Screaming Points

A Note I Wrote to a Friend Who Gets Nutball Right-Wing E-Mails

Send this to 'em:

John Kerry, a rich kid, volunteered to join the Navy during Vietnam. Once in the Navy, after a tour on the big boats, he re-upped and volunteered to join the brown river boats, the small attack boats that ran directly up the fresh water rivers into enemy territory. His job there was to fly the flag, draw enemy fire and attack its source. He did so with great distinction and heroism. He was awarded three purple hearts, and once you get three purple hearts, they send you home.

George Bush, whose father was a powerful congressman, avoided service in Vietnam. His father skipped him ahead of hundreds of less-wealthy Texas boys to get a spot in an Air National Guard unit that was stocked with the sons of politicians and Dallas Cowboys hoping to stay out of the shooting war in Vietnam. They learned to fly a type of jet that was about to be de-commissioned, and would there fore never see battle again.

The year the National Guard began testing for cocaine, Bush skipped his physical and his flying license was revoked. Through his father's political connections, he was moved to Alabama to serve out his four remaining years of obligation to the National Guard.

Remember that at this time, hundreds of young American boys, those who were from families that were not headed by politicians or profreesional athletes, hundreds of those less fortunate American boys were dying every week in Vietnam.

Bush goes to Alabama to work on a political campaign, but he never shows up at the air base to finish his National Guard service. There is not one witness who will say they saw him show up for a drill in Alabama.

Not one.

Bush blew it off. His blood was full of cocaine and booze. He was not about to take a physical and be exposed as a drug addict while his dad was rising in the Republican party.

But it's simpler than that. Why won't you people see what is as plain as day? How can you ignore what is right in front of you?

Bush is a coward, and an idiot, and a puppet.

Kerry is a hero, a genius, and is beholden to no one.

Bush has lost jobs, blown the biggest deficit in the history of the world, and sacrificed 1000 Americans and 10,000 Iraqis, minimum, and spent 150 billion dollars of your money to settle a personal family feud.

America was unified, strong, and had the backing of the entire world after the attacks by religious fundamentalists on the World Trade Towers.

George Bush took that international support and spurned it. Wasted it. Squandered it.

George Bush had an Oedipal problem with his father that he needed to work out. See, growing up, George W. was always the "bad" son, the stupid one, the drug addict, the one who had to get abortions for his girlfriends, the one who was an ugly drunk, the one whose businesses constantly failed. Jeb was supposed to be the good son, the one that would go far. George W. always came up short when he was compared to the old man - and he was compared to him a lot.

Why did George W fly jets? Because the old man, who was the youngest fighter pilot in the Navy, had become a hero when he bailed out of a burning plane during WWII (of course, some say he bailed out a leeeetle bit too soon, sending the other two crewmembers to their deaths unnecessarily, but that's really second-guessing old stuff, isn't it?)

Why did George run for office? To show up the old man.

Why did George W Bush invade Iraq? To show up the old man.

He's done it all to try and win his mother's love.

Iraq was about the 38th biggest threat to the United States when Bush took office. But Bush was determined to show that he was a bigger man than Poppy. So, he would finish Dad's undone job.

Bush the coward, the man who supported the Vietnam war but did everything he could to avoid fighting it, did this along with Dick Cheney, a man who avoided combat by taking five, count 'em, FIVE student deferrals - until the day the armed services said it would start taking college kids. They still wouldn't draft you if you had kids, though, so nine months and two days after that announcement, Dick and Lynne had a daughter. That's right, if you're doing that math at home, Dick Cheney wanted to stay out of combat soooooo bad, he had sex with Lynne.

Why are you folks still trading these bizarre fantasies about John Kerry? You can hate him because he wants women to control their own medical decisions. You can hate him because he does not want to alter the Constitution to codify hatred and discrimination. You can hate John Kerry because he does not want to legislate his religion into the law of the land.

You can hate John Kerry because he wants to balance the budget, instead of giving a tax to the richest people in the history of the world - which will be paid for by their children with higher interest rates on everything they do. You can hate John Kerry because he believes that the richest, most sophisticated economy on the planet should be able to provide some health insurance for its citizens, as every other civilized nation manages to do.

You can hate John Kerry because he wants to preserve the Bill of Rights. You can hate John Kerry because he wants an internationl coalition, a truly international coalition, to help clean up the colossal mess and chaos that George W. Bush personally created in the Middle East in order to work out his emotional problems with his father. You can hate John Kerry because he wants to move beyond petroleum as fuel, so we can wean ourselves from the whims of religious fundamentalist dictatorships with lots of oil.

But you can't hate John Kerry because his military service is somehow flawed.

That is just stupid.

It ignores the reality of his life - and Bush's life.

And just like during Vietnam, Bush wants the war - but he wants other, less wealthy people to die for it.

No one has more right to criticize the conduct of a war than a decorated veteran and hero of that war. If you're smart, you know that Kerry's comments before congress were him describing the testimony he had just heard from the Winter Soldier hearings - dozens and dozens of Vietnam vets describing their own experiences in the field.

Are you going to sit there at your safe keyboard, in your warm house, and tell us that those Vietnam vets were lying about the abuses? Do you doubt that those atrocities took place?

We all know those atrocities took place.

And we all know that that war was wrong.

It was wrong, and it accomplished nothing.

Nothing.

Except the deaths of 500,000 Americans, and as many as three million Asians in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

It was wrong, we lost it, and John Kerry had more right to comment on it and criticize it and resist it than any of us - than any of you.

Certainly more right to comment on it than the cowardly Bush. Bush supported the Vietnam War - when he was a drunken frat boy at Yale, he was very happy to see young black and Hispanic men go off to kill Asians, so that he and his white buddies could be educated to rule the world.

