Journal richie2000's Journal: repeat(history); until true=false; 1
...In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in Iraq, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Iraq or Afghanistan by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart....
We found most people didn't even know the difference between terrorism and democracy. They only wanted to work in the desert without helicopters strafing them and bombs burning their mosques and tearing their country apart.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Iraqifying the Iraqi....
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly:
But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is terrorism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Terrorists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight terrorism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now....
We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.
We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Iraq now....
We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded.
The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
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Editorial Note: Concluding his formal statement, Kerry commented about administration attempts to disown veterans and looked forward thirty years (to 2001) when the nation could look back proudly to a time when it turned from this war and the hate and fears driving us in Vietnam.
Yeah, right. Welcome to the doubleplusgood future.
Unfortunately (Score:2)