Saturday, June 6, 2009

How a President Who Genuinely Respects Veterans Speaks About Veterans

Few things in the last eight years made me crazier than the frat-boy-smart-ass tone of Smirky's speeches about and to veterans. You could see it in his face, what he was really thinking:

"You stupid chumps. While you obediently went to war, I escaped active duty in a champagne unit and blew off even that. Yet I not only escaped life imprisonment for desertion during wartime, I'm the effin' president, while you retards are begging for wheelchairs from the VA budget I stripped."

Hard as it is to believe, Smirky actually held the same job title held by the person who spoke in Normandy on the 65th anniversary of D-Day, and whose passionate sincerity carried across an ocean.



Full remarks here.

I was privileged today to speak with a D-Day veteran. A deeply conservative and religious man, a lifelong republican whose ideal politician is Bob Dole, he said this about President Obama:

"I didn't vote for him, but I'm really rooting for him to do well, and I think he will."

I couldn't speak around the sob in my throat.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

3 comments:

mud_rake said...

God point. Yet, i still am amazed at the large number of Americans who actually believed that Bush and Cheney 'cared' for our troops. Not only regular citizens, but the military men and women themselves.

How terribly gullible our countrymen are to have thought that those two shysters were one bit concerned with the fighting men and women of this nation .

Many still do.

Jack Jodell said...

Great post, Yellow Dog. President Obama is indeed a President deserving of respect and good wishes. He is superbly eloquent and an exceptionally good model of the best aspects of our country. Those same things could never have been said about Bush OR Cheney.

BimBeau said...

Having some 30 years of active duty on which to guage my responce to the Dog ... if Blue Girl doesn't confirm ...
1. Most of the Armed Forces, and to a moderately lesser extent, the Navy rely upon this lack of intellectual vigor to maintain their status quo.
2. Only a very few officers with the intellectual vigor of Wes Clark, Eric Shinseki, Tony Toluba, Elmo Zumwalt are ever permitted.
3. The discouragement is pervasive, insidious and unrelenting.
4. WestPoint and Annapolis notwithstanding, the intellectual vigor and moral integrity is tightly defined to perpetuate the quo rather than the meta of status.
5. It's why Blue was harrassed over her bumper sticker. I get flack over mine as well ... "Bring 'em Home --- NOW!"
6. Only in this milieu is it supporting the troops to put them in harm's way and to bring them home where they are safe - except from themselves - is abandoning them.

If ever there was a prima facia case to be made that the Republican'ts can't respect the truth ... this is the issue. To mismanage this issue in the manner they did is criminal. It is of an order of magnitude to encompass the requirements for a R.I.C.O. filing with a principle indictment.