Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review
When you hear the sound bites from George W. Bush’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars today in which he compares his botched war in Iraq to the Vietnam war, think about what he was doing while thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and killed in the mud of Southeast Asia.
As is well known, rather than serving in Vietnam, George W. Bush spent the war years in a cushy assignment to the “Champagne Unit” of the Texas Air National Guard. There are witnesses from that era who say Bush’s main preoccupations then were doing drugs, chasing women and driving drunk. There are also rumors he seriously damaged a fighter jet while taxiing it on a runway.
Conversely, no witnesses have ever been found who can verify that he completed his service with honor — and there is circumstantial evidence that he did not. Around the time he was in the TNG, the Pentagon began requiring drug testing of all military pilots. The record indicates that Bush never submitted to a physical after the drug testing was required — and thus was never honorably discharged.
Today, in what may be his most astoundingly outrageous speech to date, Bush had the temerity to lecture the American people about lessons the country should have learned from Vietnam:
And:
Just when you think there is nowhere lower Bush can go to try to fool people into supporting his illegal and misbegotten war, he finds a way to make us even more disgusted with him, the people who work for him and their rank incompetence — as well as with our leaders who insist on allowing him to remain in office.
Update: Flip-flop alert: In 2004, Bush bristled at comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam: “I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy.”
Update 2: The complete text of Bush’s speech is here. The excerpt about Vietnam follows below the fold:
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?†A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: “It’s difficult to imagine,†he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.†A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life.â€
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,†“re-education camps,†and “killing fields.â€
There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.â€
Cross-posted at Pensito Review.
If you think that’s disgusting…which I do, just wait until you see the commercials that started today for Freedom’s Watch. It’s a pro-war advertising campaign with all the typical talking points…very disgraceful! The commercial that I saw showed the burning WTC towers. Isn’t it funny how these ads debuted on the day Bush gave his little speech? How well orchestrated!
What he doesn’t say is who caused the killing fields and the rest of it.
The CIA enabled the Kymer Rouge and their infamous leader Pol Pot. He was the first big bad “turrist”.
And they created O. bin Laden too, who is the second coming of Pol Pot.
And in both instances it was to bring wealth to the ruling war class (those who own and run political America thru the military industrial complex), which is married to petrolia and big pharma (two of the most diseased whores on the planet), and whose mistress is the lobby class in washington.
And as everyone can see plainly with preznit blush as their current lackey, they are a disfunctional “family”.
Follow the money! Back in VN era the boogymen were “communists”. “Fight them there or on our shores.” Sound familiar?? The only difference, Johnson a Dem was escalating that war. Again, follow the money – who profited from VN??? I don’t for one minute believe teeny-g is in Iraq for any other reason than oil. The only thing g&company haven’t learned, which they should have with the example of VN, people defend there own country with great tenacity. I’d be curious to see what the vets have to say??
Chickenhawk-in-Chief George W. Bush is a disgrace — total scum, a human cesspool. The whole world is ashamed that he hails from Earth.
Mugzi #3
You said “I’d be curious to see what the vets have to say??”
I think the picture Jon Ponder provided in this article (the one showing the Vet with the “Bullshit Protector” covering his ears) speaks for many Vets.
“We have got to put pressure on the mass media not to play the same craven role they played in Iraq, when they effectually collapsed and became a megaphone for Bush’s policies,” Sanders said. “What Robert is saying here is that the leader of that effort is Fox News, which in many ways is simply a propaganda machine for the Republican Party and the Bush administration.”
(Senator Bernie Sanders)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070822/ap_en_tv/tv_fox_iran_1
Here’s one bit of W’s speech: :One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.” Now, the killing fields refers to the genocide in Cambodia committed by the Khmer Rouge. It was communist Vietnam that, it 1979, finally decided that even it could not tolerate such atrocities on their doorstep, invaded and removed the Khmer Rouge government. However the US, and as a consequence the UN, never recognised the change of government preferring to support Pol Pot and his supporters, presumably because they were now the enemy of their enemy. Forgive me for not appreciating that human rights was at the core of US policy then and for doubting whether it is now.
Big Dan # 6 Eric Margolis speaks to this lack of truth by the MSM in this video. I know it’s something you already know but he does talk about the Shite and Suni “fighting” propaganda, where the MSM calls them “insurgents”. Not true,he says, they are just resisting, as any country would if it is invaded and occupied.
Margolis says TV news hiding truth about Iraq civil war
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNDubPTrnG0
(second attempt at posting)
Well, Chickenhawk Bush said only what we would expect of a pathological liar.
But what of the VFW who handed him the podium? At what point do we simply admit that this is an organization of old, stupid men who wish they hadn’t wasted their youth as they did, fighting and supporting a war without valid purpose, and now doing it again?
Shame on you VFW! Shame!
Once again the chickin in chief used the VFW(military)
as a safe backdrop for his flawed and fialing IRAQ occupatation plans.There is no doubt that king george
saw to it that we occupy and suck out the OIL resources
of a sovereign nation that had no WMD’s and unable to
attack us.It is painfully and obviously clear that this
crooked and LYING administration will try to cherry pick the IRAQ report to Congress,Grasping at straws at
any positive remarks from the general’s report they can
to continue the ‘SURGE’ or current occupation of IRAQ .