"Bill Case" <Billc548@Hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:KAuUc.25848$9Y6.1811@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net...
Well, Cheney should try telling fighter pilot (who showed up) Senator
Harkin
to "***** himself", instead of quiet, inoffensive Sen. Leahy, whom Cheney
set
up for the Karl Rove gesture.
It appears chickenhawk Bushies are on the path to getting their tough guy
act shoved up their asses.
Quit reading here. Post like and adult and maybe it will be worth reading.
Here's a good piece from Prof. Juan Cole's website that also gets into
chickenhawk Cheney's twisting the usage of the word "senstive" by Kerry
into
something denigrating.
It occurred to me on hearing the chickenhawk mention Gen. Eisenhower in
the
process, that the *****-for-brains didn't know that Ike's huge contribution
was his ability to keep things on track among allies with different
interests and cultures.
In addition to being a smart brave MAN, Ike was sensitive to other
people's
views. Of course, the chickenhawk was trying to pretend that Kerry was
refering to touchy-feely stuff instead of INTELLIGENT actions.
Read on...
Juan Cole http://www.juancole.com/
Harkin: Cheney is Cowardly
Iowa Senator Tom Harkin has let ***** Cheney have it over Cheney's
questioning of John Kerry's ability to understand the war on
terrorism--calling the vice president a "coward". CNN quotes him,
"It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam
and
said he had 'other priorities' at that time would say that," said the Iowa
Democrat, a former Navy fighter pilot . . . The issue first arose when
Harkin joined with Des Moines police officials protesting the call-up of a
police officer who already had completed his eight year military
commitment.
Harkin said that it angered him to hear tough talk from Cheney. "When I
hear
this coming from ***** Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during
the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil," said Harkin. "He'll be tough,
but
he'll be tough with someone else's kid's blood," said Harkin.
Actually, I don't think declining to serve in Vietnam is necessarily a
sign
of cowardice. Those who didn't buy the Domino Theory or just didn't
consider
the North Vietnamese a threat to the California coast might well have
declined to risk their lives in that war. But presumably Cheney did
believe
that fighting international Communism was a worthy cause. He did ask for
and
receive five deferments, one after another. It is clear that he had higher
priorities, as he said, than fighting in the Vietnam War.
This behavior suggests not necessarily cowardice, but hypocrisy. If he was
exercised about a threat, why not go meet it? It could be cowardice, of
course. We cannot know for sure. But it was at least hypocrisy.
Now that we are on Cheney, I wanted to respond to his recent sarcastic
criticism of John Kerry for saying that we need to fight the war on terror
sensitively.
' "America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a
one
of them was won by being sensitive," Cheney told an audience of veterans
in
Dayton, Ohio. '
Many pundits pointed out that George W. Bush had used exactly the same
language about a sensitive approach to the war on terror, so that Cheney
was
implicitly criticizing his own superior.
But as a historian, I have to say that Cheney's statement is bizarre and
uninformed. Let me just give one example. The practice round for World War
II was fought in North Africa, then controlled by the Vichy French. Dwight
Eisenhower developed Project Torch, involving the landing of US troops in
Morocco and Algeria.
It was essential to the US effort that the French colonial soldiers be
quickly won over and convinced not to put up stiff resistance to the
invasion. The original plan would have explicitly used British naval
power.
But the Free French objected loudly to this plan, since they did not want
the British Empire's ships anywhere near their North African possessions.
The French and the British had old rivalries in this regard. Moreover,
there
were still French bad feelings about the British attack on the French
fleet
at Mers al Kabir in Algeria in 1940.
So Roosevelt and Eisenhower asked Churchill to keep the British navy in
the
background off Gibraltar and out of sight of the Moroccan coast. Churchill
agreed.
That is, Roosevelt and Eisenhower had their successful landing in North
Africa precisely because they were entirely willing to bend over backward
to
be sensitive to French feelings.
And that is the big difference between Cheney and Bush as wartime leaders
on
the one hand, and on the other Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Cheney and Bush
are
diplomatically tone deaf, projecting nothing but arrogance and being all
too
willing to humiliate traditional allies. They have no sensitivity. And it
is
for that reason that they have the U.S. stuck in Iraq with only one really
significant military ally, the U.K. (the Italians only have 3,000 troops
there, and most countries just a few hundred, which makes their presence a
token one). They have perhaps permanently alienated all the countries that
might have lent the U.S. a hand.
And that pattern of arrogant, unilateral war-mongering worries me more
than
Cheney being a coward.
If the Bush/Cheney team gets back in, there will be further wars and
massive
disturbances to world peace and security, starting with Iran. Maybe the
whole doctrine of pre-emptive war is a form of inferiority complex,
impelling Cheney to be a strident war-monger to try to vindicate his
uninvolved youth. If he was a coward, he may be endangering us all (and
especially our teenagers) in a desperate ploy to regain his own manhood.
posted by Juan @ 8/17/2004 06:00:00 AM
.
