April, 2004, Week 4
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April, 2004, Week 4
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Monday April 19 , 2004 Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. Sir William Haley SCHOOL !!! Kids are back in School. I feel refreshed after only 6 hours... It's amazing how just a few hours of tranquility will rejuvenate your mind and energy. Of course 14:30 rolls around and the pandemonium begins anew... but it is nice to get a break. Tuesday April 20 , 2004
"B" did his Creepy Crawly crap last night, I hardly slept... All it takes is to catch someone sneaking into your to bedroom to steal money or medicine and you would be amazed how difficult it is to get back to sleep. Christy and I have both been zombies all day. Wednesday April 21 , 2004 If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy
nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. I couldn't wake up this morning, really tired... Christy and I had Lunch at Olive Garden, I like it fine but i wish there was a Spaghetti Factory out here. I went to CCS and met with Jamie... Jamie has rules and regulations she must adhere to, unfortunately the thrust seems to be to force Autumn to adhere to the rules instead of making the rules flexible enough so that CCS can mold the therapy to her. CCS... I have done rants on them before... I won't waste your time or my energy. Thursday April 22 , 2004 When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings. William Clifford Roberts, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The American Journal of Cardiology I bought a new computer table and put it together... the instructions were pathetic, by the time I had finished with it I was so mad couldn't see straight... Grrrrr... It looks nice though,,, and seems to fill my needs, Friday April 23 , 2004 Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the "someday I'll" philosophy. Denis Waitley I am still trying to get the house put back together from putting down the new floor... I wonder if I will ever be done with this place... The quote is one of those 'hard truths' that no one wants to admit... My curse has been procrastination...fear failure or success... I don't know Saturday April 24 , 2004 Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness. Henrik Ibsen, playwright (1828-1906) I forgot to take a video back to Albertson's last night so I dropped "B" off at Supercuts and I took the video in... I bought the kids lunch at JITB and went home... I worked on the itinerary for my trip. I am going to make two trips out of it, if I tried to go to the reunion in Charleston on May 20th and tour until the wedding on July 3rd the trip would last over 55 days... two months is too long to be gone, it would be awfully expensive too. The trip to Charleston will take about 11 days and the trip to the wedding will take about 22 that's still a month all together. I polished my bike... looks good. Sunday April 25 , 2004 schadenfreude (Delight in another's misfortune) I just like the word, I hope I can find an excuse to use it some day. I took "B" to the movies at the mall, I told him that I will not be available to pick him up between 1900 and 2100 because I wanted to watch my motorcycle race... I watch Motorcycle races and football on TV, that's it. 2 hours a week on Saturday or Sunday for Motorcycle racing... slightly more time watching games during football season, I told Mike and Mark and "B" I can drive them any time except 1900 to 2100... sooo, "B" called at 1930 all pissed off because no one was there to pick him up and at 2030 Mike came in all pissed off because I wouldn't take Mark down to to meet his mom at the end of the dirt road...
