Are We Proud of What We Did In Vietnam?

There has been a lot of talk about John McCain’s “heroic” service to the country in Vietnam. Last night I read a record of America’s adventures in Vietnam, a record made by a man with prophetic vision and voice. Read what we did in Vietnam and see if you think John McCain’s or any American’s service there could considered heroic.

Consider the parallels to Iraq and understand that forty years from today someone will be writing about our foolish and unwise efforts in Iraq.

“They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence *in 1954* -- in 1945 *rather* -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh......"

"Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony......"

"Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long......"

"For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam."

"Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not."

"We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem.

When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.

Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy.

They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.

They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.

They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.

They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

Is this what John McCain is proud of having done in Vietnam?

John McCain: Hero of the Republicans

John McCain is the same Senator from Arizona who was a part of “The Keating Five, a group of five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s” (See Keating Five, Wikipedia). On April 9, 1987 John McCain was present and involved in a two hour meeting where he and four other Senators tried to persuade federal regulators to back off a corrupt savings and loan that later collapsed and cost people their life’s savings and coast the federal government about 2 billion dollars.

The group was named after Charles H. Keating, Jr., a fat act who owned American Continental Corporation, and who later spent five years in prison for his crimes of corruption. American Continental Corporation owned Lincoln Savings and Loan of Irvine, California. Mr. Keating turned Lincoln Savings and Loan into his own slush fund and got the Senators to help keep the regulators from taking it over until it was too late. “More than 21,000 mostly elderly investors lost their life savings. This total came to about $285 million” (Wikipedia).

“McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981.[8] Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.[14] In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.[6][15]”

“The Ethics Committee ruled that the involvement of McCain in the scheme was also minimal, and he too was cleared of all charges against him.[17][16] McCain was criticized by the Committee for exercising "poor judgment" when he met with the federal regulators on Keating's behalf.[6]

On his Keating Five experience, McCain has said: "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."[6]

The people who planned the Republican National Convention did not remember the Keating Five. They did not mention it once. They never once mentioned those 21,000 people who lost their savings because John McCain was pushing for the fat cat and not the underdog. I wonder why?

The convention planners baptized us with repeated reverences to John McCain as a war hero and a prisoner of war. But at no point did anyone say that the Vietnam War was another unprovoked and undeclared war that represented American adventurism and raw aggression.

No one dared say that “the root eating slant eyed Viet Cong” whipped the Americans and sent them home with their tails between their legs. No one dared say that we lost the war because the Viet Cong were fighting for their homes and families while most Americans saw the war as unjust blatant raw aggression.

And no one dared to point out that John McCain was most likely spewing napalm and Agent Orange over Vietnamese villages to kill foliage, women, children, and livestock; in short anything that breathed. I am befuddled by the constant attempt to make service in the Vietnam War equal with service in World War II or any other noble conflict.

Just because the nation’s leaders decide to go to war in some foreign land does not make the war just or right. The Vietnam War was wrong. It cost Lyndon Johnson the goodwill of the people and a second term in his own right. And it cost America a generation or two of healthy minded young men and women. It scarred us internally and around the world.

A person of no social consciousness and no moral compass was sitting in the White House just as the nation was being healed from the bubonic plague of Vietnam. What does he do: He takes the tragedies of 9/11 and uses them as a pretext to re-invent Vietnam. Iraq is our new Vietnam.

So now instead of two generations of prosperity and hope, the Republicans are getting ready to give us two generations of quagmired suffering as we pick the sores and bury the dead from this plague also.

The Republicans talked a lot about the “surge” and how it’s working. But no one at any time said, “We should not be in Iraq in the first place. What we are doing there is wrong and it cannot succeed. The war is based on a lie and “no lie can stand.” Even if we win the war, we have planted such seeds of hatred and vengeance that our children and grandchildren will pay the price for this aggression.”

Not one Republican had enough guts to say that in Iraq even the people who like us also hate us and want us to leave. Not one Republican had enough guts to say that when we leave all that we have gained will be lost. Utter chaos will ensue as soon as the American troops have left. So then the trillions of dollars that we have spent there and the thousands of lives that we have lost there will be in vain. What difference does it make if the surge is working? The desert will reclaim what you have spilled your blood to build.

Martin King told us two generations ago that if America did not repent from its arrogance “God will rise up and break the back bone of her power.” We are almost there.

What McCain did in 1989 with the Keating Five, he is now doing with the Bush Four (Bush, Chaney, Rumsfield, and Rice): he doesn’t actually do the work of the wolf; he just keeps the sheep looking the other way until its too late for the sheep to escape. McCain tells sheep that wolves are safe. They are not; they are wolves!

* All the material in this article referring to the Keating Five is from "The Keating Five" article at Wkipedia.



"Let justice roll down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream."

