Bush 'Desertion' Charge Debunked

Straight men don't whine like girly men do.

It's not going to be an issue of whining. It'll be an issue of kicking his arse and getting an Article 15 or registering a complaint to solve the problem once an for all. Personally, I wouldn't go losing half-a-month's pay for two or three months just because the gay guy won't back down.

Ping.

Ronald Reagan made movies during World War II.

He made them under orders from his commanding officers, as he was enlisted. He wasn't allowed in combat because he was blind as a bat and wore contact lenses. He was 4-F, but insisted on being inducted anyway.

I still can't believe that Peter Jennings asked Clark the question, especially the way he did - Unsubstantiated, etc.

P.S.
Michael Moore is a big fat idiot.

Weasley Clark is CERTIFIABLE...just like his idol, Michael Moore.

Both are losers and nut cases. They deserve each other.

"National Guard regulations allowed Guard members to miss duty as long as it was made up within the same quarter.

True, I've done it myself...

"Michael Moore is a big fat idiot."

True, But, I agree with him on the way we run our elections...wide open to vote scamming...we should run them more like Canada.. ie... count the ballots right there at the polling places, etc...

I can't find the quoted N Y Times story online.

He made them under orders from his commanding officers, as he was enlisted.

YOu are right and I was wrong. Reagan went into the Army reserves in 1937 as an officer not an enlisted man. He went on active duty in 1942 after first being rejected for physical reasons. He took a second physical and passed. He left the service as a Captain in the Army.

Interesting enough I, had read a news story several years ago that reported Reagan had flunked his induction physical. He did flunk the physical. The implication was he, like "many movie stars and Howard Dean" convienently flunked a physical to avoid service. The facts are Reagan was 41 and he had to apply for active duty. Men over 40 were not subject to military duty. The most likely thing is the military did not want men over 40. That is the most likely reason for the physical flunk out. He had to reapply to get on active duty.

It was apparently like the Bush stories.. half truths to try to fool the reader.. and it fooled me. They try to spin Bush as not serving, because he got permission to substitute training days, they infer he had not trained. In fact Bush did the training. But he did it on days that allowed him to do his regular job and train with the Guard.

That was not uncommon at the time. After I got off active duty, I servered 3 years in the National Guard in the 60's. My job had me working for short periods in several states other than my home state. The Guard would schedule me to train with units that were conducting training when I was at home. I did two or three week end drills a year with other than my home unit.

I just presented a request with a supporting letter from my employer and the Guard would reschedule me for training with an outfit that was having drill on weekends when I was at home. It was no big deal. The Guard did not want to make it hard on me or my employer. The training was the same, it was just with a different Unit on a different week end.

Thanks for correcting me.

Well, can we get the record straight? The accusation of Bush going AWOL is STILL repeated to this day and the Bushies have to get on this right now and set them straight. There is no reason why they should continue to repeat the charge in people's ignorance. It's slander.

W Ping...

Thanks! Bookmarking for future battles!

Timely bump.

I saw the Peter Jennings' exchange with Wesley Clark, and I must say that I was perplexed. Jennings, a liberal who has bashed Bush in the past, is now defending Bush??? Props to Jennings.

Now that Planet Dean has been taken out by the Clintonista Media Death Star, Clark has outlived his usefulness.

Kerry lost the right to any accolades for his Vietnam service with his shameful slander of his peers when he returned to the USA. He is even more vile than Hanoi Jane.

"I don't know whether [Moore's desertion charge] is supported by the facts or not," Clark replied

But do you know what is supported by the facts, Weasley? ....That you were relieved of your command in the Balkans due to issues of "character and integrity."

"Kerry came back upset with what he'd been sent to do.
That's not terribly different from a lot of guys in a lot of wars. His next step in life was to do what he could do, and that turned out to be the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War."

Most accounts say Kerry had no problems with the war when he first came back. He intended to run for Congress as a war hero. When it became clear to him that wouldn't fly, he became an anti-war hero.

"John Kerry should have taken that occasion to finally toss his medals back to the scumbuckets in Congress who had so totally shamed our nation and wasted so many of our friends."

Kerry didn't throw HIS medals onto the Capitol steps. He threw SOMEONE else's and claimed they were his.

His are now on the wall of his Senate office, so that he can remind people of what a hero he was for four months 33 years ago.

"Perhaps, but I can guarantee that Kerry's assignment was far less "cushier" than Bush's nominal stint in the Texas Air National Guard. We should be honest with ourselves here; Kerry's military record outshines Bush's, and that may or may not be a liability in the upcoming race."

Really? To avoid the draft Kerry joined the Navy as an officer. He served his first tour on a frigate off the VN coast. He never was in any danger. And his tour was only four months.

His second tour, on a Swift boat was also only for four months. He got out on a technicality, as noted before, for his three purple hearts--none of which ever cost him a day of duty according to his commanding officer.