2. Mary McGrory 4. the U.S. created the monster 5. Fantisyland of the Free (Molly Ivins 6. 'Dad ... what's a terrorist?'(If you don't read anything else) By Cynthia Tucker April 19, 2004 ATLANTA - Reading biographical profiles of dead American soldiers, I am struck, always, by their ages - 22 or 19 or 24. For most, childhood is all they get; their lives end even as their adulthood begins. Usually they come from families of modest means, strivers looking to serve their country but also to gain technical training or college scholarships. In this group, graduates of Harvard or Yale or Duke are rare. Rare, too, are children of those policy-makers who decided this war was necessary. President Bush's twin daughters are not enrolled in ROTC. When the U.S. Senate voted to give the president the authority to invade Iraq, only one senator - South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson - had a son or daughter in the enlisted ranks. No more than five members of the House have children in the military. As violence in Iraq ebbs and flows, American support for the occupation does as well. But the constant is this: The soldiers risking their lives rarely come from affluent families. The median income of the families of recruits is $35,000 a year for whites and $32,000 for blacks. Even as a conservative movement grows on college campuses across the country, young conservatives - though they may be vociferous supporters of the invasion of Iraq - don't seem to volunteer for the military in any greater number than young liberals. Conservative collegians work in GOP campaigns, denounce liberal college professors, join the Federalist Society. But, like their liberal counterparts, they are headed for Wall Street or law school, not Fort Stewart or Camp Lejeune. It is unconscionable that this republic could be so cavalier about duty and sacrifice, sending its poorer sons and daughters off to defend liberty for the rest of us. Americans have abandoned the "ancient republican tradition that citizenship entailed a duty to contribute to the nation's defense," writes Boston University Professor Andrew J. Bacevich, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, in his analysis of U.S. power, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Yet, when Rep. Charles B. Rangel, a New York Democrat, wrote a newspaper essay in December 2002 that called for a return to military conscription, he was met with widespread denunciations. "I believe that if we are going to send our children to war, the governing principle must be that of shared sacrifice," wrote Mr. Rangel, a Korean War veteran. Critics called his proposal "class warfare"; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld went so far as to blast earlier drafts as failures, saying draftees "added no value," a statement for which he later apologized. But the U.S. armed forces are now stretched too thin to cover all the obligations brought on by our imperial ambitions. With increased levels of insurgency in Iraq, the Pentagon has been forced to concede that it cannot draw down U.S. soldiers and leave security to poorly trained Iraqi troops; indeed, more U.S. soldiers may be required. So the military has refused to allow soldiers who have completed their tours to return to civilian life. (If that isn't a draft, what is?) It is a peculiar war on terror that requires so little sacrifice from most Americans. While the president declares this a paramount struggle against "the enemies of civilization," he knows most of us will cheer from the sidelines. He doesn't suggest we conserve fuel, reducing our dependence on foreign oil. He doesn't ask us to come up with the funds to raise military pay. He doesn't even ask us to pay for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq; his huge tax cuts have placed that enormous burden on the backs of future generations. Perhaps this broad war on terror can be won just this way, but I doubt it. Sooner or later, the rest of us will have to make some contribution to defending our own freedom. Unfortunately, none of our political leaders is preparing us for that moment.
Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her column appears Mondays in The Sun. Why is it I only hear about these people when they die... what an elegant writer. Mary McGrory died on Wednesday... I need to find more of her columns. Memorable Words From Mary McGrory's Columns Friday, April 23, 2004; Page A23 Some memorable words from Mary McGrory's columns: Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's funeral it can be said he would have liked it. It had that decorum and dash that were in his special style. It was both splendid and spontaneous. It was full of children and princes, of gardeners and governors. Everyone measured up to New Frontier standards. . . . There was no eulogy. Instead, Bishop Philip M. Hannan mounted the pulpit and read passages from the president's speeches and evoked him so vividly
