Gore's speech

bamaslammer · May 31, 2004

Originally posted by No Worries
This is a bunch of superficial toss.

Gore's point was

that the AG prison scandal is a very bad thing that happen on GWB's watch (FACT),

that our international reputation is hurt by AG (FACT),

and that GWB irresponsible policies fostered the environment that lead to AG (OPINION based on some facts).

You appear to have a problem with Gore (and Clinton). Anything Gore says from your prespective is wrong. I suppose FACTs becomes FICTION, if Gore speaks it.

(And you think everything Clinton did was also wrong. This pegs my BS meter. Everything that happened during Cinton's 8 years of presidency, good or bad, is not Clinton's fault. This shallow read supposes that the Congress was Clinton's complete and total b*tch. Since the Reps controlled Congress most of Clinton's years, this becomes a major stretch.)

Hey bama, if you want a balanced budget, vote for Kerry (or for a Democratic Congress). GWB and a Republican Congress have shown no commitment to fiscal restraint. Putting Kerry in the WH would revert the Republican Congress back to it budget balancing ways as seen in the Clinton years. A vote for GWB is a vote for an ever growing budget deficit.
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Talk about some toss! I think you dished up a hearty helping with that straight-out-of-the-DNC-talking-points post. A Democratic Congress offering a balanced budget? You are out of your mind. What happened during the Reagan years when they ran both houses for the majority of those eight glorious years? Uhhhh, budget DEFICITS! Yeah, Kerry will balance the budget and pigs will fly, hell will freeze over and General Clark can shoot fireballs out of his arse. Did you read all of the NEW spending he proposes above and beyond what Bush has done (which I don't like much either)? Read it on his website. But yet he claims to be a "fiscal conservative?" That's like saying I'm a Rockets fan, yet I wear a Spurs hat, root for Tim Duncan and think Yao is overrated.

I think Gore offers nothing but whining over some relatively minor torture that the media for some reason keeps hyping to the nth degree. I think you need to read this column that explains the problem I have with the constant negativity from your side of the aisle, which only cares about taking back the power you think that you are entitled to own in Washington. I know you guys are actively rooting for us to lose the war because it helps your side. So keep listening to the frantic ravings of Gore. Keep polluting your brain with the godawful, biased garbage on NPR and CNN. And keep believing the Bush is the greatest evil in the modern world. It is hilarious to see you guys with your little panties all in a bunch.

Recalling a time when setbacks didn't deter us

May 30, 2004

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Memorial Day in my corner of New Hampshire is always the same. A clutch of veterans from the Second World War to the Gulf march round the common, followed by the town band, and the scouts, and the fifth-graders. The band plays ''Anchors Aweigh," ''My Country, 'Tis of Thee,'' ''God Bless America'' and, in an alarming nod to modernity, Ray Stevens' ''Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)'' (Billboard No. 1, May 1970). One of the town's selectmen gives a short speech, so do a couple of representatives from state organizations, and then the fifth-graders recite the Gettsyburg Address and the Great War's great poetry. There's a brief prayer and a three-gun salute, exciting the dogs and babies. Wreaths are laid. And then the crowd wends slowly up the hill to the Legion hut for ice cream, and a few veterans wonder, as they always do, if anybody understands what they did, and why they did it.

Before the First World War, it was called Decoration Day -- a day for going to the cemetery and ''strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.'' Some decorated the resting places of fallen family members; others adopted for a day the graves of those who died too young to leave any descendants.

I wish we still did that. Lincoln's ''mystic chords of memory'' are difficult to hear in the din of the modern world, and one of the best ways to do it is to stand before an old headstone, read the name, and wonder at the young life compressed into those brute dates: 1840-1862. 1843-1864.

In my local cemetery, there's a monument over three graves, forebears of my hardworking assistant, though I didn't know that the time I first came across them. Turner Grant, his cousin John Gilbert and his sister's fiance Charles Lovejoy had been friends since boyhood and all three enlisted on the same day. Charles died on March 5, 1863, Turner on March 6, and John on March 11. Nothing splendid or heroic. They were tentmates in Virginia, and there was an outbreak of measles in the camp.

For some reason, there was a bureaucratic mixup and the army neglected to inform the families. Then, on their final journey home, the bodies were taken off the train at the wrong town. It was a Saturday afternoon and the stationmaster didn't want the caskets sitting there all weekend. So a man who knew where the Grants lived offered to take them up to the next town and drop them off on Sunday morning.

When he arrived, the family was at church, so he unloaded the coffins from his buggy and left without a word or a note to anyone. Imagine coming home from Sunday worship and finding three caskets waiting on the porch. Imagine being young Caroline Grant, and those caskets contain the bodies of your brother, your cousin and the man to whom you're betrothed.

That's a hell of a story behind the bald dates on three tombstones. If it happened today, maybe Caroline would be on Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric demanding proper compensation, and the truth about what happened, and why the politicians were covering it up. Maybe she'd form a group of victims' families. Maybe she'd call for a special commission to establish whether the government did everything it could to prevent disease outbreaks at army camps. Maybe, when they got around to forming the commission, she'd be booing and chanting during the officials' testimony, as several of the 9/11 families did during Mayor Rudy Giuliani's testimony.

All wars are messy, and many of them seem small and unworthy even at the moment of triumph. The unkempt lice-infested Saddam Hussein yanked from his spider hole last December is not so very different from the Jefferson Davis captured in May 1865 while skulking away in women's clothing, and thereafter depicted by gleeful Northern cartoonists in hoop skirts, petticoats and crinolines.

Conquered and captured, an enemy shrivels, and you question what he ever had that necessitated such a sacrifice. The piercing clarity of war shades into the murky grays of postwar reconstruction. You think Iraq's a quagmire? Lincoln's ''new birth of freedom'' bogged down into a centurylong quagmire of segregation, denial of civil rights, lynchings. Does that mean the Civil War wasn't worth fighting? That, as Al Gore and other excitable types would say, Abe W. Lincoln lied to us?

Like the French Resistance, tiny in its day but of apparently unlimited manpower since the war ended, for some people it's not obvious which side to be on until the dust's settled. New York, for example, resisted the Civil War my small town's menfolk were so eager to enlist in. The big city was racked by bloody riots against the draft. And you can sort of see the rioters' point. More than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War -- or about 1.8 percent of the population. Today, if 1.8 percent of the population were killed in war, there would be 5.4 million graves to decorate on Decoration Day.

But that's the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren't a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screwups worth re-examining, but they weren't a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn't lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.

There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites -- from the deranged former vice president down -- want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we're supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.

Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America. Even in its grief, my part of New Hampshire understood that 141 years ago. We should, too.
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Gore's speech

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