Kerry was at that meeting that discussed killing American officials - and he told them he was leaving the organization over that rhetoric. Kerry recounted the tales he'd heard at Winter Soldier - because the congress needed to hear them, had to hear them, and he was uniquely qualified to make them hear it. Kerry did not lie under oath - he did a far more horrible thing, something unforgiveable by the evil forces in this country - the racist, xenophobic forces which still pulse in your veins today - he told the truth. And he told the truth about himself, admitting he'd taken his Zippo lighter and set fire to villages. That was how it was done. That was how we Americans fought that war. Why does this surprise you? That's how we fight war today.

Today, TODAY, our airplanes dropped bombs on civilian neighborhoods - trying to catch a dozen thugs, they bomb dozens of homes. Americans kill low-income people of other races, that's what we do in war.

Y'all can send each other circle-jerk e-mails like this twice a day, trying to turn a hero into a villain, but it's pathetic. Kerry turned toward the fire, toward the enemy, he drove on upriver to defend his country. Time and time again. Your guy ran. He ran. Just like on 9-11, he ran and hid, saving his own skin.

He is a coward, an idiot, a puppet and a bully.

The Republican party has been completely taken over by an unholy alliance between corporate interests and religious zealots with an Armageddonist bent. Every Republican should lose his office in this election. They have shown total disregard for their supposed principles - Republicans were supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility, but they took the greatest surplus ever, and gave it to the richest people in the history of the world.

I assume that not all of you receiving this message are wealthy - some of you may just be religiously insane, or irrationally frightened by a constant barrage of phony terror threats, kaleidoscopic color-coded terror levels, and the endless barrage of jingoistic, emotional, brain-free crap on Fox News Channel and Limbaugh and Hannity, or God forbid, Beck O'Reilly and Savage.

Are you aware that everything you get from Fox comes from and profits an Australian child pornographer? Rupert Murdoch, the extreme right-wing plutocrat who pushes Fox on the world makes most of his money from the tabloid newspapers he owns in Britain. Why do those tabloids there sell so well? Because every issue, every day, features a big picture of a topless teenager, as young as 16 years old, on page three. Of course, here in Americam we call that child porn. But when Murdoch sells it and uses the money to control the information and disinformation that flows into your house and brain, we call him a capitalist.

I report, you decide.

Everything Bush has touched - in his entire life - has been a disaster. Every business he started failed. And every time, he was bailed out by wealthy interests who wanted to use him as a tool to cut their taxes.

Bush is incompetent, a liar, and a pawn of evil, evil forces.

But listen, you just keep doing this research into John Kerry's disreputable military record. If you think this election should be decided on the war record of the two men, so be it. Forget the war on terror, which Bush abandoned to chase his Poppy's nemesis, former CIA tool Saddam Hussein. Forget the jobs lost, the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs. Forget that the next president will appoint 2, 3 even 4 Supreme Court judges. Forget that this president has backed no fewer that FOUR amendments to the constitution he swore to defend.

You want this election to be about who was the better warrior for the US back in the 60s, cool. Bring it on.

Are you so racist that you think Saddam Hussein was the guy who did 9/11? You're not that stupid, are you? Saddam was a secular dictator, who ran a strictly non-religious state. Religion was quashed, kept under tight control, because the only enemy Saddam had was religious fundamentalists - like Osama bin Forgotten.

Bush took our country's horror, our trauma - and he turned it to his own devices, channeled it and mis-directed it and misled us all to fight his own, personal psychological family problems with the 82nd Airborne. He's willing to sacrifice half of the Bill of Rights on that funeral pyre in Manhattan in order to look tough on terra. He's willing to jail 5000 Muslim men in the United States - no charges, no evidence, no lawyers - and get convictions on exactly none of them! Ashcroft is 0 and 5,000 for convictions in his War on Terror.

Bush is a failure, an idiot, and a complete disaster.

Bush is the worst president in the history of this country.

The.

Worst.

Ever.

Worse than Hoover, worse than Reagan, worse than Clinton, worse than Harrison.

But he likes to say "Jesus", so you'll vote for him anyway.

You'll let my grandchildren pay for your tax cut.

You'll let poor kids of color die in Iraq for your racism.

You'll let a quarter, then a third, then half of Americans lose their health coverage because you thought Hillary Clinton was uppity.

You'll let the US Constitution, the greatest and holiest document ever written, be degraded by amendments which would institutionalize hatred, quash free speech, and roll back hard-won rights - so you can wave your flag and claim to be "patriotic".

You'll let terrorists and criminals legally purchase military assault weapons and bullets designed to shred cop's kevlar vests so that you can go hunt your ducks without the threat of your dark fantasy, that ultimate coservative nightmare, of the goverment agent appearing at your door to register your gun.

You vote out of fear, and ignorance, and personal greed. You vote out of homophobia, misogyny, and racism.

Admit it.

But please - don't dress up your bizarre obsessions in these intellectual, investgative trappings. This e-mail you have exchanged about John Kerry's supposed shortcomings - in his MILITARY career, for God's sake - is pure gibberish. Lies. Garbage. Anybody who wants me to back up anything in this e-mail, let me know, I'll give you three references for every factual assertion.

The Democratic candidate is a war hero. Your guy is a pathetic, cowardly punk. And he always has been.

Vote for Bush because you're afraid, or you're rich, or you're religiously insane.

But don't vote for Bush because Kerry's war record is lacking. That crosses the line from faith-based voting into pure, drooling idiocy.

Robert Dobbs
Kerry Voter

Posted by ScreamingPoints at October 12, 2004 01:08 AM