that tears splashed on the red carpets and the benches of the cathedral. Nobody cried out, nobody broke down. -- Nov. 26, 1963 One way you can tell a Republican from a Democrat in this era of blurred distinctions is that Republicans are emotional about the interiors of their superiors. Once they have elected a person to high office, they are passionately concerned that the decor provided by public funds may be insufficiently elegant. The thought of a rent in the Aubusson, a chip in the Chippendale, a gap on the china shelves has the effect on the Republican that a picture of a starving child in east Africa produces in your average bleeding-heart Democrat. Misty-eyed, he writes a check. The response of the haves to the Reagans' refurbishing needs was phenomenal. Mrs. Reagan turned down the $50,000 provided in the federal budget and announced a drive for public donations. Within six weeks, stricken friends had contributed $822,640, and the fund had to be closed before beauty-mad oilmen sent it to the level of their company profits. -- Sept. 8, 1981 Last Friday, on the fourth day of the reign of King Oliver North, Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), a large, pear-shaped, white-topped figure, was wandering around the halls outside the Senate Caucus Room holding a vase of red roses and looking for cameras to tell the wondrous story of how they had been delivered to his office for transmission to the idol's wife. Hyde was honored to turn delivery boy. . . . On the witness table before North was a pile of adulatory telegrams as high as the stack of documents he shredded when he found out last November that being a martyr for Reagan could lead to becoming a convict. During the break on the fifth day, the emperor of the airwaves stepped out on the balcony around the corner from the hearing room and took the screaming plaudits of the multitude below. Would-be spectators stood in breathless, 100-degree heat. Their ecstatic huzzas echoed through the corridors. The lean Marine with the long tongue and the cocked chin has changed the investigation from an inquiry into White House lawlessness to a probe of Congress and its right to exist or at least to oppose a president. -- July 14, 1987 For us, the Yule-impaired, this is the week of deliverance -- from the inexorable machinery of Christmas, from the pressure, the panic, the weeping fatigue. We Yule-impaired have nothing against Christmas. We love "The Messiah" and "Angels we have heard on high," the halls decked with holly. It's the "fa-la-la-la" that destroys us, the shopping, the bow-tying, the collectedness-capability that makes you remember that Chad's video game, headed for Washington, was in the FAO Schwarz bag with Mollie's Barbie doll, headed elsewhere, a circumstance that caused Edward to get up at dawn and make an emergency trip to UPS. These things are beyond us in ordinary times. At Christmas, details of daily life that trip us up every day proliferate. My new bank chose the joyous season to inform me of an overdraft. My old bank never had. I marched in for an explanation. No, said my new bank manager, I wasn't overdrawn, but maybe in 1990 I got an "advance" I had never repaid. What advance? They couldn't say. Surely in this age of electronic marvels, they could find out in a trice. No, this particular item could not ride the information superhighway. It was printed on microfiche that was, for some reason, in a warehouse in Mississippi. Nothing could expedite the transaction. I picture some bank employee toiling through the Delta, carrying his lunch in a knapsack on a stick. He arrives at the warehouse, and they tell him, "The M's are in another building." -- Dec. 29, 1994 Hope dies hard in the District of Columbia, home to the country's highest homicide and infant mortality rates. We in the District believe that the president of the United States, no matter who he is, will notice the disarray on his doorstep in the capital of the Western world -- and try to do something about it. Bill Clinton started out extra-promising. Not only did he make a pre-inauguration tour of Georgia Avenue, he visited a public school. But when I suggested to one of his aides that he make a practice of it, jogging into classrooms, I was told that "if you show an interest, they expect you to do something -- and we have no money." I've given up on Clinton as the savior of the District. But he has a wife, and she's smart, and needs a new interest. She was a longtime board member of the Children's Defense Fund. She promised that when she finished health care, she would take on violence. There could be no better place than this city, where violence is so rampant that four people were killed in a gunfight inside police headquarters. Hillary doesn't have to take on the whole thing. She could just appoint herself the town nanny, looking after its endangered children, who come from indifferent homes, attend indifferent schools and often despair of getting any attention unless they get pregnant or sell drugs. It doesn't take that much money to make a change in these lives. What is needed is time and attention and involvement. -- Nov. 27, 1994 (I especially liked this eulogy to her neighbor...) Those of you lucky enough to have a good neighbor will commiserate with me in my bleakness. Over Thanksgiving weekend, I lost the perfect neighbor. Her name was Marie Pack, and her philosophy was live and let live. She watched out for me, always kindly calling me when I left my car lights on, but she never pried. She came from New Orleans and was a fanatical football fan, and I was born a Red Sox fan, but except when I stupidly called her during a Redskins game and she icily reminded me of my gaffe, we got along in total amity for 40 years. After her retirement from Woodward & Lothrop, she spent her time being obliging. She took in packages