I will grant that one needs the LeMays of the world; but we need them in the military, not in civilian office.

Bottom line is I think we agree more than we disagree, but the points of disagreement can be sensitive. My apologies if I stepped over any lines in the heat of the moment.

One of my serious sore points is the old “America, Love It or Leave It” attitude. To me, this is the most un-American slogan I can think of, and I feel that the insistence on lock-step submission to a gov’t policy is another representation of that attitude.

Pardon the bold emphasis, but this whole way of framing any discussion as an issue of “disrespecting the military” is way out of control.

A criticism–which, I believe, is allowed under the current constitution–of the president is NOT, and naver has been a criticism of the military. The attempt to conflate and equate the two is the worst, lowest form of jingoism and pseudo-patriotism in existence. There is no connection between disagreement with the foreign policy of a given administration

My remark was aimed at Reagan. He used our military as a prop and a tool to make himself look like he was riding tall in the saddle. It was exactly the same kind of stunt that Bush thought he could pull off in Iraq.

And I frankly don’t care that Bud Day won a Medal of Honor, or the Legion of Honor. What he did in Vietnam does not give him carte blanche to smear, lie, and poison the political atmosphere, thereby attempting to derail honest, open debate by villifying anyone who happens to be a Democrat. Did he serve his country honorably? Absolutely. So why does he now chose to wallow in the mud and do everything in his power to corrupt and destroy all that our country supposedly stands for?

You deride and belittle Wes Clark’s career, and yet the Medal of Honor leaves Bud Day above criticism. Frankly, Joe, I’d come to expect better of you than this sort of partisan clap-trap.

And let’s talk about John McCain’s biggest flip-flop: Torture. He was, admirably, opposed to the notion that our country should torture its prisoners. Now that he’s running for president and doing everything in his power to pander to the RW fringe, he’s in favor of it.

And btw: I just read that the tactics used in Gitmo came from a 1950s Air Force manual describing how the Communists used these tactics against US personnel. And these are the sorts of tactics that McCain is now endorsing? The stuff we were supposedly fighting against for all those decades after WWII? The sort of stuff that made them the “Evil Empire”? How exactly does that work?

See, here’s the thing about the USSR. The RW wants it both ways: it was an existential threat, but it was also a rotten ediface. That the USSR never launched a first strike had more to do with the disparity in respective nuclear arsenals of the two countries. Especially in the 1960s, we were so far ahead of the USSR in capacity that using their arsenal was never a serious consideration for them. Ronnie (technically, it was GHWB, I supppose) happened to be in the right place at the right time.

And, finally, don’t you remember Giap’s quotes? First, he said, you may lose thousands, and we may lose ten thousands, but we will still win. Then, after the war, a US general told him: we won every major battle of the war. Giap’s response was: true, but irrelevant. And LeMay, IIRC, wanted to “bomb NVN back into the stone age.” Apparently he never figured out that they weren’t that far from it. And that was part of their strength.

Short of actual extermination of the North Vietnamese, there was little the US could do to “win” that war. IIRC, turning NVN into a “parking lot” was a fairly prevalent attitude at the time. Do you advocate those sorts of tactics?

Lemay’s attitude is staggering. But much, much worse than the barbarity (which is plenty awful), it’s the staggering ignorance that takes my breath. The US cannot impose its will on the rest of the world solely by military means. We have the best-trained, best-equipped, plain best military in history, but military power, per se, is not enough. If it were, the Brits and French would still rule India and Algeria. There are certain types of wars that a superior military cannot win. Ask Napoleon about Spain. Ask the British or the Russians about Afghanstan. We carpet-bombed NVN for years without breaking their will. The Nazis tried to beat Britian with the Luftwaffe.

Is that what we should have done in NVN? Invaded, occupied, and turned them into a colony? That’s what started the whole problem in the first place.

What, exactly, does this country stand for? Might is Right? We’re the strongest, so we get to set the rules, and no one else gets any input? Cross us, and we pummel you into submission so we can take your resources, or force you into a mold of our choosing? Force you to have elections, then claim they’re invalid when you elect someone we don’t like, as happened in Palestine?

Do we stand for spreading “freedom” by force, all the while using our “crusade” to frighten and cow our own citizens into scared silence by decryg how they “disrespect the military?” Is that what we stand for?