BTW, Kerry was a pilot, had a pilots license, liked to try to do stunts, like flying under the Golden Gate bridge. You have to wonder why he didn't volunteer to go into the Air Force.

Bush went into an Air National Guard unit that was rated the best in the country. MANY of its members served time in Vietnam. He could have easily have been among them. He flew one of the most dangerous planes of its (or any other) day. He faces real life danger every time he took off and landed. And he faced that danger for more than four months.

BullSh*t!!! Hanoi Jane went into the side of the enemy and sat on an ack ack gun and posed smiling. Kerry used the freedom of speech he bled and killed for as an American - as part of the political process - before congress.

I'll see your BS and raise it one.

John Kerry, we know, is running against John Kerry: his own voting record. But there is another record that John Kerry is running against, and this has to do with his very emergence as a Democratic politician: Kerry, the proud Vietnam veteran vs. Kerry, the antiwar activist who accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of the most heinous atrocities imaginable.
John Kerry not only served honorably in Vietnam, but also with distinction, earning a Silver Star (America's third-highest award for valor), a Bronze Star, and three awards of the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat as a swift-boat commander. Kerry did not return from Vietnam a radical antiwar activist. According to the indispensable Stolen Valor, by H. G. "Jug" Burkett and Genna Whitley, "Friends said that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. 'I thought of him as a rather normal vet,' a friend said to a reporter, 'glad to be out but not terribly uptight about the war.' Another acquaintance who talked to Kerry about his political ambitions called him a 'very charismatic fellow looking for a good issue.'" Apparently, this good issue would be Vietnam.
Kerry hooked up with an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Two events cooked up by this group went a long way toward cementing in the public mind the image of Vietnam as one big atrocity. The first of these was the January 31, 1971, "Winter Soldier Investigation," organized by "the usual suspects" among antiwar celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, and Kennedy-assassination conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane. Here, individuals purporting to be Vietnam veterans told horrible stories of atrocities in Vietnam: using prisoners for target practice, throwing them out of helicopters, cutting off the ears of dead Viet Cong soldiers, burning villages, and gang-raping women as a matter of course.
The second event was "Dewey Canyon III," or what VVAW called a "limited incursion into the country of Congress" in April of 1971. It was during this VVAW "operation" that John Kerry first came to public attention. The group marched on Congress to deliver petitions to Congress and then to the White House. The highlight of this event occurred when veterans threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, symbolizing a rebuke to the government that they claimed had betrayed them. One of the veterans flinging medals back in the face of his government was John Kerry, although it turns out they were not his medals, but someone else's.
Several days later Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His speech, touted as a spontaneous rhetorical endeavor, was a tour de force, convincing many Americans that their country had indeed waged a merciless and immoral war in Vietnam. It was particularly powerful because Kerry did not fit the antiwar-protester mold — he was no scruffy, wide-eyed hippie. He was instead the best that America had to offer. He was, according to Burkett and Whitley, the "All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government."
Kerry began by referring to the Winter Soldiers Investigation in Detroit. Here, he claimed, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
This is quite a bill of particulars to lay at the feet of the U.S. military. He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course, indeed, that it was American policy to commit such atrocities.
In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie. It was inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book entitled Conversations with Americans, which claimed to recount atrocity stories by Vietnam veterans. This book was panned by James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, not exactly known as supporters of the Vietnam War. Sheehan in particular demonstrated that many of Lane's "eye witnesses" either had never served in Vietnam or had not done so in the capacity they claimed.
Nonetheless, Sen. Mark Hatfield inserted the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record and asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to investigate the war crimes allegedly committed by Marines. When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam.
Kerry's 1971 testimony includes every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and the men who served there. It is part of the reason that even today, people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe the worst about the Vietnam War and those who fought it. This predisposition was driven home by the fraudulent "Tailwind" episode some months ago.
The first cliché is that atrocities were widespread in Vietnam. But this is nonsense. Atrocities did occur in Vietnam, but they were far from widespread. Between 1965 and 1973, 201 soldiers and 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against the Vietnamese. Of course, the fact that many crimes, either in war or peace, go unreported, combined with the particular difficulties encountered by Americans fighting in Vietnam, suggest that more such acts were committed than reported or tried.
But even Daniel Ellsberg, a severe critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam, rejected the argument that the biggest U.S. atrocity in Vietnam, My Lai, was in any way a normal event: "My Lai was beyond the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every soldier in Vietnam. They know it was wrong....The men who were at My Lai knew there were aspects out of the ordinary. That is why they tried to hide the event, talked about it to no one, discussed it very little even among themselves."
