Bittersweet Symphony
2004-08-21 at 3:09 p.m.
Some politics and family ties
I'm sorry, I have to comment on the whole Swift boat crap. And make sure everyone reads this article, especially these parts: [with my comments]"In the new ad, Kerry is heard describing atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers during the war. As he speaks, a picture of the 27-year-old in a fatigue jacket, slouched over a table with a crowd behind him, appears on the screen, along with his words in large type.
[When I first saw the footage of this testimony on Meet the Press, I have to admit, I was a little, like, what the...? And Kerry should have made the facts clear like this article will go on to do. It seemed to me that he was trying to make himself popular with anti-war people by lying about what he had seen, but, in fact, he never claimed to have seen it. He was just totally speaking out against the war, and that is A OK with me. Is that A OK with you?]
"'They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,' Kerry says as the ad begins. Joe Ponder, who was wounded in an ambush in November 1968, then says, 'The accusations that John Kerry made against the veterans who served in Vietnam was just devastating.'
"Kerry continues: ' � razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.'
"Former POW Galanti says: 'John Kerry gave the enemy for free what I and many of my comrades in North Vietnam in the prison camps took torture to avoid saying. It demoralized us.'
[So, like, is he saying that it was true, and he knew it while he was being tortured, in other words, he took part in it? In other words, I don't give a fuck about him? And also, the "enemy" didn't need John Kerry to say it, as he was just repeating what someone else said, as you will see as you continue reading.]
"The ad does not make it clear that Kerry is recounting stories that came to light during the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit earlier in 1971, in which more than 150 honorably discharged veterans talked about war crimes they had committed in Southeast Asia. He was not claiming to describe events that he had witnessed.
[That bastard Kerry, publicizing the comments people had confided to him in priv-- oops, I mean, in the Congressional Record.]
"Contrary to Ponder's assertion, Kerry did not say that all soldiers committed heinous acts against the enemy.
'In the context of that testimony, this is not a statement of every soldier, sailor and Marine in Vietnam,' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, whose organization documented the widespread recognition of the group's first ad.
"'You can say that by repeating it, he's legitimizing [the allegations], but it's not fair to him to make it seem that he's making the charges himself and making them about all soldiers.'"
[POW Galanti legitimized it when he admitted that he took torture to avoid confessing it to the his captors. And, oh, I can stop talking in brackets now.]
So there it is. And we'll now return to our regularly schedueled entry and stop giving them the publicity they don't deserve.
So yesterday I was talking to my husband, and I wanted him to give a message to his family for me, that Ali can go to the high school he wants to go to, and we'll make sure he has the money to go there, and Wael told me his mom wanted to talk to me anyway so I could tell them, and for some reason I started crying like a baby, and told him how "I want to talk to her too... sob sob sob." So I made my very first by-myself international call. And now! I want to go back to Lebanon. Just kidding. I have to remember all the bad stuff. 1) slow internet connections 2) only talking to Wael every 3 or 4 days 3) no satellite with TiVo 4) no seatbelts in our 1980 chevy 5) it's boring and 6) all beef comes with cinammon and ginger or something weird included. OK. But I'm totally cool with a 2 week to 1 month visit every year. But now I miss them. My FIL's mother is so cute. Everytime I saw her, she told me in Arabic that she loved me. "I love you. Very Very much." Oh she's so cute. Be still my heart. Talking on the phone makes them seem so close, and especially me calling them and then them picking it up without my husband calling for me, made them seem even closer than normal for some reason. If only they were closer than a 24 hour plane ride away.
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