Posted on 02/14/2004 4:00:33 AM PST by ultima ratio
Dear Senator Byrd By Lewis F. McIntyre FrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2004
Below is USN (Ret) CDR Lewis F. McIntyre's letter to Senator Byrd about President Bush's visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln.
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Senator Byrd,
As a retired Naval Officer, with two Gulf carrier deployments under my belt, I find your criticism of President Bush's visit to the Lincoln offensive in the extreme! This is the first time that the Commander-in-Chief took time out of his schedule to pay a visit to thank those who served in the line of fire, in a way that was both dramatic and meaningful to those on the carrier.
Perhaps if LBJ got off his fat ass to do something similar, our troops' morale in Vietnam might not have been so low.
As a Naval officer, I am extremely sensitive to styles of leadership.
That is, after all, our stock in trade. And it was not lost on me that the President spent about thirty seconds shaking hands with the Admiral, CO, and CAG (If you don't know these abbreviations just look them up in your Funk &Wagnalls!) He then spent the next forty-five minutes putting himself at the disposal of the people who make that ship work, the yellow shirts, the green shirts, thepurple shirts, the chiefs, the sailors.
If you don't know the significance of those colored shirts, look it up in your Blue Jacket's Manual. Not dressed out in formal uniform (I understand at Bush's request), but in their greasy, smelly, sweaty working uniforms ... working a flight deck is hot, hard work. And yet he, in his flight suit, put himself at their disposal, this was their moment for 19 or 20 something year old kids a few years out of high school, to get a picture of themselves with the President of the United States, his arm draped around their shoulder. That is a moment that those kids never dreamed would ever happen to them, maybe not even when they knew he was coming aboard. Surely, he would see the brass, not the troops. But it was the troops to whom he gave his time ... and it was the most natural moment in the world. You might have thought it was a family reunion, and in a way, it was...
Bush is one of them, the common man, and while he is still the most powerful man on the planet right now. He hasn't lost his touch for them.
Was it a political moment?
What moment of a president's life is NOT a political moment? Was it grand standing, to come in to an OK pass to a 4 wire, a bit high in close, correcting, left of centerline? Well, hell, he didn't fly the approach anyway, though I understand from the pilots who flew him that he did a pretty good job at formation flying, tucked in close for a lead change. You can always tell a fighter pilot, you just can't tell him very much. And, apparently after thirty years, it all comes back, with a little coaching, I am sure. Frankly, I would have liked to see him come aboard in an FA-18, but the Secret Service vetoed that, and Bush accepted their judgment ... again, a mark of a good leader. If you had spent some time in the service, instead of the Klan, you might understand the significance of that moment to all the men and women aboard the Lincoln, and indeed to all the men and women in the service who shared that moment vicariously. But you chose the bedsheet instead of the uniform, and so you don't.
I am half-tempted to move to West Virginia just so I could vote against you in your next election.
Lewis F. McIntyre CDR, USN (Ret)
OUCH!!! :)
His membership in the Klan was the only route to a job and politics for a poor man in those days. Senator Rockefeller did not face those same obstacles years later.
Unfortunately, Senator Byrd has lost more than his honor and respect. He lost his mind in 1998.
Whereas Bubble Squeak Byrd spends 45 minutes a day standing in front of an empty Senate running his beak off about nothing of any importance or value to his constituents.
1. Americans are glad Saddam is gone and his rotten kids are dead.
We're glad GWB had the balls Clinton didn't have, and we're glad that GWB gave us the reason, or even just the cover, to go kick his ass out of power...3000 Americans were killed by these bastards and Saddam was happy about it and WOULD have helped if he didn't.
This bastard was paying suicide bombers...Americans don't give a damn whether we ever find those WMD, we wanted his head and we got it.
That's why Libya came across and the others will too....they know that GWB means what he says and if they don't we're coming after them, next. You betcha.
The UN and the rest of the world knows GWB and America means what it says, this ain't the clinton's any more....
2. Kerry will never be elected President.
Americans have a deep sense of fairness, and even those of us who didn't go to Viet Nam, knew that our friends that did, didn't want to go, and those of us MEN, who were subjected to the draft, (and you women can just stay out of this...it's like having a baby....that's yours, the draft is ours) felt deep inside for the friends we lost, and that POS Kerry joining Hanoi Jane, (a woman not subjected to the draft, and a traitor) was a betrayal, and we are never going to forgive him for his testmony against the soldiers who were fighting....we protesetd the war, not those who were FORCED, OFTEN against their will, to go fight it.......
So you liberals in the press and the PC democrats can whistle any tune or tell any lie you want.....We're with GWB and that's the way it is.
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