That's the only real way to honor their service, now before they're all gone. Watch and listen.
Full transcript here.
Also worth a read: The President's exchange with World War Two veteran Ernest Lovato, who served in the Army Air Corps' 100th Bombardment Group.
This is the speech I want to hear read out in thousands of towns all over this country on Veterans Day.
With apologies to Charlie Pierce for pasting the entire fantastic thing:
My father died in 1989, a victim of Alzheimer's Disease. In his younger days, he was a combat Naval veteran of World War II. Because of that, he was able to take advantage of a big-government program called the GI Bill of Rights. Because of that, he was eligible for a comfortable big-government pension when he retired from his career in a big-government program called the public schools. His politics were very conservative, almost radically so. (It was he who suggested I spend a rainy weekend reading None Dare Call It Treason, a sort of ur-text for Birchite winguttia.) He is not here to speak for himself, so I will do so. It is not merely unseemly, but positively obscene for people like Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, and the unspeakable Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods to use surviving World War II veterans to advance a political agenda that would make the lives of those veterans immeasurably worse. It is obscene for them to use old, brave men as camouflage for bigotry and nonsense. It is obscene for them to borrow courage that never would find in themselves and to gussy it up in Confederate flags and trot it out as an an audience for crackpots like Larry Klayman. It is obscene for them to claim for themselves the dead of Normandy, and the Bulge, and Okinawa, and Saipan. It is obscene for them to try to purify their own vandalism in worthier blood than flows in their veins.
How dare these idiots? Tailgunner Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, the constitooshunal skolar from Utah, and Ms. Palin. How dare they traffick in this manner of grave-robbing? They would all throw these veterans off Medicare, close the VA hospitals, bury the brave old men and women in substandard nursing homes rather than give an inch away of their indomitable ideology of entitled selfishness. Ted Cruz doesn't think the government has a role in making the lives of these veterans easier. Mike Lee thinks the Founders wanted vets to starve. Sarah Palin doesn't think, period, and is proud of it.
The American Right has never looked as fundamentally reckless and inhumane as it did when it attempted to burglarize heroism over the weekend. All the chickenhawks came home to roost, for sure. To see Princess Dumbass there, one hand on her heart while the other one very likely was picking pockets, attempting to wrap herself in the sacrifice of so many people, living and dead, when the hardest thing she's ever done in her life is quit her job halfway through doing it, is to see a kind of ghastly kind of historical vampirism. It takes a special lack of conscience to grift the graves of the honored dead. It's enough to make you root very hard for the Curse Of The Pharaohs. My father doesn't need the intercession of these delusional creatures. On his behalf, I say, in god's name, walk away from decent people in shame.
The greatest generation indeed:
The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American G.I.’s were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light.
In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.”
This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity.
…
On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque. In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.)
In France, Ms. Roberts also found a desperate letter from the mayor of Le Havre in August 1945 urging American commanders to set up brothels outside the city, to halt the “scenes contrary to decency” that overran the streets, day and night. They refused, partly, Ms. Roberts argues, out of concern that condoning prostitution would look bad to “American mothers and sweethearts,” as one soldier put it.
Keeping G.I. sex hidden from the home front, she writes, ensured that it would be on full public view in France: a “two-sided attitude,” she said, that is reflected in the current military sexual abuse crisis.
A Richmond man who was one of the Tuskegee Airmen died Sunday following a long illness.
Frank Douglas Walker, 93, died peacefully at his home on East Main Street in Richmond, said his son, Charles Walker.
"It was his time," he said. "His health had been failing for a while."
Frank Walker was a fighter pilot in the Tuskegee Airmen, an African-American Army Air Corps program created in 1941. Members fought prejudice at home to become America's first black military aviators during World War II.
Walker flew more than 50 missions in Europe. He was sent back to the United States after being injured when a P-47 he was piloting caught fire on a runway.
As a unit, the Tuskegee Airmen celebrated numerous achievements — more than 15,000 combat sorties, 150 enemy planes shot down, more than 1,000 planes, railcars and other vehicles destroyed on the ground, and one destroyer sunk.
However, it would be decades before the unit was recognized for its contributions.
In 2007, Walker was among 300 Airmen to receive a Congressional Gold Medal and recognition from then-President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C.
"They were hoping to be treated as equals as soon as they stepped off the boat," Charles Walker said. But when they got home, "the white folks went to the ticker-tape parade and the black folks went the other way."
Posts
All Comments
