March 31, 2004
Wictory Wednesday
"Guilty as Lt. Calley might have been of the actual act of murder, the verdict does not single out the real criminal. Those of us who have served in Vietnam know that the real guilty party is the United States of America." -- John Kerry, April 1971
To be fair, I searched for quotations from George W. Bush. I found all sorts of things he said. Some funny, some serious. The thing that struck me was that I couldn't find one negative thing he has said about America. It's not that he doesn't see any problems in the U.S., but instead of name calling he talks about constructive ways to improve things.
Kerry's style of placing blame on everyone else (even on things as mundane as a snowboarding mishap) may get attention from the press, but what kind of leader would that make him?
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Posted by marybeth at March 31, 2004 10:31 PM Politics
kerry was dead on right about vietnam era american govt. history is on his side. nixon
WAS a crook. the war WAS needless/winless as early as the mid 60's.
this is an example of courage and patriotism
in the form of calling out what you see as a
huge error in american judgement. irregardless of how you feel about him as a pres candidate, calling him out on that is bogus revisionism.
vietnam was a national embarrassment, period.
There's a difference between saying that the American government is guilty and saying that America is guilty. For most people, if they were guilty of anything, it was ignorance. We can't judge Americans of the 1960s and 70s by what we know now.
For someone with such nuanced views on everything political, this seemed a broad and excessively negative declaration. It was politically expedient since the Dellums Committee hearings and Kerry's statement before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations were at the end of that April.
You left out Kennedy and Johnson or do you really believe that discrepancies between what the government knew and what the American public heard only happened under a Republican presidency?
Posted by marybeth at April 5, 2004 08:42 AM