Text 1492, 144 rader
Skriven 2004-08-28 06:49:27 av John Hull (1:379/1.99)
     Kommentar till en text av Alan Hess
Ärende: Dole then and now
=========================
27 Aug 04 14:12, Alan Hess wrote to all:


 AH> washingtonpost.com
 AH> When Bob Dole Said No

 AH> By Noel Koch

 AH> Thursday, August 26, 2004; Page A23

 AH> "They want me to head Veterans," Bob Dole said. "They" meant the 
 AH> Bush White House. His tone said there were things he would rather 
 AH> do.

 AH> I asked him whether he was going to do it -- take on the campaign 
 AH> role of going after the veterans' vote. "Probably have to," he 
 AH> said, although he added that he knew the Bush campaign would want 
 AH> him to attack John Kerry, and he didn't intend to do that. He 
 AH> didn't have anything against Kerry, he said.

 AH> The conversation in my old friend's Pennsylvania Avenue office 
 AH> took me back decades. In the 1970 off-year elections, Bob Dole, 
 AH> freshman senator from Kansas, campaigned so aggressively for 
 AH> Republican candidates that he was awarded the position of chairman 
 AH> of the Republican National Committee. It looked like one more 
 AH> giant step forward for the man whose war wound in April 1945 
 AH> brought him near death on three separate occasions and kept him 
 AH> bedridden for years while other young veterans were starting 
 AH> careers. When he finally learned to walk again, he did it with a 
 AH> vow: "I'm going to get those years back," he told his brother 
 AH> Kenny.

 AH> But the RNC job was a poisoned apple. It came from the White 
 AH> House, and Dole was expected to pay an extravagant price for it. I 
 AH> was, in the way of things, the bill collector. For a brief period, 
 AH> I worked for Charles Colson. Chuck was one day to found an 
 AH> important prison ministry, but before his pilgrimage took him 
 AH> there he styled himself a hatchet man for Richard Nixon.

 AH> Colson ran a political operation in the White House, with outreach 
 AH> programs to various constituencies. My "constituency" was 
 AH> Congress, and my job was to get Republican members to laud the 
 AH> president and savage Democrats -- particularly House and Senate 
 AH> Democrats. The idea was to keep White House enemies on the 
 AH> defensive. Sometimes it worked. When it didn't work, it was 
 AH> because the members refused to be mustered into Colson's attack 
 AH> machine. They valued their independence.

 AH> No one valued his independence more than Bob Dole, who had 
 AH> struggled for so long to regain it after years of dependency on 
 AH> others. Colson never understood that; he felt Dole should pay for 
 AH> the chairmanship, and it was assumed I could persuade him to do 
 AH> things he preferred not to do -- such as launching gratuitous 
 AH> attacks on his colleagues. "They want me to get out there and 
 AH> accuse Teddy Kennedy of all kinds of stuff," he would complain. 
 AH> "I'm not going to do that. I have to work with the guy. Besides, I 
 AH> like him."

 AH> Dole was no shrinking violet; he was willing to attack -- indeed, 
 AH> his reputation for it shadowed his career for years. But he was 
 AH> not willing to be manipulated. He refused to be used, and Colson 
 AH> swore Dole would pay for his defiance. After the 1972 election 
 AH> Dole was fired as party chairman. His bitterness was palpable: 
 AH> "They invited me up the mountain [Camp David] and threw me off."

 AH> Dole is part of a political generation that took national service 
 AH> for granted. What separated his service from that of so many of 
 AH> his congressional colleagues was that he nearly died and then 
 AH> spent the remainder of a remarkable life overcoming challenges 
 AH> that most people can't imagine -- e.g., simply getting dressed.

 AH> No one is better placed than Dole to know how arbitrary are the 
 AH> fortunes of war. It is not surprising to hear John Kerry's wounds 
 AH> belittled by men who have avoided all risk of being wounded. 
 AH> Someday perhaps we will be able to plumb the neuroses of those who 
 AH> avoided Vietnam and have ever after had difficulty living with the 
 AH> choice. But it is surprising to hear Bob Dole doing it. Kerry not 
 AH> hospitalized for his wounds? Bob Dole was not hospitalized for his 
 AH> first Purple Heart either.

 AH> "It was just a scratch," he later recalled. "I think one of our 
 AH> grenades hit a tree and bounced back." He received a Bronze Star, 
 AH> but that came much later, and was a bureaucratic exercise having 
 AH> little to do with his service as a platoon leader in the 
 AH> extraordinary 10th Mountain Division on April 14, 1945, the day 
 AH> his war ended, in Italy.

 AH> Bob Dole knows as well as any person how capricious is the 
 AH> gleaning of medals. Some men deserve what they don't get; some get 
 AH> what they don't deserve. And who should know better than he that 
 AH> it is craven to belittle a man's service because it didn't extend 
 AH> over some arbitrary stretch of time?

 AH> Bob Dole spent little time in combat. But as a result of the time 
 AH> he did spend, he lay on his back for years, recovering, and 
 AH> helping others to recover.

 AH> I spent a year in Vietnam and came home without a scratch. My 
 AH> brother served two tours in Vietnam, earned three Purple Hearts 
 AH> (and was hospitalized, and does draw disability -- weird 
 AH> yardsticks used to measure John Kerry's alleged shortfall), and 
 AH> yet spent far less time than I did in-country. Indeed, his first 
 AH> "tour" lasted about 15 minutes, ending on the beach near Danang in 
 AH> the midst of the U.S. Marines' first amphibious assault in 
 AH> Vietnam.

 AH> Time in-country, how often a man was wounded, how much blood he 
 AH> shed when he was wounded -- it is hurtful that those who served in 
 AH> Vietnam are being split in so vile a fashion, and that the wounds 
 AH> of that war are reopened at the instigation of people who avoided 
 AH> serving at all. It is hurtful that a man of Bob Dole's stature 
 AH> should lend himself to the effort to dishonor a fellow American 
 AH> veteran in the service of politics at its cheapest.

 AH> There was a time when he would have refused. I know. I was there.

 AH> The writer was special assistant to President Richard Nixon from 
 AH> 1971 to 1974. He was assistant secretary of defense and director 
 AH> for special planning at the Defense Department from 1981 to 1986.

 AH> + 2004 The Washington Post Company

There're a couple of problems here, Alan.  First, John Kerry is the one who put
his record in Vietnam forward and tried to trade on it for political advantage.
 That is undeniable.  Second, he came back from Nam under conditions that were
absolutely bizarre at best, and a lot of people who were there *with* him
dispute what he says.  And third, he sat in front of a Congressional
subcommittee and accused his fellow soldiers of the most vile and heinous acts
one human can perpetrate against another.  And did it without a shred of
evidence.  That's all his doing, nobody elses.

That's three strikes, Alan, and now all you liberals want to give him a pass
and say none of that counts.  But wait, you can't rely on his Senate record
either, because he has flip-flopped more times than a trout out of water on a
river bank.  At the same time, you want to take Bush to task for things that HE
did, or didn't do, 35 years ago.  You simply can't have it both ways.

John 

America:  First, Last, and Always!
Go to www.madgorilla.us for all your Domain Name Services at the lowest rates.

--- Msged/386 TE 05
 * Origin: We are the Watchmen of our own Liberty! (1:379/1.99)