"Supporting the Troops." Not.
Bill Kristol outlines what appears to be another instance of journalistic malpractice on the part of those who are all too willing to believe the worst of American soldiers.
posted by LadybugUSA at 9:25 AM
11 Comments:
Like you, the Kristol Ball is desperately clinging to anything that will keep him from sinking. This includes, but is not limited to, pushing the heads of his fellow Americans underwater with outrageous mind-reading statements like this: "Of course the antiwar left hated what the troops were doing, fighting the enemy in Iraq, and they hated the troops' goal, victory in Iraq."
And the troops are so loved and respected by your and Kristol's hero Bush that they were relegated to mold-infested squalor when they returned with missing limbs.
So laughably ridiculous, so transparently desperate, so pitiful.
At least the left is not standing at the airports spitting at us. ... Yet
Leave it to the draft dodgers to claim war is all about honor, glory, and medals.
Lets keep in mind that both Rudy and Mitt made valiant efforts to be draft dodgers so that others could serve and die in Vietnam. And not a single one of Mitt's five sons is willing to fight in Iraq.
Earth to Carol said...
Leave it to the draft dodgers to claim war is all about honor, glory, and medals.
Do you mean like clinton who went to England in order to avoid the draft?
Carol,
To be honest, I still don't know what people mean when they say that they support the troops. I think it is a piece of rhetoric that the war makers and supporters dreamed up as a way of selling the Iraq war. Support the troops! It sounds so cool. But does anybody know what it meants?
Instead of analysing the rhetoric or dismissing it as pap and pablum, the people who don't want the war picked up the rhetoric and say it just as often.
When anybody says it, it is meaningless.
When we go to war the military is supposed to fight that war. When we win, loose, or decide to otherwise stop fighting a war, the military stops fighting the war. It's that simple.
It is intellectual sloppiness and weakness for Kristol to auger his argument on the phrase 'support the troops.' It makes his arguement as meaningless as the phrase
Cliff,
The distinction is that Clinton wasn't pro war and didn't run around claiming he was a war Preznut.
To believe that American troops are NOT sinless paragons of all that is good in the world is NOT a slight on the troops.
The troops are ordinary people who are experiencing extraordinary horrors.
After reading TVSWWPOTO's post, I was tempted to say, "If you have to ask, you'll never understand." Just do a Google search on the phrase and you get "about 716,000" hits.
And as the Flomblog suggested, it's not spitting on the troops in airports.
Also, it's not writing that you "loathe the military." Nor is it, a la Rep. Murtha, saying Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," then refusing to apologize or even retract when proven wrong. Nor is it comparing American troops at Guantanamo to ...Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings." (At least Sen. Durbin had the guts to apologize for those remarks.) Nor is it stating (about Abu Ghraib), "... Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under new management – U.S. management." Sen. Kennedy has never apologized for that statement equating all of the 15,000 or so women and men who acted honorably at Abu Ghraib with Saddam's thugs and murderers. In his bloodshot eyes, the dozen or so troops who were prosecuted for their actions are no better than those other 15,000. Nor is it trying to pass off, "You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." as a poorly told joke. Nor is it deriding troops before Congress as "war criminals" who committed "... war crimes...in Southeast Asia -- not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command...." which allowed the enemy to play your words over loudpeakers while torturing your fellow troops. Sen. Kerry has never seen fit to apologize for those slanderous words, either.
Well...perhaps my first inclination was right after all. If you have to ask what the phrase "support the troops" means, maybe you never will understand.
Backbone,
You proved my point. You never said what 'support the troops' means. It is a meaningless saying.
Wasn't Murtha proven right? There's a soldier now who is on trial for raping a teenage Iraqi girl and murdering her family... along with a number of other soldiers who were complicit in the killing.
And if you don't think that the Abu Ghraib photosoot didn't prove that Saddam's tortures were continuing under US control then you were probably both deaf and blind. I remember a hooded man attached to a power point, and a female soldier laughing and pointing at the genitalia of Iraqi prisoners. What do you remember?
Truth has a liberal bias doesn't it?
Not to mention My Lai of course
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