and checked my place for leaks when I went away. She never gave me unsolicited advice. She was one of the most organized human beings I ever met. Her apartment was immaculate and so was she. I would meet her in the morning on her way to the trash room or the laundry, and she was dressed as if on her way out to lunch. I never saw her with a hair out of place. She died with the same dignity. Her son, Bob, and his wife, Jane, with whom she had Thanksgiving, discovered her the day after, lying on her bed, composed as ever, a lady to the end. She had large dark eyes, and in her youth was a belle of New Orleans. She attended Sarah Lawrence College for a while, and came to Washington with the Redskins. She gave them unconditional love -- and exasperation. She always referred to them as "we." Sunday afternoons were sacred, as I said, and this paragon of southern graciousness and charm turned into -- there is no other word for it -- a fishwife. . . . One Sunday afternoon, I was walking with a friend past her place when the air was rent with shrieks: "No, no, no, you idiot. I'll kill you." It was followed by curses she didn't learn at the posh New Orleans finishing school she attended. "Domestic violence?" my friend asked apprehensively. "Should I break it up?" The sound of a roaring crowd was heard, and my friend said, "Phew, a Redskins fan." I told Marie about it later, and she thought it was funny, although not at the time. -- Dec. 8, 2002 (... and this is pretty damn good too....) The Supreme Court's decision to elect George W. Bush is a travesty. The best that can be said about it is that it might be marginally better for them to have the last word than for the panting Florida Legislature or the possessed House of Representatives. The majority opinion is all trees, a catalogue of technical and legal problems that makes it impossible for the voters of Florida to decide who won. The minority concentrated on the forest, the universal suffrage that is the bedrock of democracy. The majority hardly makes a pretense of seeking fairness or living up to the motto inscribed over its facade, "Equal Justice Under Law." It reinforces the widespread opinion that holds that Vice President Gore won Florida, or why else would the Bush forces have spent the last five weeks doing everything short of burning the ballots to stop a recount? The majority, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, who might as well have been wearing a Bush button on his robes, did acknowledge, in a subordinate clause, that yes, the Constitution seems designed to "leave the selection of the President to the people through their legislatures"; all they did was to assume "an unsought responsibility." That is not so. They became involved on Nov. 24 through their own folly. They received the Bush complaint that the Florida Supreme Court had imperiled the Republic by ordering the recount of some 60,000 "undercounted" ballots. The U.S. Supremes stopped the recount, and instructed the Floridians to "clarify" their decision. The Florida Supreme Court had confused their betters on the high bench by claiming that the right to vote is the supreme and sacred right for every citizen of a democracy. Scalia had taken satisfaction in reminding the country that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to vote for president, but only the chance to choose the state legislators who will pick the members of the electoral college. Once they got into it, the justices realized they really didn't have the "federal question" that would justify their meddling. But the majority fell right into the Bush strategy of delaying until the new deadline was almost upon them. Then, in their late-night decision, they groaned, "Oh, dear, where did the time go?" -- Jan. 31, 2002 Many American still hold misperceptions about Iraq war, poll finds Posted on Friday, April 23 @ 09:57:14 EDT By Frank Davies, Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - A new poll shows that 57 percent of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein gave "substantial support" to al-Qaida terrorists before the war with Iraq, despite a lack of evidence of that relationship. In addition, 45 percent of Americans have the impression that "clear evidence" was found that Iraq worked closely with Osama bin Laden's network, and a majority believe that before the war Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (38 percent) or a major program for developing them (22 percent). There's no known evidence to date that these statements are true. U.S. weapons inspector David Kay testified before Congress in January that no weapons were found and prewar intelligence on Iraq was "almost all wrong." CIA Director George Tenet last month rejected assertions by Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq had cooperated with al-Qaida. Despite that record, many Americans continue to believe that the threat from Iraqi weapons and its alleged links to terrorism justified the war. That conviction correlates closely with support for the war and President Bush, the poll released Thursday found. For example, among those who say most experts agree that Iraq had banned weapons, 72 percent plan to vote for Bush. The poll for the University of Maryland's Program in International Policy Attitudes, conducted by Knowledge Networks from March 16 to 22, surveyed 1,311 adults and had