cognitive dissident

My local newspaper has published another of my letters to the editor. I was compelled to respond to a previous letter that read as follows:

John Kerry reminds me of the big bad wolf who huffed and puffed and couldn't blow the house down.

Democrats want a day-by-day report on President Bush's time in the National Guard and imply he avoided the Vietnam war. To balance things, we should have the same report on John Kerry, plus a report on the total of two days he spent in the hospital for his three Purple Hearts.

Kerry's slander of GIs he left behind in Vietnam is not yet well-known. He told a Senate committee in 1971 that soldiers raped, cut off ears and heads, shot at civilians and poisoned food stock. He is also shown in pictures taken by the FBI demonstrating with Jane Fonda, our No. 1 traitor.

We need fair and balanced reporting.

[name and address redacted]

The edited version of my response is also online, and my original version is below:

Because the current administration’s two top members didn’t serve overseas during Vietnam, they are desperate to attack Democratic front-runner John Kerry, who did serve and who did so honorably. Cheney’s “other priorities” and the Bush family’s machinations that snagged a coveted stateside National Guard position are facts, not mere implications. Bush’s fair-weather patriotism, with its suspicious months-long gaps, pales in comparison to Kerry’s Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. There is a substantial difference between Kerry – as demonstrated by servicemembers who thank him for saving their lives – and Bush, who can’t find anyone from Alabama who even remembers him showing up for duty.

The mud-slingers who now accuse Kerry of “slandering Vietnam veterans” need to take off their Fox News Channel “fair and balanced” blinders and learn a few facts. First, Kerry’s remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about atrocities in Vietnam began with the words “They told the stories,” clearly indicating that he was not making accusations but rather revealing what other GIs had told him. Other contemporaneous statements clearly show that Kerry’s anger was directed toward “the men who ordered us,” and not toward his fellow veterans. Second, the “demonstrating with Jane Fonda” story is also a mirage that vanishes upon closer inspection. In the photograph from Valley Forge, Kerry is sitting three rows behind Fonda; he is so far away from her that he’s not even in focus. (There is a faked image circulating on the Internet that combines two separate photos, doctored to make it appear as if Fonda and Kerry are on the same podium. Maybe the previous letter-writer was taken in by the hoax, and is trying to use hysterical hatred of “Hanoi Jane” to slander Kerry.)

Dissent against injustice – not compliance with it – is true patriotism. Kerry’s protests against our invasion and occupation of Vietnam show far more love of country than Bush’s skipping out of National Guard duty to work on a political campaign and then “working out” an early departure to attend business school.

Not that I’m a huge Kerry fan, but I’d prefer an honest public debate to the soundbite-laden sludge that’s often served to us as “news.” Bush’s cozy relationship to the press gave him a huge edge during the 2000 (s)election season; any bets on whether or not he’ll get away with it this time, too?

Thanks for reading.

Quote of the Day:

“In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time...”

(John Stuart Mill, On Liberty)