My Lai was an extreme case, but anyone who has been in combat understands the thin line between permissible acts and atrocity. The first and potentially most powerful emotion in combat is fear arising from the instinct of self-preservation. But in soldiers, fear is overcome by what the Greeks called thumos, spiritedness and righteous anger. In the Iliad, it is thumos, awakened by the death of his comrade Patroclus that causes Achilles to leave sulking in his tent and wade into the Trojans.
But unchecked, thumos can engender rage and frenzy. It is the role of leadership, which provides strategic context for killing and enforces discipline, to prevent this outcome. Such leadership was not in evidence at My Lai.
But My Lai also must be placed within a larger context. The NVA and VC frequently committed atrocities, not as a result of thumos run amok, but as a matter of policy. While left-wing anti-war critics of U.S. policy in Vietnam were always quick to invoke Auschwitz and the Nazis in discussing alleged American atrocities, they were silent about Hue City, where a month and a half before My Lai, the North Vietnamese and VC systematically murdered 3,000 people. They were also willing to excuse Pol Pot's mass murderer of upwards of a million Cambodians.
The second cliché is that is that Vietnam scarred an entire generation of young men. But for years, many of us who served in Vietnam tried to make the case that the popular image of the Vietnam vet as maladjusted loser, dehumanized killer, or ticking "time bomb" was at odds with reality. Indeed, it was our experience that those who had served in Vietnam generally did so with honor, decency, and restraint; that despite often being viewed with distrust or opprobrium at home, most had asked for nothing but to be left alone to make the transition back to civilian life; and that most had in fact made that transition if not always smoothly, at least successfully.
But the press could always find the stereotypical, traumatized vet who could be counted on to tell the most harrowing and gruesome stories of combat in Vietnam, often involving atrocities, the sort of stories that John Kerry gave credence to in his 1971 testimony. Many of the war stories recounted by these individuals were wildly implausible to any one who had been in Vietnam, but credulous journalists, most of whom had no military experience, uncritically passed their reports along to the public.
I had always agreed with the observation of the late Harry Summers, a well-known military commentator who served as an infantryman in Korean and Vietnam, that the story teller's distance from the battle zone was directly proportional to the gruesomeness of his atrocity story. But until the publication of the aforementioned Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and its History, neither Harry nor I any idea just how true his observation was.
In the course of trying to raise money for a Texas Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Burkett discovered that reporters were only interested in homeless veterans and drug abuse and that the corporate leaders he approached had bought into the popular image of Vietnam veterans. They were not honorable men who took pride in their service, but whining welfare cases, bellyaching about what an immoral government did to them.
Fed up, Burkett did something that any reporter worth his or her salt could have done: he used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to check the actual records of the "image makers" used by reporters to flesh out their stories on homelessness, Agent Orange, suicide, drug abuse, criminality, or alcoholism. What he found was astounding. More often than not, the showcase "veteran" who cried on camera about his dead buddies, about committing or witnessing atrocities, or about some heroic action in combat that led him to the current dead end in his life, was an impostor.
Indeed, Burkett discovered that over the last decade, some 1,700 individuals, including some of the most prominent examples of the Vietnam veteran as dysfunctional loser, had fabricated their war stories. Many had never even been in the service. Others, had been, but had never been in Vietnam.
Stolen Valor made it clear why John Kerry's testimony in 1971 slandered an entire generation of soldiers. Kerry gave credence to the claim that the war was fought primarily by reluctant draftees, predominantly composed of the poor, the young, or racial minorities.
The record shows something different, indicating that 86 percent of those who died during the war were white and 12.5 percent were black, from an age group in which blacks comprised 13.1 percent of the population. Two thirds of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers, and volunteers accounted for 77 percent of combat deaths.
Kerry portrayed the Vietnam veteran as ashamed of his service:
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped 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 the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, and so when in 30 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 the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning. But a comprehensive 1980 survey commissioned by Veterans' Administration (VA) reported that 91 percent of those who had seen combat in Vietnam were "glad they had served their country;" 80 percent disagreed with the statement that "the US took advantage of me;" and nearly two out of three would go to Vietnam again, even knowing how the war would end.
Today, Sen. Kerry appeals to veterans in his quest for the White House. He invokes his Vietnam service at every turn. But an honest, enterprising reporter should ask Sen. Kerry this: Were you lying in 1971 or are you lying now? We do know that his speech was not the spontaneous, emotional, from-the-heart offering that he suggested it was. Burkett and Whitley report that instead, "it had been carefully crafted by a speech writer for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who also tutored him on how to present it."
But the issue goes far beyond theatrics. If he believes his 1971 indictment of his country and his fellow veterans was true, then he couldn't possibly be proud of his Vietnam service. Who can be proud of committing war crimes of the sort that Kerry recounted in his 1971 testimony? But if he is proud of his service today, perhaps it is because he always knew that his indictment in 1971 was a piece of political theater that he, an aspiring politician, exploited merely as a "good issue." If the latter is true, he should apologize to every veteran of that war for slandering them to advance his political fortunes.

Source

Kerry is a disgrace, as are people who try to defend his slander of Vietnam veterans.