Veteran Has No Regrets For Spitting On Jane Fonda - Page 6 - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

cmac2012 · #76 04-24-2005, 03:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by riethoven

I think that 30 years later we can see that Vietnam was a waste. Thirty years from now we will see that the invasion into Iraq was a waste too, unless you consider that the Bush family now feels better because they got Saddam. Oh, and maybe we got a little more oil to pour into our gas guzzling SUVs, instead of looking at conservation and alternate fuels. (An issue near to many of us dieselheads)

Defense is one thing, but Vietnam and Iraq are not defense, they are imperialism, just like we have done in many other countries in the world, usually without a war first. I think I would die to defend our land, but not to make good on some political vendetta.

Long live the US system of free speech that allows us all to express our opinions. (jane too!. I know she is just out to sell books). By the way, I think Ted Turner is great too, and the Atlanta Braves.

Tell it bro!

cmac2012 · #77 04-24-2005, 03:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by boneheaddoctor

And you believe Clinton was never offered Osama Bin Laden by Sudan too?

I don't know why people are always assuming that I back every damn democrat who ever held public office.

The first time I saw Clinton was when he and Hillary were on 60 minutes (what, in '91?) trying to do damage control on the Jennifer Flowers thing, with their innocent, "Us??? Oh no, there's nothing like that happening in our marriage! Goodness gracious!"

I'm thinking, well these characters are lying through their teeth, no way the American public will fall for this crap!

Surely, there must be some truly great statemen out there, don't you think?.

Botnst · #78 04-24-2005, 09:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cmac2012

Sorry to go all religious on you bro, but seein how "People of Faith" is a major theme of our current power elite, I say OK, let's get into it.

How does that line in one of Moses' books go, "There's a time for war and a time for peace?"

If I'm going into a war, of course I'm not going to want to make it fair so the other guys have a fighting chance. The point is, war is such a blunt instrument that the threshold for entering a war has to be extremely high, like it was in WW2 or in Afghanistan. Pope John Paul 2 gave Bush some serious sh** about Iraq saying it did not meet the Christian standard of a just war, and Bush's response was pouting petulance.

If we had won the damn war (the Vietnam war), we'd be there yet, just like in Korea. At what point, after some imagined victory, were the Cong going to stop picking our guys off? After we'd turned it into a parking lot? What kind of victory would that have been? There was no victory possible. It was unwinnable.

Conservative pundits are fond of dropping Sun Tzu's "Art of War" into their pieces, like they are students of esoteric texts on warfare. Do these guys actually read it? It can be found, free of charge, in its entirety at:

http://www.sonshi.com/

Pertinent quotes here:

"Generally in warfare, keeping a nation intact is best, destroying a nation second best."

"One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.
One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.
One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle."

We didn't know the enemy in Vietnam, and we damn sure don't know him in Iraq.

Yeah, I read the "Art of War". Nice little book.

When you say, "we didn't know the enemy in...", which "we" are we talking about? The military assesment is a lot different from the political one and in our country, the military one is guided by the civilian. The military asks, "How can we defeat XXX with minimum loss of men and materiale?" That is their job. When they go to work on accomplishing that job they're pretty effective most of the time. Sometimes they screw-up--the military is good, not perfect. But if allowed to do their job they usually do it pretty darned efficiently.

The civilian side is a whole lot messier. Especially in a democracy. We never have a clear victory in a democratic government. One side does not utterly and completely defeat the other side resulting in total capitulation and complete change in regime. Instead, battles and campaigns are won and lost but the war continues. At the present time one group holds power but in a few years, they'll be out and largely forgotten and a new, shiney reform movement will be in place that will never agian make the mistakes of the other side. Riiiight.

So in Vietnam, had the military been unleashed, we'd have won decisively and probably moved into Laos and Cambodia crushing the commies along the way. At what cost? MacNamara and LBJ flinched at the cost, Ho did not. Ho won. Had we won, would the people of Vietnam be better or worse off than today?

