Swift-Boating Congress

The man who wouldn’t fight for his country in Vietnam yesterday gave those who did false analogies about their war to the one he is now waging with the lives of another generation.

Be thankful for smalls favors that President Bush did not dress up in the flight jacket he wore for his “Mission Accomplished” speech, but his Iraq comparisons to Vietnam and World War II had no more reality than that Commander-in-Chief moment in 2003.

“Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars,” Sen. John Kerry said after the speech.

Kerry knows first-hand about the Bush big-lie machine that is now gearing up to swift-boat Congress as it did his war record during the 2004 Presidential election and, before that, John McCain’s Vietnam experience in the primaries of 2000.

Now advertising will be aimed at lawmakers, especially Republicans, who face re-election next year. An interest group, Freedom’s Watch, is beginning a month-long, $15 million campaign to pressure wavering members of Congress to stay the Surge course. Ads will run in 20 states, in more than five dozen Congressional districts.

This bunch has no idea of how to run a war, but it is very good at smearing those fought one and those who want to stop the senseless carnage they started and can’t finish.

If George Bush ever takes time out from comparing himself to great leaders of the past, he might want to take a look at what a real military commander, Dwight Eisenhower said when leaving the Oval office:

“People want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

New Kind of Washington Wake-Up Call

With their sleeping cots and general disarray, Senate Democrats are evoking images of protests past against an unresponsive government. Granted that demonstrations of old were not by elected officials, the symbolism is familiar.

In 1932, with World War I veterans starving during the Depression, more than 10,000 came to D.C. and camped out, demanding the bonus that had been promised them. They ended up being rousted by the Army under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur who ignored President Herbert Hoover’s order to go easy. Generals were feistier then.

In 1969, a quarter of a million peaceful protesters against the war in Vietnam converged on the nation’s capital, holding candlelight vigils until morning. “I do believe,” Sen. Ted Kennedy told them, “this nation is in danger of committing itself to goals and personalities that guarantee the war's continuance.”

The dramatic difference this time is that anger and frustration are directed, not against the government, but by one branch of the Washington power structure against another.

Only a President with the insensitivity and arrogance of George W. Bush could have driven the Congress of the United States to such expression of enraged impotence. Even Herbert Hoover was incapable of that.

Bush and Cheney, Meet the Burkes

While so many blog our feelings about the war in Iraq, multitudes of other Americans, good people who love their country, are living with pain beyond words.

In the Boston Globe today, their story is embodied by the Burkes, George and Michael, father and son who served as Marines in Vietnam and Iraq, and came home wracked by post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Michael's story is sadly familiar,” Charles M. Sennott reports, “he has not been the same since seeing a friend killed in a roadside bomb blast in western Iraq.

“But what George, 63, is living through is part of something new--or rather something old that has returned with new force. Forty years after his tour of duty in the battles around Khe Sanh in the fall of 1967, he is overcome again by debilitating memories and nightmares from that war, symptoms triggered by televised images of the Iraq bloodshed, and by his fears for--and firsthand knowledge of --what his son was to encounter in Iraq.”

The head of VA readjustment counseling services confirms many such cases across the country--fathers who served in Vietnam having their PTSD reawakened by Iraq and what is happening to their sons serving there.

So now we have two-for-the-price-of-one tragedies, families in which the sins, not of the fathers but those who sent them off to insane wars, keep destroying American lives. Sleeplessness, nightmares, alcoholism, anxiety are their rewards for volunteering to serve their country.

In a just world, the Neo-Cons who lied us into this war and the new generation of Cheney nincompoops who want to invade Iran would be sentenced to live for the duration with the Burkes in Clinton, Mass. and see what patriotism--abused by high-level stupidity--has done to them.

Semper Fi.