a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points. Claims by the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and links to terrorism helped shape public perceptions, said Steven Kull, the director of the program. No cause-and-effect relationship between the beliefs and support for the president could be proved, however. In the poll, roughly 4 in 10 Americans perceived the administration as saying it had clear evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction just before the war. The administration has backed off earlier claims that evidence of such weapons was found, but the president continues to say the weapons question is open. "We all thought he had weapons," Bush said Wednesday. "We're so polarized right now that people are seeing what they want to see through a very partisan lens," said Thomas Mann, a political analyst and Brookings Institution scholar. The PIPA poll did have several warning signs for the administration, as respondents have become more pessimistic about the prospects for success in Iraq. The number of those who believed the year-old war would result in greater peace and stability in the Middle East has dropped from 56 percent in a Gallup poll in May 2003 to 40 percent last month in the PIPA poll. And for the first time, a majority of Americans - 51 percent - said they thought that a majority of Iraqis wanted U.S. forces to leave. The survey was completed before the worst violence of the occupation erupted in April. Complete results can be found at the Web site of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, at www.pipa.org. How the U.S. created the monster it now has to fight' Posted on Friday, April 23 @ 09:56:02 EDT
By Randolph T. Holhut DUMMERSTON, Vt. - So many mistakes have been by the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan that it's hard to know where to begin. Perhaps the Bush team's biggest mistake has been a failure to understand the true nature of the conflict this nation is currently fighting in those two countries. The commonly offered explanation for what's become known as "the war on terror" is that Islamic culture (or more specifically, the fundamentalist branch of Islam) is at odds with secular Western values (or perhaps more specifically, the fundamentalist Christian and Jewish sects of the West) and the result of all this has been terrorism. But terrorism isn't necessarily endemic to Islamic culture. In fact, terrorism as we now know it has its origins in the last three decades of U.S. foreign policy. Mahmood Mamdani, an Ugandan-born professor of political science and anthropology at Columbia University, believes that the 9/11 attacks are not the result of radical Islam. Rather, they are the result of the rise of non-state violence and proxy warfare - two strategies developed by the U.S. in the latter stages of the Cold War. Mamdani lays out this argument in his new book, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror." In it, he describes how the CIA supported and trained terror groups and proxy armies in Indochina, Africa, Latin America and Afghanistan to fight against pro-Soviet regimes. After the Vietnam debacle, Mamdani writes that the U.S. made a conscious decision to shift its strategy against the Soviet Union from direct military confrontation to the use of privatized, stateless proxy forces to do the fighting. From UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and RENAMO (the Mozambican National Resistance) in Africa, to the Contras in Nicaragua, to the mujihadin in Afghanistan, the idea was to create "an international cadre of uprooted individuals who broke ties with family and country to join clandestine networks with a clearly defined enemy." The one thing all these forces had in common, besides CIA assistance, was that all used the random killing of civilians as a way to sow fear and paralyze the governments they were fighting against. The mujihadin in Afghanistan are a perfect example of the proxy war strategy. Mamdani writes that this force was created as a secular counterbalance to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The hope was to turn the religious schism in Islam between the minority Shia and the majority Sunnis into a political schism. On top of this, the Reagan administration saw the opportunity to form an alliance between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. to unite a billion Muslims in a holy war against the Soviet Union and its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Mamdani writes that the idea of a jihad, an armed struggle against an external enemy, hadn't been part of the Islamic world since the Crusades, but the CIA decided to revive the concept and have eager young jihadis do battle against the Soviets. It took 10 years for the mujihadin to drive out the Soviet army. Unfortunately, victory came at an exceptionally high cost for a poor country with about 15 million people - 1 million dead and another 1.5 million maimed, as well as more than 5 million refugees. Things didn't get better in Afghanistan after the Soviets were routed. The various factions, led by anti-American Islamic hardliners, turned to fighting each other with all of the first-class American weaponry they had received from the CIA. Still, the U.S. money kept flowing, even after the victors in the intramural Afghan destruct-a-thon, the Taliban, took in an old friend from the mujihadin days - Osama bin Laden - and let him use Afghanistan as a base for what eventually became al-Qaida. The term for this is blowback - the unintended boomeranging of a covert strategy. The U.S. created a jihad to defeat the Soviets, only to see it turned against the U.S. This is the backdrop that the "war on terror" is being fought under. For more than three decades, the U.S. encouraged and funded proxy armies and terrorist groups as a low-cost, low-risk way of fighting the Cold War. Now, some of the veterans of those struggles against the Soviets have decided to turn their attention toward their former paymasters. As Mumdani points out, Islam is not the driving force behind terrorism. Instead, it is years of cynical foreign policy decisions that grafted terrorism onto religion and did not consider the consequences. Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com. Posted on Friday, April 23 @ 09:46:00 EDT (3026 reads)By Molly Ivins, Working For Change
Is Bush in hock to the Saudis? Plus, more reaction on that nutty press conference AUSTIN -- There was the president at his press conference looking just like a turtle on a fence post. "They (weapons of mass destruction) could still be there. They could be hidden." Saddam Hussein is still an "ally" of the 9-11 terrorists. Hussein was still "a direct threat" to America. Oy. The Nation points out a charming little Bush thesis: "Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free." The infamous "some people" making this racist argument are cleverly hidden: I never heard of it before Bush trotted it out. I got a lovely question last week: "Why do you and your ilk (it's hard to speak for my entire ilk) hate George W. Bush so much and love Osama bin Laden?" If that's what public discussion has come down to, we really are in trouble. In fact, we're in trouble anyway. According to the Rand think tank study on peacekeeping, we would need 500,000 troops in Iraq just to provide security. Guess what? We don't have 'em. We're stuck big time. It may not be Vietnam, but it's sure a quagmire. A heavy contender in the Immortal Idiocy category is Paul Wolfowitz's pre-war assertion to Congress, "There is no history of ethnic conflict in Iraq." According to a report in the New York Times, Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds are all arming themselves in anticipation of civil war. (Some superb reporting from Iraq is being done by John Kifner and John Burns in the Times.) The perpetually peevish pundit George Will has condescended to explain to us all that our problems in Iraq are but the obligations of empire. Yup, Bwana Will-ji says we gotta take up the white man's burden. "Regime change, occupation, nation-building -- in a word, empire -- are a bloody business. Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq's urban militias." That's us, gotta steel ourselves to administer the necessary violence because THEY are making us do it. One assumes after penning this advice, Bwana Will-ji grabbed the memsahib and headed on down to the Imperialists' Ball. Meanwhile, the Heathers (as Washington's lightweight pundits are collectively known) are atwitter over the new Bob Woodward book. From reading secondhand accounts of it, the item that stopped me was not when Bush decided to invade Iraq -- as per Clinton's testimony to the 9-11 commission and Paul O'Neill's book, Bush apparently wanted to invade from before he was sworn in -- it's the Prince Bandar story that left me whomper-jawed. Do you remember when someone who was connected to someone who was connected to someone who was connected to China was found to have raised money for Bill Clinton? The right wing came completely unglued over it, and all manner of hideous conspiracy theories were advanced. Maybe the Saudis trying to influence our elections shouldn't startle me -- the new book "House of Bush, House of Saud" is all about that connection. Still, the non-denial denials from the White House and the Saudis smell like rotten meat. Just what we need: a prez in hock to the Saudis. One of the eerie things about Bush's press conference performance was just how divorced from reality he is. Not only is he still claiming we're going to find the WMD and that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9-11, but he actually claimed we went to war to save the credibility of the United Nations. The man is living in Fantasyland. As Lewis Lapham points out in an essay in the current Harper's, we are seeing "the systematic substitution of ideological certainty for reasonable doubt across the entire spectrum of issues bearing on the public health and welfare. ... The disdain for disloyal or unpatriotic fact defines the Bush Administration's approach not only to questions likely to embarrass the oil, weapons and insurance industries but also to those that might interfere with its fanciful conceptions of war and money." Lapham cites the report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, "Scientific Integrity in Policymaking," a depressing collection of instances in which the administration has either censored or ignored scientific fact. Those who have known Bush for a long time know he is capable of leaving the realm of fact and logic in favor of his "gut" or "instinct" on several issues. It seems to me the trait is becoming more pronounced. Denying that Iraq is a rapidly escalating tragedy will do nothing to help us or the