Nonsense

The speechifying, pontificating, and parading of the politicians and the punditry of the Republican National Convention has been over now for about five days. As expected John McCain and his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, have received a “bump” in the polls. In some polls McCain-Palin lead Obama-Biden by 5 to 10 points. McCain and Palin have unleashed new television ads proclaiming themselves as “mavericks.”

This is pure nonsense. How can anyone who has voted for foolishness 90% of the time be a maverick from the same foolishness? It seems that Sarah Palin may have been a maverick from her husband a couple of times, but that’s about as far as her maverick moves have gone.

The Republican Convention was nonsense. It claims to be the party of morality and “Christian values;” yet it paraded before the country a list of people with the worst moral records of anybody in politics. Rudy Giuliani was one of their main speakers. This is the man who declared war on African Americans in New York City by basically telling the police, “If he is black, shoot to kill.”

When the nation and the city of New York went on a natural cycle of decrease in crime (probably occasioned by fewer births 18 to 20 years prior), Giuliani said that his polices brought about the decline. In other words, there were fewer criminals in New York City because the police killed all the black suspects on the street.

Every time I think of Giuliani I think of Abner Louima, a man brutalized by Giulinai’s ploice; and Amadou Diallo an innocent man killed by the same highly praised “men in blue.”

Giuliani is also the guy who began dating Judith Nathan (his present wife) while he was still married to Donna Hanover. He filed for divorced from Donna while they were both still living in Gracie Mansion. I happened to be in New York City on the day when Donna Hanover heard that Rudy Giuliani had filed for divorce: she heard it on the news the same as the rest of the city.

Don’t be angry with Giuliani. He was just following the pattern set down by his mentors Newt Gingrich and John McCain: both divorced their wives to marry younger women. At least Donna Hanover was not on her sickbed when she discovered that her sanctimonious husband was breaking vows that he made to God and her to marry a hot young thing.

Remember this is the party that gave us Mark Foley whose reputation with young boys is as bad as any Catholic priest. They also gave us the pit bull dog Tom Delay who flaunted the Constitution and tried to ignore the courts until someone showed him that not everybody was stupid.

Corruption. Speakers: DeLay, Cunningham, Cheney
Incompetence. Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney
Hypocrisy. Bush, Cheney, Foley, Craig, McCain
Constitution trampling. Bush, Cheney, Gonzales
LMAO
(I copied the above from a www.politico.com).

There was a speech by George W. Bush, the “Idiot-In-Chief.” Every time I see or hear of this guy I wonder, “How is it that Clinton could get impeached for having sex and lying about it and this guy lied to lead the nation into an unnecessary war where billions of dollars are wasted and thousands of lives are destroyed and few people in Congress have even pronounced the word “impeachment.”

Congress will have to pay for this misjudgment. But I hope that Bush doesn’t think that getting by and getting away are the same thing. They are not! “There is a law of justice and of retribution at work in the world. The arch of the moral universe is long but it bends towards right.”

The biggest piece of nonsense offered by this party was Sarah Palin. John McCain must be an artist because he found a canvass with nothing on it. She has absolutely no experience of any note to do anything like lead a sizeable government. And like most moralist, her biggest failings seem to be in the one area that she champions most: fidelity and family life. The internet blogs and the tabloids are full of stories of her infidelities.

The mainstream media is beginning to check her on some of her outright lies, such as her supposed opposition to the so-called “bridge to no where.” Maybe by the time the media gets through investigating her lovers, lies, and the ongoing investigations about her abuse of power we will know if she is really a “pit bull” with lips stick or just another term for a female dog in the heat of ambition.

While Sarah Palin and Giuliana made fun of Obama’s work as a community organizer I was waiting to hear some one describe anything that she had done to bring about community or to organize anything. Sarah Palin is a rubber stamp for someone and we have to find the identity of that person.

At the Republican Party Convention the fat cats from Halliburton, Citibank, Exxon, Texaco, BP, Boeing, Countrywide, Texas Instruments, and a thousand other multinational corporations said to the majority of American voters, “We think that you are so stupid that we can nominate a ham sandwich and win the election as long as the sandwich is the right color and repeats the right catch phrases.”

Looks like there maybe some truth in the assertion.

“Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

Four Reasons Why America Needs John McCain

After eight years of the most disastrous foreign and domestic policy this country has seen since the Great Depression, America needs John McCain for the following reasons:


1. Eight years of George Bush has not made America economically or morally weak enough. We need fewer jobs, a smaller tax base, and millions more poor, desperate and hungry people. We need more home mortgage failures, more bank closers, more failing schools, and more factory closers. John McCain will give this to us.


2. Only rich and powerful people (who can afford seven homes) deserve the best healthcare. To provide healthcare to everyone is both un-Christian and un-democratic. Universal healthcare is an evil plot hatched by the devil to create a level playing field for everyone. If this country adopts universal healthcare the child born to poor parents will have the same chances of growing and being healthy as the child born to rich parents. John McCain will stop this evil plot.


