samremy

This article can be found on the web at: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=mcgovern

about
George McGovern:

George McGovern, senator from South Dakota from 1962 to 1980.
Democratic candidate for President in 1972.
Author of The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time
(Simon & Schuster).


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The Reason Why
by GEORGE MCGOVERN
(from the April 21, 2003 issue of The Nation )

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
(in the Crimean War)

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.

He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly. This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)

The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address. War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.

Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others. My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration. For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.

During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider." As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him." In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not." This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will. In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.

As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.

Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.

I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.

We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.

During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.

I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.

The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people. We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?

It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United States? Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen." Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated." The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never comtemplated."

I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.

The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of civilization.

But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.

The Reason Why

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__________________
"...to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government .. " -- The US Declaration of Independence

seretogis

It looks like more of the same overly-emotional liberal nonsense to me.

__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

rogue49

* BTW, please do NOT think my remarks are coming from a liberal mind,
because you will be far from the mark *

While I do agree with the decision to attack Iraq & the way it was accomplished.
And the war in Afganistan also.

I disagree with Bush's usual foreign diplomacy.
The creation of the Homeland Security Dept.
The appointment of John Ashcroft and his implemented policies.
The lack of real Domestic effort
The return of the Deficit buildup and obligation to a balanced budget
The lack of responsiblity of the tax cut. (I do not believe in the trickle down theory)

As far as I'm concerned, Bush has not proven himself a complete President.
Mostly just a spectre of vengence.
This is necessary for our defense, however it is not the whole package.

But to give him the benefit of the doubt,
he's got a year & a half to prove to me that he's got the focus of the american people,
not just a warrior.

Peetster

The article is more liberal sour grapes.

Sparhawk

Linking Iraq to 9/11 is shameful. Even more shameful is that so many americans buy it.

__________________
"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."

The_Dude

why do y'all dismiss something just because "it's liberal" or something of that sort??

why not citicize it, saying why it's not true instead of just saying that an argument is invalid because of the ideology of the author?

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

chavos

McGovern for president? He's old, but by that article he sounds much more cognizent than our current pres or many of the challengers. That humanity is precisely what we need in contrast to Bush's stark moralizing and "certainty."

Kadath

No more debate around here. You see something you disagree with, label it "liberal" or "conservative" out loud and go on your merry way. And here I was wondering why I feel like there's nothing worth debating here anymore.

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it's quiet in here

redravin40

Why should we be any different then the rest of the country?

The_Dude

i think that we need to make a rule for the board as to NOT dismiss an arguement just because "its liberal" or "its conservative".

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

rth9821

What about dismissing an argument because it’s crap?


That’s not the way you start a debate, however it is a way of turning away large numbers of moderately minded people from reading your essay. Perhaps that’s why the Wa Po turned him down since they’re in the business of being read.

Besides what shall we debate?

Supreme Court
Economic Policy
Vietnam
Can God really be a “Co-pilot?”

The man was all over the place.

Phaenx

I only had to read the first sentence to come to the same conclusion.

__________________
"I went shopping last night at like 1am. The place was empty and this old woman just making polite conversation said to me, 'where is everyone??' I replied, 'In bed, same place you and I should be!' Took me ten minutes to figure out why she gave me a dirty look." --Some guy

seretogis

Exactly. This is nothing but a whiney rant about the VRWC, and I would like the time back that I spent reading it. If you are going to post an article/essay/link, at least post a response to it, or what you think of it so that it has some sort of value. Don't just jump on a bandwagon and start copy/pasting others unsupported opinions.

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seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

geep

Sounds to me like the man is still bitter for losing one of the most lopsided elections in modern history. If only the Supreme Court had been on his side....

The_Dude

yes, i agree samremy should have posted his opinion on this

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

Liquor Dealer

I can dismiss it simply because it comes out of George McGovern's mouth! Since the early sixties much extreme liberal crap has flowed from that mouth and continues today - only a few bought it then - at least so few that outside of his home district he was a political nobody - a time when the Democrats were scaping the bottom of the gene pool looking for a candidate much in the way they are at the present time.

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Life isn't always a bowl of cherries, sometimes it's more like a jar of Jalapenos --- what you say or do today might burn your ass tomorrow!!!

samremy

<div align=justify>I apologize for not commenting on McGovern’s Essay at the time of posting. I wanted to test the waters of the ‘Tilted Politics’ forum by seeing what kind of response this post would receive . That said, I will now comment on the opening statement; since it was the main topic of most replies.

“Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.”

The fact of the Supreme Court makes partisan decisions cannot be argued, for it is most definitely a fact.

As far as ‘W’s lack of both wisdom and compassion is concerned, I would find it surprising for any conservative with an ounce of intellect to argue that point. His limited vocabulary and obvious fear of press conferences is astonishing. How can it be? He doesn’t quite personify an Ivy League graduate from both Harvard and Yale. Does he? How can such an educated man with an MBA from the Harvard Business School make this statement? “Let me tell you my thoughts about tax relief. When your economy is kind of ooching along, it's important to let people have more of their own money.”- George W. Bush, Boston, Oct. 4, 2002. It's not just because I strongly believe that whatever the pitiful amount is of "...their own money" from some tax cut, it doesn't equal or even compare to the benefits the average person and the national economy receive from steady income, which only steady employment provides, It's actually the tremendous embarrassment I feel knowing that our president uses words like “ooching”? Unbelievably, he actually makes Dan 'potatoe' Quail look like a Mensa genius!

Now, how can the leader of the free world be afraid of the journalist Helen Thomas, an 82-year-old woman? Did he have to ban this respected member of the press because her questions aren't easy; couldn’t he have been a little compassionate and shown some politeness and just not call on her? Was it is his wisdom or compassion, which forced him to insult the award winning journalist heard asking the tough questions at most presidential press conferences since JFK? Must 'W' have press conferences scripted as if they were 'State of the Union' speeches? Now I know, I just realized how 'W' ever made it through Harvard and Yale.

‘W’s amount of compassion as well as his level of wisdom can easily be determined by what he says:“There's only one person who is responsible for making that decision (to go to war), and that's me. And there's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids on the death of their loved ones. Others hug, but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug, and that's me, and I know what it's like.” -‘W’ interviewed by Barbara Walters, ABC ‘20/20,’ 12/13/02.He probably learned all about compassion from his mother. Here’s what the former first lady said about watching the war on TV;“I watch none. He sits and listens and I read books, because I know perfectly well that, don't take offense, that 90 percent of what I hear on television is supposition, when we're talking about the news. And he's not, not as understanding of my pettiness about that. But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? And watch him suffer.” –told to Diane Sawyer, ABC/Good Morning America, March 18, 2003 I hope she wasn't talking about US service men in body bags being irrelevant. I sure wish 'W' would take after his father, but judging by the words that come out of his mouth, he just might merely be a 'mamas boy'. How unfortunate for America.

We all saw ‘W’ landing on the aircraft carrier, I would say he enjoys being commander and chief. Wouldn’t you agree?

I don’t think I have to argue the point that Congress is timid, especially since most of the democrats in Congress are too weak, concerned that standing-up to a president with high approval ratings might cost them their re-election, despite the high cost to America's economy, credibility and honor.

In essence, McGovern is correct, a man such as 'W' has no understanding of the greatness this country possesses. What is most unfortunate, 'W' doesn't have the common sense to realize that such greatness is being significantly diminished by having Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz unchecked by allowing them to determine the nation's foreign and domestic policies, all the while 'W's obliviously(and obviously) enjoying his dirty little war. How shameful!

I can't agree more with McGovern's opening.
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__________________
"...to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government .. " -- The US Declaration of Independence

Sparhawk

Thanks for the quotes, and for the comments samremy.

__________________
"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."

The_Dude

keynsein theory says you're supposed to cut taxes and spend more.

yes, bush is doing both, but he's spending more on foreign countries and the defense sector only.

i doubt that can inject the economy

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

Conclamo Ludus

What McGovern should understand is that not everyone's idea of greatness for this country is McGovern's idea of greatness. He's definitely not looking to garner any moderates support in his statements in which case it is a letter to people that agree with him. He's not making a case to convince you, he is simply patting himself and those that agree with him on the back for hating W.

I don't believe Vocabulary has anything to do with wisdom, but that's just me. My grandfather was one of the wisest men I've ever known but he didn't exaclty stray from words like "ooching".

__________________
Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul
I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold.
-Son House, Death Letter Blues

Daval

good article, i enjoyed reading it.

__________________
"It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don't believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it."
Winston Churchill