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Banned
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This post is no endorsement of Kerry....he had his opportunity, and...if official election administration fraud was not his undoing, his days as a democratic party frontrunner are in the past.
I ask forgiveness, in advance, if this seems too OT. I just couldn't resist viewing djtestudo's comments about the "merits" of Bush's 2004 "victory", and a Lieberman. 2008 candidacy for prersident, displayed in kind of a shit sandwich, bookended by today's "news" concerning the "non-civil" war in Iraq, and the escalating US fatalities.....vs. John Kerry's.....still applicable...and pertinent comments about the earlier US involvment in another country's civil war:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...101500207.html
Iraq Sectarian Spree Kills 83 in 2 Days
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
The Associated Press
Sunday, October 15, 2006; 1:37 PM
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- At least 83 people were killed during a two-day spree of sectarian revenge killings, as Iraq's government said Sunday it was indefinitely postponing a much-anticipated national reconciliation conference.
Separately, the U.S. military reported the deaths of a Marine and four soldiers.
A brief statement from the Ministry of State for National Dialogue said only that the Iraqi political powers conference planned for Saturday had been put off because of unspecified "emergency reasons out of the control of the ministry."
The failure to bring Iraq's divided politicians together appeared likely to hurt Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's attempts to strengthen political consensus, underscoring the effect worsening violence is having on efforts to stabilize the U.S.-backed government and curb the bloodshed.
An Iraqi militant group that includes al-Qaida in Iraq announced Sunday in a video that it has established an Islamic Iraqi state, comprising six provinces _ including Baghdad _ that are largely Sunni and parts of two central provinces that are predominiately Shiite.
That statement came from the Mujahedeen Shura Council _ an umbrella organization of insurgent groups in Iraq that have be trying to drive out U.S. forces and topple Iraq's fragile government.
"We bring you good news of the founding and the formation of the Islamic Iraqi State ... to protect our people," said a man identified in the video as the group's spokesman.
The man in the eight minute video, which was posted on a Web site commonly used by insurgents, wore a traditional Arab robe and had his face blocked out.
Weekend revenge killings among Shiites and Sunnis left at least 63 people dead in a city north of Baghdad. Eleven people died Sunday in a series of apparently coordinated bombings on a girls school and other targets in the northern city of Kirkuk, where Kurds and Arabs are in a tense struggle for control of the oil-rich city.
<h3>Even by Iraq's bleak standards, October has been an especially bloody month. Hundreds of Iraqi's have died in attacks and 54 U.S. military personnel have been killed in the first two weeks alone.</h3>
U.S. commanders say that based on the record of past years, they expect a further spike in bloodshed throughout the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which ends in a week. Some Islamic militants believe that dying in combat during Ramadan brings extra blessings in paradise.
<b>The tit-for-tat sectarian killings began late Friday with the discovery of the decapitated bodies of 17 Shiites kidnapped earlier in the day near Balad, a predominantly Sunni region northwest of Baghdad and a hotbed of the insurgency battling U.S. and Iraqi forces.
Suspected Shiite militiamen then began targeting Sunnis in Balad and surrounding towns, killing at least 46 overnight, according to police and hospital officials.</b>
Extra police flooded into the area, 50 miles north of Baghdad, to enforce a curfew and additional security measures were taken in other villages in the area, Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.
Despite that, bullet-ridden bodies continued to be delivered to the Balad's main hospital well into Sunday morning, according to a hospital director who asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisals.
An army officer in the nearby city of Tikrit confirmed the death toll and said 63 suspects _ both Sunnis and Shiites _ were arrested.
The Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni political group, said 30 Sunnis had been killed and accused the Shiite-dominated police force of cooperating with the militias in snatching 70 people from Balad hospital and other locations.
"The Iraqi Islamic party condemns the violence in Balad for which we hold the occupation forces and government fully responsible," the party said in a statement, using its standard term for the U.S. military presence.
In one of the Kirkuk bombings, two girls who died when a man detonated explosives strapped to his body in front of the Kurdish al-Mallimin girls high school in downtown Kirkuk, police officials said.
The American military said the Marine was killed in combat in Anbar province, the Sunni heartland west of Baghdad on Saturday.
Three soldiers died in a roadside bombing Saturday south of Baghdad, and one soldier was killed in a roadside bombing Friday night southwest of the capital. The soldiers' names were being withheld pending notification of their families.
In Baghdad Sunday, Interior Ministry undersecretary Hala Shakir Salim survived a roadside bomb attack that killed seven others.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by djtestudo
I think Hillary Clinton would have a better chance then John Kerry as the Democratic nominee, but that's like saying I have a better chance of sleeping with Kirsten Dunst then Scarlett Johansson.
Although I voted for Bush and still believe he is a better president then Kerry could ever have been (and some might say my previous comparison works here as well  ), I figured that enough people were going to vote NFB that Kerry might win.
That he didn't shows how poor the ticket was.
They'd have been better off running Leiberman; they might have got some Republican cross-over votes.
Plus, since neither Bush (ineligable) or Cheney (no chance in Hell of winning) will be running, he'll likely be going up against a Republican that isn't perceived (at least) as being involved with the administration, so he wouldn't have that going for him like last time. |
Quote:
http://www.nationalreview.com/docume...0404231047.asp
April 23, 2004, 10:47 a.m.
Kerry’s Testimony
What he said.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Below is the text of John F. Kerry's testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22, 1971.
........<b>Feelings of Men Coming Back from Vietnam</b>
I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, <h3>and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history;</h3> men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.
As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.
In 1970 at West Point, Vice President Agnew said "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse" and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam.
But for us, as boys in Asia, whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because <b>we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dated to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country</b> which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we can not consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia.
In our opinion, and from our experience, <b>there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom</b>, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.....
........<b>What Was Found and Learned in Vietnam</b>
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from......
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To make my point truly clear; Bush and Lieberman, and to an extent, Hillary, are advocates of a failed policy, based on intentional lies, that gives too many of our troops a chance to die for as "big a nothing" as in "that noble war", in Vietnam. No additional US troops needed to die for Kerry to know that. How many more will have to die "for nothing" before Bush, Lieberman, or Hillary, know what John Kerry knew in 1971, and knows again, now.
When will djestudo know that a president who orders US troops to stay inserted in an escalating civil war in a far away country, while our troops continue to die there in steady, and sometimes escalating numbers, is ordering them to "die for nothing"?
Last edited by host; 10-15-2006 at 09:55 PM..
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