3. The idea of American imperialism must be preserved. We must preserve the idea that the whole world will jump when America says “jump.” Therefore any common sense approach such as “diplomacy” must be shelved. In order to retain our greatness we must be at war in everyplace on the globe where people are not doing as we want them. We rejoice at seeing our sons and daughters brought home in body bags, or with their limbs blown away, or with their minds destroyed by war. John McCain will go to war at the drop of a hat.


4. Our standing as a moral leader in the world has not been sufficiently damaged by the Iraq war. We need John McCain, Dick Chaney, and Donald Rumsfeld to come back and finish assuring the world that America is a nation led by the immoral, doing the unconscionable, for reasons that are unwise, while proclaiming that which is untrue. John McCain will continue the polices of our present “Idiot-in-Chief,” and soon no nation on earth will respect us for our “moral leadership.” Go McCain!!! Take us all the way down.

McCain’s Choice: Sarah Palin Compared to Barack Obama?

McCain’s Choice: Sarah Palin Compared to Barack Obama?


The Republican presumptive nominee, Senator John McCain, announced his choice for vice-presidential running mate on Friday, August 29, 2008. He chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Immediately, the McCain Campaign and the right wing media pundits began to spew out comparisons between Gov. Palin and Sen. Obama that highlighted Gov. Palin’s “executive experience.” Now let’s get this straight: they want the voters to compare the experience and background of Sarah Palin to that of Barack Obama.

There is no comparison. Sarah Palin has not lived as much, seen as much, felt as much, run as fast, reached as high, grasped as much, accomplished as much, or come as far as has Barack Obama. There is absolutely no comparison between the life of cookie cutter suburbia and a black man born of interracial parents, raised by a single white mother, schooled in various countries and cultures around the world, mentored by white grandparents, got a degree from Columbia and has a Harvard Law degree. A suburban soccer mom who became governor cannot be compared to a person who has struggled all his life to succeed and did so, choosing higher education and public service over drugs, prison, and failure.

Sarah Palin also fails the comparison test when it comes to experience in government. She fails because experience is not just about the position that you hold, but it is also about the quality of problems you have faced. The governor of an entire state with less than one fourth the population of the city of Chicago cannot encounter the same depth of problems and challenges as a State Senator from the Southside of Chicago (population of Alaska: 670,000; population of Chicago: 3 million).

Sarah Palin has been mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a suburb of Anchorage. Wasilla has a population of 8,500 whereas Hyde Park, the district that Senator Obama represented in the Illinois Senate, has a population of 29,920. This Chicago neighborhood is three and half times larger than the town of Wasilla. The point is that this nation and the world are now beset with the kind of problems that one is not prepared for by being a mayor in “soccer-mom suburbia” or the governor of a state with a population equal to that of Memphis, Tennessee.

John McCain did not choose Sarah Palin for her so called “experience,” but to try to capture the disaffected “Hillary Clinton voters.” This means women who wanted to break the glass ceiling of American politics by making Hillary Clinton the first female presidential nominee from a major party, and hopefully the first female president of the United States. What’s wrong with that?

The problem with the choice and the thinking behind it is that John McCain, and those around him, act as if any woman is the right woman. Hillary Clinton won the millions of votes that she did because, like Barack Obama, she has worked outside of “white bread America” and “soccer mom heaven” long enough to be acquainted with the problems that everyday Americans face. She has seen the face of America up close. She has seen the affects of racism and bigotry, sexism and the glass ceiling. She has witnessed the results of inadequate healthcare, and like Obama she has studied ways of solving these problems. There is no evidence that Sarah Palin even knows these problems exist.

Every person who believes in women’s rights should be up in arms over this selection because it makes a mockery of women’s progress and female leadership. This selection says the best person to be a heart beat away from the presidency is a woman who doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to choose,* has no established policy on healthcare, knows nothing about foreign policy, and has no known domestic policy. In other words she was chosen simply because she was a woman governor of relatively unknown background. It’s like replacing Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas simply because Thomas is black. This is like replacing a roaring and majestic lion with a tabby cat simply because they are both of the feline family.

Any woman voting for John McCain because Sarah Palin is on the ticket is not thinking, and may even be siding with her own ideological enemy.

*The writer of this blog is not a proponent of abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or the mother’s life is in danger.

The most unfortunate fact about abortion is that it occurs whether legal or illegal. When abortions are illegal poor woman are butchered in back alleys, while rich woman are listed in hospital registrations as having appendectomies. The author believes that spiritual, governmental, and academic communities should promote programs that teach abstinence as well as safe sex and thereby reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. The author does not believe that teaching safe sex encourages sexual promiscuity, but that in many cases it prevents a person from being faced with a choice that includes abortion.