"JDKAHN" wrote in message
...
I'd posted this in the "liar and fraud" thread but someone suggested
nobody
would see it as that thread had kinda petered out. It's a good summary of
the reality of Bush's Guard record:


How a guy who put in 600 hours in F106s "part time" is supposed to be a
shirker is beyond me. Meanwhile, sKerry bugged out of Nam with 3
scratches
after only 4 months. It's one thing for an enlisted man or draftee to
"game
the system" to bug out early, quite another for a commissioned Navy
officer
to do so. Absolutely despicable. Which is why 80% of his unit mates
despise him. Plus meeting the VC later in Paris. Good lord...

Here's a great summary of Bush's guard service from the Mudville Gazette
weblog. I will take the word of Bush's contemporaries and commanders over
Killian's typist who BTW is a partisan democrat and Bush hater, therefore
whos credibility is zero anyway, any time. Juan you are a classic Micheal
Moore Moonbat Leftist. And that says everything.


And you're a classic KKKristian KKKonservative right wing conflict addict.
But if you must be OT suit yourself.

U.S. democracy: ugly but it works
The proof is in what happens when Americans figure out they've been
conned -- just like the Vietnam War

Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun


April 1, 2004

Democracy in the United States can be ugly. It can be brutal. It can
be downright creepy when the zealots on the far left and the far right
start howling for political blood. Or playing the race card. Or
wrapping themselves in the Stars and Stripes. Or invoking the
blessings of the Almighty as though God were some crooked Nixonesque
politician.

Yet despite the warts and the sleaze and the excess, one has to
acknowledge that democracy practised American-style works.

The best proof is what happens when the American people start to
figure out they've been had by their own leaders. And boy, did the
patriots get conned by President George W. Bush and the
neo-conservative Pied Pipers who merrily led them into Iraq,
squandering vast amounts of the country's hard-won treasure in the
process.

Worse, they got fleeced. The wealthy few got massive tax cuts, the
corporate cronies got rich contracts to rebuild what shock and awe had
demolished, most of the people just got saddled with a bill so huge
that it may take generations to repay.

One Associated Press report earlier this year estimated that
accumulated U.S. deficits over the next decade might reach $2.4
trillion -- yes, that's trillion -- an amount larger than the entire
2004 U.S. budget.

No wonder the International Monetary Fund has been warning that
excessive deficits in the U.S. caused by recession, tax cuts and war
spending could damage the global economy.

All this for a war based on a pretext which was spun from deceptions
and duplicities that were themselves concocted in the service of an
agenda thick with ideology but thin on the forethought.

Well, logic says it's either that, or one accepts that the folks who
marched into Iraq really believed they were there to remove an arsenal
of weapons that was only 45 minutes from wreaking hideous mass
destruction on London. Which, given the extensive advice to the
contrary, would make the invaders and their intelligence agencies the
stupidest collection of incompetents since Millard Filmore failed in
his attempt to get re-elected as president running for the American
Know Nothing Party.

I note with some amusement that even true blue icons like Walter
Cronkite are now reported to be comparing the American misadventure in
Iraq to the nightmarish experience of Vietnam.

I had an eerie sense of deja vu when I came over the brief newspaper
item reporting an interview the avuncular conscience of American
journalism granted a bunch of college kids in a class being taught by
an old CBS News colleague. I'm old enough to remember the stunned
reaction when he reported on the evening news that the war in Vietnam
looked unwinnable.

"I see a very close parallel [with Vietnam]," Cronkite was quoted as
saying this time. "I don't find any real substance in the argument
that there's no parallel, which is what the administration would
like."

These days, if I do a quick survey of the news columns it seems that
everybody is making the comparison. Most tellingly, those -- like
Cronkite -- who were in Vietnam are finding troubling parallels with
Iraq.

Then there's Brent Scowcroft, the former U.S. national security
adviser who served the first Bush administration. He's quoted in the
Sydney Morning Herald as having warned in an interview with the
Portuguese newspaper Expresso that the long-term consequences of the
American involvement in Iraq could be even worse than Vietnam.

"Our exit from that country did not have grave consequences, while if
we wanted to get out of Iraq today, the consequences would be very
deep," Scowcroft said.

The Herald says he's the expert who reviewed the intelligence service
for the current U.S. administration and was a critic of the invasion
of Iraq because it relieved the pressure on the really dangerous
terrorists in al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

After the bombings in Bali, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Moscow,
Israel, the Philippines, the massacre in Madrid and the anti-terrorist
operation that just seized half a tonne of explosive in the middle of
London, it's difficult to argue that Scowcroft didn't have a good
point about just where the imminent threat to civil society lay.

All of which helps explain why there's such a frenzy of vilification
surrounding recent statements to the same effect by anti-terror expert
Richard Clarke, one of the most experienced and senior veterans of
both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Clarke has said bluntly that the Bush administration was so fixated on
its neo-con agenda for Iraq that it pointedly ignored his and other
warnings about the genuine threat posed by al-Qaida -- a failure of
comprehension that resulted in the World Trade Center massacre.

Yet the intensity of the criticism now directed at Clarke should
remind us of one thing that's more important than the debate. American
democracy works. And as cruel as the process can be, it's working
right now.

The nastiness of the discussion reflects less on Clarke than on the
fact that those who persuaded the public that a war in Iraq was
essential to protect the U.S. from terrorists also understand the
political consequences if the American people come to believe they've
been fed a self-serving lie.



© The Vancouver Sun 2004


Once the global beacon of freedom, America has become a belligerent,
warmongering, incipient police state.