We are still in S. Korea. Who is better of, the people of S. Korea or the people of N. Korea?

schwarzwagen · #79 04-24-2005, 11:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

So in Vietnam, had the military been unleashed, we'd have won decisively and probably moved into Laos and Cambodia crushing the commies along the way. At what cost? MacNamara and LBJ flinched at the cost, Ho did not. Ho won. Had we won, would the people of Vietnam be better or worse off than today?

We are still in S. Korea. Who is better of, the people of S. Korea or the people of N. Korea?

this is too black and white, you need to muddy this up with some extraneous facts or red herring arguments.

schwarzwagen · #80 04-24-2005, 11:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cmac2012

I've got no desire to run down any vietnam vet, with the possible exception of gung ho Ollie North, pinhead deluxe.

sounds like you would like to when you make excuses for jane fonda.

cmac2012 · #81 04-25-2005, 01:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by schwarzwagen

sounds like you would like to when you make excuses for jane fonda.

I've seen replays of Jane Fonda's speeches back then and she was just a tad self righteous and obnoxious. You have to look at what she did with an eye on the whole shebang which was practically a national meltdown of emotion, conflict, whatever. It was tough on me. I'd grown up believing we were the guys in the white hats, always and forever and it was hard to square our high-tech bludgeoning of a bunch of farmers with that image.

I saw a picture once of a North Vietnamese woman, up to her knees in mud, handing off an armload of mud up the bucket brigade line, trying desperately to repair a bombed out dike. She looked so hot and so fragile. I'm sorry, but I wasn't real proud of the USA at that moment.

At some point, I felt that we'd gone off the deep end, that our obsession with communism had led us into utterly unsupportable behavior.

A whole bunch of us believed that this had to stop and everything got a little crazy. Fonda went over the top, no doubt about it. I think she's realized that. Conservatives are so proud of their profound Christian faith but I don't see a lot of the corny old forgiveness or compassion coming out for anyone during that time except the ones pushing for more bombs.

Hawks will probably say we could've won the war if not for the damn hippies til their dying days. I'm probably a fool for trying to convince them otherwise. They'll say that Fonda cost a lot of good men their lives. I'm thinking that if we'd pushed harder to win it, we would have lost another 10,20, 50 thousand men and still not have had anything resembling a clear victory. So maybe Fonda, Kerry and the damn hippies saved a lot of lives. We'll never know. I do know I didn't meet a single returned Vietnam vet who urged me to join up and stop them commies. Just the opposite. I had a guy on my dorm room floor in 1970, I was 18, he was about 24, going to school on his GI bill. His eyes had a sunken, haunted look, and he said, "Man don't go over there....stay out no matter what it takes," or something about like that. This is not as simple as the hawks want us to believe. We are not endowed with divine correctness no matter what we do.

If any of the hawks bother to read this, I've got no doubt they'll be thinking "Shut up you @%$%$#* weeney!" You know what? I'm tired -- I don't care.

cmac2012 · #82 04-25-2005, 01:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

Yeah, I read the "Art of War". Nice little book.

When you say, "we didn't know the enemy in...", which "we" are we talking about? The military assesment is a lot different from the political one and in our country, the military one is guided by the civilian. The military asks, "How can we defeat XXX with minimum loss of men and materiale?" That is their job. When they go to work on accomplishing that job they're pretty effective most of the time. Sometimes they screw-up--the military is good, not perfect. But if allowed to do their job they usually do it pretty darned efficiently.

The civilian side is a whole lot messier. Especially in a democracy. We never have a clear victory in a democratic government. One side does not utterly and completely defeat the other side resulting in total capitulation and complete change in regime. Instead, battles and campaigns are won and lost but the war continues. At the present time one group holds power but in a few years, they'll be out and largely forgotten and a new, shiney reform movement will be in place that will never agian make the mistakes of the other side. Riiiight.

