Tell your brother that he is a patriot and a gentleman. I appreciate the fact that he feels so strongly about this election and wants to express his anger.
I would say that Kerry as a citizen and as a disgruntled officer in our military had a personal right to work outside the system of government, oppose our congressional and executive decisions with respect to the war in Vietnam, and he even had a right to lead the VVAW in the direction he did, cooperating with Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda, and so forth.
Eeach of these things may have earned him a position of special emnity with troops who were fighting to win in Vietnam. The American people may or may not share that anger.
What they are increasingly sharing is the sense that this man has forfeited his desirability as our next commander in chief. If he couldn't abide by the directives of a duly elected president, Nixon, who had decided to end American involvement in the war honorably and with continous and vigorous support from our military industrial establishment, then Kerry was engaged in direct civil disobedience.
Americans can decide today if those acts were worthy. When Henry David Thoreau sat at Walden Pond and sat out paying his taxes during the Mexican war because of a fit of conscience, Americans failed to agree with him. They might have respected his mode of operation, and they might have appreciated his thoughts on remaining free from government intrusion into the realm of conscience, but they continued to support their troops.
This situation is very different because Kerry is no HDT. He's no great thinker who can inspire us to see beyond the temporal and corporeal world of our petty politics. Kerry undermined a selfless act of America and its allies. He opposed our opposition to Maoism and Stalinism, saying that we were fighting for "nothing."
Around a hundred million people had already been brutally murdered by communists when Kerry uttered those ugly words.
In November, Americans will speak their minds. Did they support the Vietnam war? Maybe not. Did they support President Nixon's promise to get us out of it without betraying our friends? Yes, and he won two elections on those promises. If he hadn't been impeached, Saigon might have never fallen. But the Kerrys, the Fondas, and the Ramsey Clarks were no where to be found when the Cambodian killing field agrarian maoist machinery fired up its evil mills of Satan.
Kerry was just another opportunistic, opinionated American in 1971. He also happened to be on the wrong side of history. Americans will think about that and decide for themselves.
Bump!
He will appreciate your kind comments. I'm forwarding this thread to him.