First of all, Clark did not “attack” McCain’s record. He simply stated that getting shot down is not, in and of itself, a qualification for becoming president. I might add, a military record, no matter how distinguished, isn’t a qualification either.

As an example, I offer Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur. Did their military experience give them tempered insight into world politics? Would you have wanted either of these men as president?

Plus, Mr McCain’s willingness either to lie, or to be willfully ignorant about conditions in Iraq after his last visit raise serious questions in my mind. Recall how he went on a walking tour–surrounded by a large cordon of military personnel and firepower and declared that Baghdad was “safe.”

Secondly, the way that this episode has been orchestrated by the Right and their main-stream media lackeys is an indication of the sort of stuff that’s going to be coming from McCain’s campaign over the next 4 months. For instance, McCain hired Bud Day, late of the “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” campaign of 2004. I don’t know what your several opinions are of this despicable crew–many of whom were on record praising Kerry a short time before they attacked him–but I found the whole thing, well, despicable.

If Mr McCain is such an honorable man, why hire someone from the gutter?

Third, if Mr McCain is a man of such staunch principle, why does he now oppose two pieces of legislation that bear his name? I refer to his immigration bill and campaign finance bill. He co-sponsored both, but now he’s against them after he was for them. Earlier he had changed his positions 42 times in the previous two weeks. His “principles” are very dependent on to whom he is speaking.

Not only that, he may not understand some of his own positions. In a recent earlier this month, he declared himself in favor of cap-and-trade for carbon emissions, but, within minutes of that declaration, said he was opposed to a hard limit on emissions. Apparently, he misunderstood the “cap” part of “cap-and-trade.”

And yet, and yet, his mainstream media lackeys refuse to call him on any of this.

No one has attempted to disparage or belittle what Mr McCain endured as a POW. All they’ve done is state–correctly–that this in and of itself is not a qualification for president.

As for Wes Clark: the man is a retired 4-Star general. Our personal feelings about Kosovo do not change the fact that he carried out his mission successfully. He is a combat veteran. I believe that America still upholds the right to “free speech.” Assuming this, Clark has the right to voice his opinion. But, apparently, anything that disagrees with opinions held by those to the right of center is unpatriotic and pandering.

Clark is not part of the Obama campaign. He is a Democrat, sure, but he is not part of the campaign. In the meantime, one of McCain’s aides claims that a terrorist attack would be an advantage for McCain. And McCain has hired a Swift Boat Veteran. These men are part of McCain’s campaign. Which is worse? Which is more indicative of the sort of people the Candidate has actively chosen?

Finally, I would remind readers that St Ronnie Reagan didn’t exactly have much foreign policy experience when he took the presidential oath, either. He had been gov of Calif, 15 years prior to becoming pres. Rather, he had a series of sound-bites (e.g. “peace through strength”) and little else. I recall that one of his first foreign policy advisors had no answers to a lot of the questions asked during his confirmation hearings. The man didn’t know the names of heads of state, and yet St Ronnie chose this guy as a foreign policy advisor.

And, btw–Reagan’s first National Security Advisor, Richard Allen, stepped down after taking a bribe from a Japanese journalist to set up an interview with Nancy R. OT, I know, but I get really tired of the bromide that Reps are somehow more trustworthy on nat’l security, when the record says otherwise.

St Ronnie wasn’t responsible for the collapse of the USSR; he was an accidental beneficiary. 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch. Al Qaida is still alive and well and reconstituting itself in Pakistan because Bush outsourced the capture of OBL at Tora Bora. The war in Iraq was a fiasco from the get-go….What, exactly, is this supposed superiority based on other than bald assertions? Our invasion of Grenada?

link to story

“I think what we really need to work on over the next four, five months, and it goes back to the speech that Sen. Obama gave [Tuesday] and this little fight that I’ve been watching and that is, we need to make sure that we take politics out of service,” Webb said. “People don’t serve their country for political issues.”

He continued: “And John McCain’s my long-time friend, if that is one area that I would ask him to calm down on, it`s that, don’t be standing up and uttering your political views and implying that all the people in the military support them because they don’t, any more than when the Democrats have political issues during the Vietnam War. Let’s get the politics out of the military, take care of our military people, or have our political arguments in other areas.”