest of us.

As a kid from the country in Wyoming, I did not experience television until I moved to Texas as a nursing student in 1955. From my first black and white, small screen television viewing I was hooked. And I was always drawn to the hard news. Like millions of others I wanted to know what was happening. I has a curiosity and a need to know, so I always watched the evening news. My choices were NBC and CBS. NBC got on the list because that was the network that would come in on our radio growing up. But CBS quickly became a close second as I listened to Edward R. Murrow, and then watched, his weekly broadcast.

Walter Cronkite succeeded Murrow. The managing editor of his own program, he was trained as a print journalist and comfortable on camera, a dynamite combination. And we soon found that he could tell us what was happening in ways that were congruent, clear, unbiased, simple and believable.

It was Walter Cronkite who told me that John F. Kennedy was dead, and showed his own devastated feelings silently and without shame. He was openly angry when his news crewmen were roughed up on the floor of a Democratic Convention in the searing sixties. He went to Vietnam and said out loud the truth of that awful war. President Lyndon Johnson was convinced of the reality of his lost leadership by that broadcast. Walter Cronkite went to the moon's dusty surface with the astronauts with the rest of us. He gaged it as a most significant event for humankind. But he missed by just a few days the 40th anniversary celebration of the moon landing that will be coming up on Monday. I am moved by the congruence of that. Last night the new NASA administrator, Charles Bolden released a lovely and poetic tribute to Walter Cronkite, noting that it was Walter Cronkite who inspired him to want to become an astronaut so many years ago. And I am moved by the congruence of that, as well.

Walter Cronkite, according to a contemporary, was not happy about having to retire. But he did it without public complaint. Acclaimed by most everyone, he popped up every now and then until he was well up in years. He was a sailor and loved to have the wind at his back and the bow of his craft splitting the waves. He lost his beloved wife, Betsy a few years ago. He was one of a kind and I feel grateful that I was able to find much of my truth from his take on the significance of all those momentous life changing events.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Robert McNamara (1916-2009)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Robert McNamara, one of the supposedly "best" and "brightest" behind the Vietnam War, the defense secretary who determined who was winning and losing by counting body bags, died yesterday at the age of 93.

To a certain extent, he was the Vietnam War, and just as it took America down, it took him down, too. He was long gone by the time the war eventually ended, with American fatalities increasing significantly under Nixon and Kissinger, but he remained "a haunted man," the war "his personal nightmare."

He apparently came to regret what he had done, but the past could never ever be put fully behind him.

There is not much more to say. This was a man who lived, and suffered, and who may or may not have come to terms with his time in office, or achieved, at long last, some sort of inner peace. The Vietnam War wasn't entirely his fault, but, to his death, he bore as much responsibility for it as anyone.

**********

For more, I highly recommend Errol Morris's fantastic documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

And I suppose you could already read his mea culpa memoirs, which I have not.

Oh Baby, Ohio

By Libby Spencer

It happened 38 years ago, today.



Rest in peace, Kent State Four.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)

T. Boone Chickens

By Carl


You might have been following the (possibly drunken) mouthings of T. Boone Pickens from the American Spectator dinner the other night:

Sen. John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential campaign was torpedoed by critics of his Vietnam War record, said Friday he has personally accepted a Texas oilman's offer to pay $1 million to anyone who can disprove even a single charge of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In a letter to T. Boone Pickens, the Massachusetts Democrat wrote: "While I am prepared to show they lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven false. I am prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt."

Pickens' original boast (again, I'm not discounting the possibility the man was shit-faced and egged on), for incontrovertible proof of one lie, just one, that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth told during the 2004 Presidential campaign.

Hell, I don't have access to any of the factual material and I'd take that challenge on in a heartbeat!

Kerry took Pickens' challenge head on, and good for him, because as with bullies of all stripes... Pickens' chickens out!:

Dear Senator Kerry:
So glad to hear from you regarding the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth political ad campaign, and an offer I made public at an American Spectator dinner in Washington, D.C. last week. I am intrigued by your letter, and am certainly open to your challenge.

My concern at the Spectator Dinner was, and continues to be, that you and other political figures were and are maligning the Swift Boat Veterans, and I want to prevent this important part of American history from being unfairly portrayed.

In order to disprove the accuracy of the Swift Boat ads, I will ultimately need you to provide the following:

1) The journal you maintained during your service in Vietnam.
2) Your military record, specifically your service records for the years
1971-1978, and copies of all movies and tapes made during your
service.

When you have done so, if you can then prove anything in the ads was materially untrue, I will gladly award $1 million. As you know, I have been a long and proud supporter of the American military and veterans' causes. I now challenge you to make this commitment: If you cannot prove anything in the Swift Boat ads to be untrue, that you will make a $1 million gift to the charity I am choosing -- the Medal of Honor Foundation.

Gee... T. Boone... you never put conditions in your original challenge as the nature of the proof or anything beyond disproving one claim.

Did you wake up the next morning, take a couple of Excedrin, and as you were reviewing your performance the night before while shaving, nick yourself when you came to the sudden realization that, yes, indeedy, the one man who could factually, definitively and factually refute not just one, but any number of claims, would drop that bomb on you?

