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Victor Hanson "Fog of War" about Kerry -- Whoa
... and admits not voting for KerryELF snip In addition, it was not all that easy a thing either for a young man like George Bush to fly an obsolete jet with a record of mechanical problems. His qualification as a jet pilot gave him no immunity from being called at any time to combat duty in Vietnam. Indeed, sitting at the controls of an underpowered F-102 with a host of mechanical peculiarities was not the same as fleeing to Canada, burning a draft card, or harming the interests of soldiers in the field by giving emotional aid to the enemy. And unlike a few prominent public figures, George Bush never said he served in Vietnam when he did not. Second, Senator Kerry long ago wisely understood that he himself had mixed perceptions about his past Vietnam experience and astutely had not really privileged it in most of his past campaigns. If John Kerry had once endured fire, his post facto exaggerations about war crimes — with lurid allusions to Genghis Khan — and slurs at veterans were aimed at advancing his own nascent political career at the expense of the reputations of thousands of anonymous, and mostly blameless, others. Third, Vietnam service in the 1970s and 1980s quite unfairly was an albatross around veterans' collective necks, in part because of the previous statements of John Kerry and others in the anti-war movement who offered a sort of moral equivalence between the United States and the North Vietnamese. Posted by: Sherry 2004-08-27 |
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