Iraqis get out of it. Pointing out that it's a mess does not make one a fan of Osama bin Laden nor a bigot concerning "brown-skinned people." Let's get a grip here, team. Contributed Friday, April 23 @ 09:49:38 EDT Surely even a child can understand the difference between good and evil. Kerry's Military Records Show a Highly Praised Officer By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- Records of John Kerry's Vietnam War service released Wednesday show a highly praised naval officer with an Ivy League education who spoke fluent French and had raced sailboats -- the fruits of a privileged upbringing that set him apart from the typical seaman. With Republicans questioning his service in Vietnam, the Democratic candidate for president posted more than 120 pages of military records on his campaign Web site. Several describe him as a gutsy commander undertaking a dangerous assignment in Vietnam and detail some of the actions that won three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star. Kerry's most harrowing experience came during the nearly five months when he commanded a swiftboat along Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The future Massachusetts senator was commended for gallantry, heroism and valor during the tour, which was cut short when Kerry was wounded three times and sent back to the United States. Throughout his four years of active duty, Kerry's superiors gave him glowing evaluations, citing his maturity, intelligence and immaculate appearance. He was recommended for early promotion, and when he left the Navy in 970 to run for Congress, his commanding officer said it was the Navy's loss. The lowest marks Kerry earned were the equivalent of average -- in military bearing, reliability and initiative. But narrative comments from his commanding officers said he was diplomatic, charismatic, decisive and well-liked by his men. "Intelligent, mature and rich in educational background and experience, Ensign Kerry is one of the finest young officers I have ever met and without question one of the most promising," wrote Capt. Allen Slifer, Kerry's supervisor aboard the USS Gridley, where he served his first tour in Vietnam but was far removed from combat as an electrical officer. Kerry's education included Swiss boarding school, and he won speaking and debating awards and was class orator at Yale University's commencement. He lettered in varsity soccer and lacrosse, fenced, had a private pilot's license and had experience sailing and ocean racing. Kerry traveled throughout Europe in his youth and spoke fluent French and some German. His supervising officer later commended him for taking it upon himself to learn Vietnamese. Kerry cited his sailing experience before the Navy when he volunteered to command a swiftboat, a 50-foot-long craft that could operate at high speeds in the rough waters of Vietnam's rivers and tributaries. Some critics have questioned whether Kerry's injuries were severe enough to warrant his reassignment to the United States. The records briefly describe shrapnel wounds to his arm and thigh for the first two Purple Hearts, but they don't detail the severity of the wounds. According to a naval instruction document provided by Kerry's campaign, anyone serving in Vietnam who was wounded three times, regardless of the nature of the wound or treatment required, "will not be ordered to service in Vietnam and contiguous waters." On Feb. 28, 1969, Kerry's craft and two other boats came under heavy fire from the riverbanks. Kerry ordered his units to turn into the ambush and sent men ashore to charge the enemy. According to the records, an enemy soldier holding a loaded rocket launcher sprang up within 10 feet of Kerry's boat and fled. Kerry leapt ashore, ran down the man and killed him. Kerry and his men chased or killed all the enemy soldiers in the area, captured enemy weapons and then returned to the boat only to come under fire from the opposite bank as they began to pull away. Kerry again beached his boat and led a party ashore to pursue the enemy, and they successfully silenced the shooting. Later, the boats were again under fire, but Kerry initiated a heavy response that killed 10 Viet Cong and wounded another with no casualties to his own men. He won the Silver Star "for gallantry and intrepidity in action" that day. Two weeks later, Kerry was engaged in another fire fight that resulted in a Bronze Star for heroic achievement and the third Purple Heart that would result in his reassignment out of Vietnam. Kerry was commanding one of five boats on patrol on March 13, 1969, when two mines detonated almost simultaneously -- one beneath another boat and one near Kerry's craft. Shrapnel hit Kerry's buttocks, and his right arm was bleeding from contusions, but he rescued a shipmate who had been thrown overboard in the blast and was under sniper fire from both banks. Kerry then directed his crew to return to the other damaged craft and tow it to safety. In April 1969, Kerry was sent stateside to the Military Sea Transportation Service, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, in Brooklyn, N.Y. On Nov. 21, 1969, Kerry requested that he be released from his commitment to serve actively until August 1970 so that he could run for Congress. He was promoted to full lieutenant on Jan. 1, 1970, and soon after was discharged from active duty and became a reservist. |