So in Vietnam, had the military been unleashed, we'd have won decisively and probably moved into Laos and Cambodia crushing the commies along the way. At what cost? MacNamara and LBJ flinched at the cost, Ho did not. Ho won. Had we won, would the people of Vietnam be better or worse off than today?

We are still in S. Korea. Who is better of, the people of S. Korea or the people of N. Korea?

Your post is a good one and I'm going to have to chew on it for awhile. In short (yeah, right

), I think calling the Vietnamese gooks and assuming that we could just roll over them in their own country was a profound underestimation of their toughness. This is almost stating the obvious, I guess. Plus, I don't think we realized that they could fight for weeks on a small bag of rice and what they foraged in the jungle. I remember a story an American soldier told of how he and his crew were taking a lunch break in a relatively secure space they had surrounded with razor wire, etc. All of a sudden, this little unarmed Cong guy comes up and like a contortionist, rapidly slithered and manuevered his way through the multiple reems of wire and stood up and just defiantly looked at them. The soldier said it was like he was showing them, "You can't stop us, we're not afraid of you." They shot him but he said everyone was a little spooked by the whole thing. He said he felt at that moment that they weren't going to win this one.

Likewise in Iraq, I don't know if Cheney and co. actually believed that we would be welcomed with chocolates and flowers or if that was just part of his selling of a war he wanted at any cost, but like it or not, he was wrong. The proof is in the pudding. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier photo-op is another example of not knowing the enemy. The beginning of the beginning was accomplished, maybe. Thinking that we could just send in a bunch of contractors to rebuild Iraq and make everyone happy was not knowing the enemy. Yeah, if the insurgents would let them rebuild it, it might help and if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass when he hops.

Like Bush said during the '04 campaign, "Results matter."

cmac2012 · #83 04-25-2005, 06:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by schwarzwagen

this is how you can justify her actions? i have difficulty accepting that. fonda was the poster child of the anti-war, anti-establishment movement, i think she knew full well what she was doing.

what right wing conservative media? you mean fox news? one cable news outlet amongst a sea of liberal news organizations, cable and free. wow, i didn't know fox news was so influential.

There is liberal media in this country such as The Nation, In These Times, Mother Jones, The Progressive. But, and I'm not the first to say it, the vast, vast majority of media in this country is/are owned by rich white men, not known for loving hippies and radicals.

If you would truly like to explore media bias, I mean beyond the one Rush Limbaugh talks about, you might want to check out:

http://www.fair.org/index.php

the web site of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. They have quite the archive of conservative bias in our nation's media. There are plenty of conservatives in this country who thought that Reagan was way too liberal. Those folks see commies under every bush.

The continual harping about the liberal media is actually a brilliant ploy by Rush and the boys to plant in people's minds the belief that whenever they read or hear any news that appears to cast aspersions on a cherished conservative like Boy George, IT'S NOT TRUE, it's just the liberal media trying to trash an effective conservative leader. "And so my friends, stay with me, Rush Limbaugh, for the real truth." I heard some audio footage of Joe McCarthy the other day. It is uncanny how much Rush sounds like him, right down to the "....and so my friends..."

Cleverness and wisdom are not the same thing but what would I know.

boneheaddoctor · #84 04-25-2005, 08:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cmac2012

I don't know why people are always assuming that I back every damn democrat who ever held public office.

The first time I saw Clinton was when he and Hillary were on 60 minutes (what, in '91?) trying to do damage control on the Jennifer Flowers thing, with their innocent, "Us??? Oh no, there's nothing like that happening in our marriage! Goodness gracious!"

I'm thinking, well these characters are lying through their teeth, no way the American public will fall for this crap!

Surely, there must be some truly great statemen out there, don't you think?.

Well you redemed yourself a bit in my eyes by not falling for the misinformation the Clintonistas are trying to spread that he never fumbled the ball there....areguing it never happened...As I saw the interview he did that admitted to it some time after he left office I know for a fact it did happen.