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Originally Posted by NCB
Sorry host, but youre absolutely a gutless, selfish, and arrogant human being that you think so little of your stepson and that you refuse to put aside your political leanings for one bloody second. The man is putting his life out on the line for your country (probably something you never did) and you just berate him like that. I wish you never posted your story; I liked you a lot better when I thought you were just a misinformed, misguided liberal
Yeah, I know I'll get a PM from a mod on this, but this type of shit is dispicableand some things deserve a harsh reply. |
NCB ..... I tried to combine my thoughts and my feelings into words ....... and you did, too. I hope that others will also post thoughts, feelings put into words, or a combination of both.
When we all knew a lot less....before the US invaded Iraq, my other son enlisted in the military, motivated primarily by the 9/11 attacks. He was injured during training and was discharged. He sees the present situation just as I tried to word it in my last post. When he enlisted, he had a strong sense about what he was going to be fighting for. The government and the political leadership had not yet been exposed as unreliable and misleading as to why and where our troops have been ordered to fight, as to whether...or not...there is a "terror" threat...to the US..... of a stature that rises to justify attacking and occupying other countries, as to the foreknowledge of and decisions made, by the leadership, before, during, and immediately following the 9/11 attacks, and the actual intent of the leadership with regard to the steady transfer, outside the law, and by changing the law and the makeup of the courts...of our constitutional rights from us....to the executive branch.
All of those affronts to our trust and our rights are known, and documented, much more definitively now. I could be reflexively supportive if my stepson harbored some doubts.....had some questions about the integrity of the government, the leaders, and about his mission. He is still cocksure, and he claims that the people who he serves with, all are, too.
I haven't "worked on him"....to change his opinions...not in any meaningful way. We have had discussions, all along....since 9/11. I've mentioned before that he is much more intelligent than I am. As time went by, and my questioning of authority increased, and the answers that I found, influenced my declining faith in the integrity of this leadership, his opinion stayed rock solid. I spent ten minutes in a discussion with him in september, where I showed him two of my posts on this forum, and drew his interest when I convinced him to read my post about Cheney saying in 2001 that "it was pretty well confirmed that Atta met with Iraqi government agents in Prague, and then denied in 2004, in an interview with Gloria Borger that he [Cheney} had ever made the strong Atta/Prague meeting connection.
My stepson asked for more proof, and I showed him the pages on the whitehouse website that contained Cheney's comments.
I want to understand....I don't want to feel like I an reluctant or against supporting my stepson's decision to fully support the administration and it's "terror" war fronts. I asked for others to point out what supports their belief systems....in spite of the "no one could have imagined that terrorists would hijack airliners and fly them into buildings, not once, but"...blah, blah, and the Negroponte appointment, the Gonzales appointment, the John Bolton recess appointment, and the Zalmay Khalilzad appointment, and the secrecy, and the fake Lodi, CA "jihadist" cell example, and the manipulation of the color coded terror warnings, and the false assertions that the "insurgency in Iraq is in it's last throes, if you will", and the "to tell you the truth, Kelly, I don't think about him [Bin Laden], and the "we don't torture" statements, and the 700 signing statements, and Patriot II and the "end run" around the FISA court, etc., etc., etc.......
In 1970, it was easy for me to decide not to make myself available or to cooperate with the military draft intended to provide replacements for other draftees completing combat tours in Vietnam:
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http://cgi.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/....time/9605/20/
At War with War
(TIME, May 18, 1970) -- With an almost manic abruptness, the nation seemed, as Yeats once wrote, "all changed, changed utterly." With the killing of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen last week, dissent against the U.S. venture into Cambodia suddenly coalesced into a nationwide student strike. Across the country 441 colleges and universities were affected, many of them shut down entirely. Antiwar fever, which President Richard Nixon had skillfully reduced to a tolerable level last fall, surged upward again to a point unequaled since Lyndon Johnson was driven from the White House. The military advantage to be gained in Cambodia seemed more and more dubious, and Nixon found that he had probably sacrificed what he himself once claimed was crucial to achieving an acceptable settlement: wide domestic support, or at least acquiescence, for his policies. Now it is the opposition that has gained strength.....
......The President had carefully calculated the diplomatic and military hazards of invading the Cambodian sanctuaries. But the more important risk involved the response at home -- and in that crucial area he has proved to be dangerously wrong. Nixon, to be sure, could not have foreseen the Kent State shootings. But he was sadly slow in recognizing their impact. After the four students were gunned down, he found no reason to censure the Guardsmen. All he could bring himself to say was: "When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy." That much was obvious. It seemed equally clear that even if the Cambodian expedition should accomplish more than now appears likely, it has already destroyed far more American resources of morale and cohesion than any North Vietnamese supplies could be worth.
Conciliation. By the end of the most searing week of his presidency, Nixon had grown elaborately conciliatory. Six Kent State students who drove to Washington on the spur of the moment to talk with Ohio Congressmen were taken to the White House to see Presidential Adviser John Ehrlichman. Learning of their presence, Nixon invited them into the oval office the next morning for an hour's conversation. .......
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We've reached a similar juncture in the US now...it is obvious....certainly to someone as smart and talented as my stepson is, that it is past the time to entertain doubts about the neccessity of Bush's long and hard ,GWOT.
NCB...the actions and the deceit of the leaders of our government have split our family, and again, as in 1970, our country. Nothing that you can say to me, certainly not in a discussion begun because of my reaction to that set of facts, seems very controversial or anything like the slap in the face...twice now in my adult lifetime.....that deceit involving avoidable war and death of our troops stings the cheek of my sensibilities, currently.
My other son understands, my wife understands, our son who blindly trusts and fights for the shifting policies and the disappearing rights described by this administration as "freedom" and "American ideals", and others who support this deception...this false GWOT, are not understood by us.
You can react to me and what I post, as you see fit..... consider though, that my concern is that my son currently serving, and those who serve alongside him, are in danger of dying...or killing for nothing. This is what I believe, this is why I have to forcie myself to tell him that we are "proud of his service".
Instead of reacting the way you did, please tell the rest of us what you believe that our troops are fighting and dying to achieve, under orders of president Bush, that is neccessary, legitimate, defends the US against a signifigant and a looming threat, and is in the spirit of the constitutional rights and freedoms that we were guaranteed before 9/11/2001, and were paid for by the blood and sacrifice of US troops on Omaha beach and US marines on Iwo Jima?
I didn't see it rise to that level of justification in Vietnam, I don't see it rising to that level of justification in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, I don't see a serious effort to fight a "war on terror", and I am losing respect for a son who puts himself in harms way, as he unquestioningly and fully supports a POTUS and CIC who has spent fully, one year of that "wartime" period...clearing brush on his own ranch, and the rest of his time making key appointments of shitty, substandard choices like Negroponte and Khalilzad, and endlessly repeating his "stay the course" mantra, ordering even more of our troops to their deaths, in order to postpone the day when even he realizes that every death of a US soldier has been in vain....changed nothing in Iraq or in Afghanistan, made American "no safer", and "defended" less and less "freedom" and "individual liberties", than before the first US soldier died.