Harkin: Fear the military

According to Tom Harkin, a man who served his country for decades in the military and follows a family tradition of service must be feared rather than respected. Harkin told reporters that John McCain’s family history of service makes him too “militaristic” to be President, unlike those who got drafted against their will to serve the nation. Unfortunately, neither describes Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton: Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s family background as the son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military, “and he has a hard time thinking beyond that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., said Friday. “I think he’s trapped in that,” Harkin said in a conference call with Iowa reporters. “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.” Harkin said that “it’s one thing to have been drafted and served, but another thing when you come from generations of military people and that’s just how you’re steeped, how you’ve learned, how you’ve grown up.” A McCain spokesman said Harkin’s remarks were offensive and showed that Democrats are out of touch with Americans’ values. “Senator Harkin’s comments are an affront to the many thousands of Iowans who have served our country so valiantly for generations,” said spokesman Jeff Sadosky. “This sort of attack shows just how out of touch Democratic leadership has become with the values that have made our country so great.” So let’s get this straight. Anyone who serves in the military is at least a little suspect, but those who volunteer should be considered warmongers, especially if they follow their father and grandfather into the service of their country. It’s one thing to have been drafted — that excuses someone from their association with the military — but to have actually volunteered? Quelle horror! This comes, of course, from the same party whose Senate Intelligence chair suggested that military pilots have little human feeling. It precedes an effort by the New York Times tomorrow, along with some of McCain’s oh-so-courageous unnamed Senate colleagues, to suggest that McCain didn’t really experience Vietnam because his five-plus years as a POW kept him from learning all of the lessons John Kerry experienced in his three months in a Swift Boat. This also comes from the same party that celebrated Kerry’s military experience while denigrating George Bush’s National Guard service. According to Harkin today, Bush would be a better candidate — right? If the Democrats want to party like it’s 1968, that’s their choice. The rest of America grew up. People stopped drinking the New Left Kool-aid a long time ago and quit treating veterans like baby-killers and Dr. Strangelove. Tom Harkin, Jay Rockefeller, the New York Times, and a good portion of the Left apparently never stopped.

Funny you say that, as Harkin as always struck me as a little odd in a sexual sort of way.

Speaking of which, Obama's pal Bill Ayers, seems a little strange in this regard as well...

"During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara's picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century."

(snip)

"Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as:

'Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but 'it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,' he said."

(snip)

"He also writes about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation as they tried to 'smash monogamy.' The Weathermen were 'an army of lovers,' he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male friend."

New York Times, Sept 11, 2001:
"No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

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From "Remembering a Sixties Terrorist" -by Donna Ron
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 04, 2006:

"when I was getting ready to leave [Bill] Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up. At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black -- that I was a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he ****** me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger **** me angrily while I hated myself."

Remembering a Sixties Terrorist -by Donna Ron
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 04, 2006:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=9E8CD8A7-E90B-4311-8AA9-AEFD014A14B2

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"In July 1969, Dohrn, Eleanor Raskin, Dianne Donghi, Peter Clapp, David Millstone and Diana Oughton, all representing 'Weatherman', as Dohrn's faction was now called, traveled to Cuba and met with representatives of the North Vietnamese and Cuban governments."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn

From David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
"FBI files from 1976, recently made public under the Freedom of Information Act, confirm the connections between Weatherman, Havana, and Moscow. Weatherman leaders like Mark Rudd traveled illegally to Havana in 1968 to engage in terrorist training. There, camps set up by Soviet KGB Colonel Vadim Kotchergine were educating Westerners both in Marxist philosophy and urban warfare."
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808

July 27, 1970: The United States Army base at The Presidio in San Francisco is bombed on the 11th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. [NYTimes, 7/27/70] :
Chronology of Weather Underground attacks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)#Chronology_of_events __________________________________________________

...Harkin’s wife Ruth, whom he met when both were studying law at Catholic University, moved from the powerful law firm of Vernon Jordan and Robert Strauss – Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLC – in 1993 when appointed by President Bill Clinton as chairman and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). At OPIC she facilitated deals with Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.

Ruth Harkin appears to have played a role in President Clinton’s seizure of low-sulfur coal lands in Utah that gave a potential $1 trillion in assets to the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army and the Indonesia-based Lippo Industries, which control the world’s only other major deposits of this kind of coal used by U.S. power plants. These foreign entities funneled huge amounts of money to the Clintons and to the Democratic Party.

While Ruth Harkin ran OPIC for President Clinton, it channeled $748 million to Democratic Party benefactor Enron Corporation as well as billions to her law firm’s clients in Russia. She also directed $65 million to military contractor United Technologies, which hired her as Senior Vice President and head of its Washington office in 1997.
She also became a director of the oil company Conoco and, in the wake of its 2002 merger, of Conoco Phillips. (In June 2001 the Des Moines Register reported that Senator Harkin “inadvertently omitted” $200,000 in Conoco stock owned by his wife and another $15,000 of this stock owned by one of his two daughters.)

In 2003 and 2004 the leftwing populist Tom Harkin was again echoing the line of his comrades at the Institute of Policy Studies, blaming oil companies as a prime reason for President Bush’s intervention in Iraq....

————”The Bark of Tom Harkin - John Kerry’s most rabid attack dog,”
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | 9/16/04 | Lowell Ponte

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