"Maligning the Swift Boat Veterans" is undoubtedly the funniest turn of phrase I've heard since Bruce Cutler said this in defense of John Gotti: "He has threatened to kill hundreds of people, and all the people that have been threatened on tape by John are alive and well, or, if not, they died of natural causes."

So who is T. Boone Pickens? Well, you could describe him in several ways: failed venture capitalist, failed political king maker, failed philanthropist, failed father... are ya seeing a pattern here?

Oh... and he's an executive director of the Rudy Giuliani campaign.

Nuff said.

Oh... except that he's a chicken.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

It's decisional

By Capt. Fogg

I'm not even going to bother with the dictionary. If Decisional is a word, it shouldn't be, but a Decisional meeting is what Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell called today's "surprise" get together at the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq's Anbar province; bringing together senior U.S. military leaders, top Iraqi political leadership, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and of course, the Decider in full Decisional mode.

Nothing beats the opportunity to look David Petraeus in the eye and Ambassador Crocker and say, 'What's the situation? What do you think?'

said an unnamed "senior official as quoted by ABC News today. I don't agree. I think we'd be better off, decisionally speaking, having the opinion of someone whose career doesn't depend on selling vain hopes and sanguine dreams to delusional deciders.

Whether or not there has been a significant and stable gain in overall security in Iraq of late, and whether the administration is simply sprucing up the stage set or building a full scale Potemkin Village, one can be forgiven a bit of skepticism -- and particularly one old enough to remember General Westmoreland's hauntingly similar vision of a "light at the end of the tunnel" ten weeks before the Tet Offensive.

Iraq wasn't like Vietnam, until it was

By Michael J.W. Stickings

That is, until it suited the president to make the comparison. Which he did. Yesterday:

President Bush defended his ongoing military commitment in Iraq by linking the conflict there to the Vietnam War, arguing Wednesday that withdrawing U.S. troops would lead to widespread death and suffering as it did in Southeast Asia three decades ago.

"One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 'reeducation camps' and 'killing fields,' " Bush told a receptive audience at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention."

In response, Ted Kennedy noted that Bush is "drawing the wrong lesson from history," which is, of course, true. What is Bush saying, that the U.S. should not have withdrawn from Vietnam, that the war should have gone on? Giuliani made very much the same argument in his recent Foreign Affairs piece -- see Fred Kaplan's thorough dismantling of that piece here. It's a remarkably stupid argument, but it's one that seems to be rather popular on the right: Vietnam was a failure not because it was a terrible war but because it wasn't waged effectively, because the U.S. withdrew too soon, because liberals and peaceniks and other traitors got their way.

And so now, Iraq, which is not a failure because it is a terrible war, and because the warmongers got it all wrong, but because it hasn't been waged effectively, or competently, and because the liberals and peaceniks and other traitors are getting their way -- and so the war isn't really a failure at all, it just looks that way, and victory, whatever that means these days, is right around the corner, just give it a chance to succeed.

And you see whose fault it is, right? Not the warmongers -- not Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld, not the neocon utopians at The Murdoch Standard or any of the other cheerleaders on the right -- but the war's opponents, who just aren't giving it a chance, even now, years after it started.

And when the U.S. does withdraw -- sometime, inevitably -- you see who will be blamed, right, when Iraq descends further into chaos?

Yes, Bush's Iraq-is-like-Vietnam flip-flop serves a dual purpose: to make the case for the war now and to prepare the ground for the politics of post-withdrawal. See what you traitors have done, Bush and the warmongers and the cheerleaders will say, Iraq, poor Iraq, is another Vietnam, and it's all your fault, you made us lose. They will re-write history, a common enough practice on the right, and spin Iraq this way and that, making the analogy where once the analogy was anathema, for there is apparently no low to which they will sink to avoid taking any responsibility for what they have done.

**********

-- Steve Benen notes that historians are not impressed with the analogy, not at all.

-- For more reaction, see Josh Marshall, Taylor Marsh, Steve Benen, Barbara O'Brien, Cernig, and D at LG&M. And there's a lot more at Memeorandum.

-- Pamela Leavey has John Kerry's response: "Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars."

-- The Hill: "Democrats blast Bush’s Vietnam comparison."

"Where the hell were you in the Vietnam War?"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So asked decorated Vietnam veteran and former senator Max Cleland of draft-dodging warmonger Dick Cheney -- Crooks and Liars has the video and transcript here.

The full quote: "Where the hell were you in the Vietnam War? If you had gone to Vietnam like the rest of us, maybe you would have learned something about war. You can't keep troops on the ground forever. You gotta have a mission. You gotta have a purpose. You can't keep sending 'em back and back and back with no mission and no purpose. As a matter of fact, the real enemy is Al Qaeda, it's Al Qaeda stupid, it's not in Iraq."

The stupid -- Bush and Cheney both -- didn't go to war. The stupid sent others to fight their disastrous war in Iraq, to die for their lies and delusions. The stupid want still more war in Iraq. The stupid want war with Iran. The stupid have blood all over their hands.

The stupid don't have a fucking clue.