Excellent Article on Kerry in Salon "Kerry vs. the chicken hawks"

[absyntheNsugar]

It was an unscripted scene, nothing like the polished photo ops the Bush team, plundering the resources of the government, liked to put together. Near the end of the Iowa caucus campaign, former Green Beret Jim Rassmann stood on a Des Moines stage and quietly described how John Kerry had saved his life in Vietnam. By the time he was finished, something remarkable had happened: a presidential challenger had, as the world watched, grown larger than the incumbent president.

But something even more important happened as well: In that moment, Vietnam veterans, with characteristic modesty, claimed their long-overdue seat at the head table of American politics. And that brought an unexpected threat to the Bush team's reelection plans, which relied on beating up liberals who didn't know how to fight back. Standing beside Kerry at campaign stops, working the phones, or simply filling the front rows, the veterans, powerless but for the witness they bore, took aim to blow those plans away.

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ON EDIT: DOH! http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/19/bush/index.html

Good read

[WilliamPitt]

1. Link?

[King of New Orleans]

2. Chickenhawks then

Freeloading hawks now (the war itself is bad enough but putting the cost on the U.S. Visa card for future generations to pay also galls me greatly)

BTW--I'd like a better term than freeloading if there are any good rhetoric types out there

[ProfessorPlum]

3. there is something enormously powerful

about the idea of this generation of men, who served their country and were wounded in body and soul, finally gaining some measure of political power in the highest ranks of this country.

Something beautiful, in fact.

Almost transformingly beautiful. I could almost feel really good about voting for Kerry if I knew that it would help these folks, who have been victimized then deserted by their own government, ostracized, blamed, and forgotten, would feel that they finally have a piece of the political pie again.

Huh - that's a great thought.

[seaglass]

4. It really is a beautiful piece.

"The gathering of veterans in his camp made Kerry the Bush team's nightmare opponent. They turned its greatest advantage, its flag-bedecked character costume, into its greatest weakness. They didn't go out of their way to attack neocons for having avoided combat service -- Vietnam vets have always been the most nonjudgmental members of their generation. Rather, simply by showing their faces in politics, as veterans supporting a veteran, they invited comparisons unflattering to Bush and his friends.

When Jim Rassmann talks about Kerry in public, even a skeptical viewer finds it hard to avoid the thought: The candidate is a better man than the president he seeks to replace. The more veterans appear in political settings, the more neocons will find themselves facing the kinds of questions they've managed to dodge for most of their adult lives."