Salon: Kerry vs. the chicken hawks

[kskiska]

John Kerry's band of Vietnam War brothers has the Bush army running for their lives.

It was an unscripted scene, nothing like the polished photo ops the Bush team, plundering the resources of the government, liked to put together. Near the end of the Iowa caucus campaign, former Green Beret Jim Rassmann stood on a Des Moines stage and quietly described how John Kerry had saved his life in Vietnam. By the time he was finished, something remarkable had happened: a presidential challenger had, as the world watched, grown larger than the incumbent president.

But something even more important happened as well: In that moment, Vietnam veterans, with characteristic modesty, claimed their long-overdue seat at the head table of American politics. And that brought an unexpected threat to the Bush team's reelection plans, which relied on beating up liberals who didn't know how to fight back. Standing beside Kerry at campaign stops, working the phones, or simply filling the front rows, the veterans, powerless but for the witness they bore, took aim to blow those plans away.

Their presence made the election itself larger. The contest became more than a choice between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. It became a referendum on whether Vietnam still matters to us, and perhaps on whether it ever did. And thus it became our best, and perhaps last, chance to use the Vietnam War to make ourselves a better nation, rather than allow it to make us a worse one.

Like Dylan's thin man, the Bush team knew something was happening, but they didn't know what it was. Almost without thinking, they reached for the weapon they'd used to eviscerate Clinton and everyone in his vicinity: character. Though it has multiple uses, in the context of war "character" is a code word for courage and patriotism, just as "states' rights," "soft on crime" and "quotas" are for race. It lets a skilled attacker pretend to be above the fray by refraining from directly calling others unpatriotic, while making clear that they are.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/19/bush/index.html

[onehandle]

1. Beautiful!

John Kerry's band of Vietnam War brothers has the Bush army running for their lives.

(I was just on my way to post this story)

[Frances]

2. I want to see Veterans for Kerry bumper stickers

on the trucks of construction workers and other blue-collar men and women who defected to Reagan and got shafted by the Republican party

[hlthe2b]

3. No matter who you support, I hope all DUers will read this....

While you can choose to ignore the more positive aspects to Kerry as nominee from the article, should you choose, there is plenty more in the piece that bears noting and understanding.

A VERY important article, I believe. As one who grew up in the Vietnam era, I vividly remember how poorly many returning Vets were treated by an American populace that had finally awakened to the disaster that was the Vietnam War (and wasn't always able to reconcile the role of our young men sent there with the culpability of our lying government). I am pleased to see these VETS step up to assert themselves in the political discourse. I can only hope that they bring many of their disenfranchised brethren along with them. We need to hear from them (and I believe they NEED to be heard at long last).