LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE

I am getting so tired of the LIARS! And most of all, the liars who lie for a living (Rush, Sean, Savage, Coulter, etc.). Last week on a new Dallas radio talk show, Town Hall Radio, I heard some dimwit repeating the thoroughly discredited tale that the Jersey Girls (9/11 widows that pushed for the establishment of the 9/11 commission) were financed and directed by Teresa Heinz Kerry via the Tides Foundation. As I recall, the Tides Foundation has made it perfectly clear that the Jersey Girls have nothing to do with 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which pays the Tides F. a fee to process their donations, and nothing else. And the Heinz Foundation used Tides to funnel something around $50,000 to environmental projects in western Pennsylvania in the late 1990's, and NOTHING ELSE.

This morning I heard Darrell Ancarlo ("Ancarlo Mornings") mocking John Kerry's heroic military service, reading Kerry's Bronze Star citation in a voice similar to "The Shadow" -- mucho drama and sarcasm dripping from his thin lips. And THIS from a man who (like so many right-wing radio wackos) professes to HONOR military service and defended the Chimp's spotty Texas Air National Guard service record on the grounds that "at least he enlisted!" Okay, if they object to Kerry's post-service anti-war activities, they have the right to express that, even though I'm not aware of a single one of the afore-mentioned ever having served their country in uniform, much less having been wounded and/or risking their own life saving the life of another, as Kerry most certainly did. But they have no moral right to belittle Kerry's heroism to support their own bias.

DOESN'T ANYONE REMEMBER what it was like in the later years of the VietNam War? Very similar to the current conflict in Iraq in these respects:
(1) politicians were running the war instead of the generals;
(2) politicians were lying to the nation about the progress of the war;
(3) our fighting men were mostly boys drafted because they couldn't afford or gain entry to college, National Guard duty and other deferments that saved the hides of the more affluent;
(4) these young men were ordered or encouraged to exhibit animalistic behavior;
(5) lower-echelon officers such as Calley and Medina were crucified for such behavior while their masters went unpunished;
(6) these young men died for nothing. VietNam today is a united country, and communism has been pretty much discredited in most of the world.
(7) we didn't take much better care of our wounded than we're doing today -- soldiers just don't seem to count to some people unless they're on the front line -- and judging by how poorly equipped our men and women are in this conflict, not even then. When I was a teen, the best surfer in our town came back from Nam with no legs -- and the military wouldn't provide prosthetic ones for some reason that escapes me now. Our city threw a fit and eventually he got those prosthetics, but I penned a poem at the time that included the line, "The surfer man returned to town but with a certain lack; the government took his legs from him and wouldn't give them back."

Where John Kerrey is going wrong is in not remembering what he felt when he said, "How do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?" The invasion of Iraq was a criminal mistake, and I don't want one more American soldier to die for that mistake -- Bush's mistake, Cheney's mistake, Rumsfeld's mistake, Rice's mistake -- and yes, Colin Powell's mistake. Say what you will, Colin, about "good soldiering" -- that's the same excuse the Nuremberg defendants used.