The prevailing thoughts on the left generated by the Swift Boat Liars' efforts seem to be coming around to the idea that the real crime in all the shameful behavior is being committed by Team BushCo as they eagerly conjure up the most painful and (helpfully) unresolved aspects of Vietnam to, once again, divide us as deeply as possible. I mentioned it last night:
[The Swift Boat Liars are] victims of the real monsters: the people who are willing to exploit the SBL's suffering (then and now) to make political book. Those people are happily dragging the US military through the mud by throwing into question the validity of every medal ever awarded as well as forcing the issue of the atrocities committed during Vietnam - and, by extension, in every other war we've fought and are fighting - to the surface of the public consciousness, not to heal the pain or address the problem, as the Toledo Blade tried to do and as Sy Hersch tried to do with Abu Ghraib, but simply to smear the opposition and avoid a discussion of issues. That's all. They are exactly that petty and that cruel.
Digby got close but is still focused on the SBL: (emph mine)
The sad thing, of course, is that Kerry will never have his reputation back and at a time when Vietnam veterans were finally beginning to receive their due for their service a bunch of self righteous, petty old men stepped in to cast doubts on them all over again. Nice bunch of patriots selling out their brothers toward the end of their lives to protest a man they claim sold them out when they were young. By any means necessary I guess.
And Chepooka pointed me to an MSNBC.com story that has an apt quote from John Zogby:
“It’s still the phony war period,” says Zogby. For an incumbent president in as much trouble as Bush, fighting a war that’s been over for nearly 30 years takes voters’ minds off Iraq.
It's the job of Kerry*Edwards to show America that exploiting the pain of Vietnam, on which Clinton foolishly thought he had closed the door, is directly linked to what the veterans of the Iraq Wars are facing now.
Nothing written yet expresses all of this better than John Kerry's Senate testimony in April, 1971 - ironically, the same testimony that has the Swift Boat Liars so distraught:
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
snip
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
snip
We found also that, all too often, American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search-and-destroy missions as well as by Viet Cong terrorism, - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
snip
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by this denial, is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
The parallels between Iraq now and Vietnam then couldn't possibly be more clear. But Kerry is in a tough position because he's on record as supporting the authority to wage that war, if not the war itself. He's in that corner now and it will be difficult to explain to America what the corporate media will try to stop him from saying: BushCo's war in Iraq is an unmitigated failure and in order to divert us from that point, he is willing to sully the reputations of past soldiers living and dead as well as open old wounds in the most excrutiating way possible, with no regard for what that means for the country and the vets. He's trying to win election on the back of two failed wars and too many dead and damaged people to count. It's a tactic that only someone with no knowledge of what it means to serve their country could even conceive. He's the worst kind of traitor because a country so divided cannot focus on the real threats that face it in these "dangerous times." Somehow, Kerry needs to get that message out, while offering an alternate vision of a united America that is ready to fight together again. I'm not sure his campaign is capable of doing it, but I'm holding out hope.
Step One: Start. reading. blogs.
UPDATE: 6:20pm: I had to add the link to Atrios for Kerry's testimony.
Comments