Ever get those crazy emails from a right wing family member and you wonder if it's worth replying to them to dispute the distortions contained therein? Well I received one of those yesterday and decided to hit 'reply to all' Below is the email and my response.
WHAT SENATOR JOHN GLENN SAID:
There were 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January. In the fair city of Detroit there were 35 murders in the month of January.That's just one American city, about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq.
When some claim that President Bush shouldn't have started this war, state the following:
a. FDR led us into World War II.
b. Germany never attacked us; Japan did. >From 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost ... an average of 112,500 per year.
c. Truman finished that war and started one in Korea. North Korea never attacked us.
>From 1950-1953, 55,000 lives were lost ... an average of 18,334 per year.
d John F. Kennedy started the Vietnam conflict in 1962. Vietnam never attacked us.
e. Johnson turned Vietnam into a quagmire. >From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost .. an average of 5,800 per year.
f. Clinton went to war in Bosnia without UN or French consent.
Bosnia never attacked us. He was offered Osama bin Laden's head on a platter three times by Sudan and did nothing Osama has attacked us on multiple occasions.
g. In the years since terrorists attacked us , President Bush has liberated two countries, crushed the Taliban, crippled al-Qaida, put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran, and North Korea without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people.
The Democrats are complaining about how long the war is taking. But
. It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation.
We've been looking for evidence for chemical weapons in Iraq for less time than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.
It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard than it took Ted Kennedy to call the police after his Oldsmobile sank at Chappaquiddick
It took less time to take Iraq than it took to count the votes in Florida!!!!
Our Commander-In-Chief is doing a GREAT JOB! The Military morale is high!
The biased media hopes we are too ignorant to realize the facts
But Wait there's more!
JOHN GLENN (ON THE SENATE FLOOR) Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:13
Some people still don't understand why military personnel do what they do for a living. This exchange between Senators John Glenn and Senator Howard Metzenbaum is worth reading. Not only is it a pretty impressive impromptu speech, but it's also a good example of one man's explanation of why men and women in the armed services do what they do for a living
This IS a typical, though sad, example of what some who have never served think of the military.
Senator Metzenbaum (speaking to Senator Glenn): "How can you run for Senate when you've never held a real job?"
Senator Glenn (D-Ohio): "I served 23 years in the United State s Marine Corps. I served through two wars. I flew 149 missions. My plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire on 12 different occasions. I was in the space program. It wasn't my checkbook, Howard; it was my life on the line. It was not a nine-to-five job, where I took time off to take the daily cash receipts to the bank."
"I ask you to go with me ... as I went the other day... to a veteran's hospital and look those men .. with their mangled bodies in the eye, and tell THEM they didn't hold a job!
You go with me to the Space Program at NASA and go, as I have gone, to the widows and Orphans of Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee... and you look those kids in the eye and tell them that their DADS didn't hold a job.
You go with me on Memorial Day and you stand in Arlington National Cemetery, where I have more friends buried than I'd like to remember, and you watch those waving flags
You stand there, and you think about this nation, and you tell ME that those people didn't have a job?
What about you?"
For those who don't remember During WW.II, Howard Metzenbaum was an attorney representing the Communist Party in the USA.
Now he's a Senator!
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English thank a Veteran.
And my 'reply to all':
Hi all,
I thought you might be interested to know that there are some errors in
this email according to the website snopes.com, this exchange between
Democratic Senators Glenn and Metzenbaum took place in 1974, not 2004 as
the email states. John Glenn retired from the Senate in 1998.
Snopes Debunks Glenn timeline
The additional portion of the email detailing WWII, Korea, Vietnam . . .
has nothing to do with the exchange between Glenn and Metzenbaum and is an
anonymous add-on.
I've been opposed to the Iraq war from the start and have a bumper sticker
on my car (Support the Troops, End the War) which expresses how I and the
majority of our country feels even if President Bush and the Republican
party insist on keeping our brave soldiers in the middle of Iraq's civil
war with no political resolution in sight.
My thoughts on some of the claims made in the forwarded email follow:
> >>> There were 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January.
> >>> In the fair city of Detroit there were 35 murders in the
> >>> month of January. That's just one American city,
> >>> about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq.
This is really getting creative with statistics. First of all, I presume
this only considers U.S. troop deaths and not Iraqi deaths (estimated so
far at ~75,000 by http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ ). In any case, let's
stick to US troop deaths. Well there were ~130,000 US troops in Iraq in
Jan. 2004 making the murder rate 30 per 100,000. Detroit has a population
of ~950,000 according to
Detroit population
35/950,000 gives a murder rate of 3.7 per 100,000. As one would expect,
it's more dangerous to be a US soldier in Iraq than a citizen in Detroit.
But that's not the sense the paragraph in the email conveyed.
> >>> [Clinton] was offered Osama bin Laden's head on a platter three
> >>> times by Sudan and did nothing. Osama has attacked us on
> >>> multiple occasions.
Cohen Defends Clinton
Former Defense Secretary Cohen defended Clinton's use of the military to
go after Bin Laden in 1998. At the time, Clinton was accused of 'wagging
the dog' by Republicans with a keen interest in his sex life.
From the cnn article (Defense Secretary Cohen's words):
"I put my entire public career on the line to say that the president
always acted specifically upon the recommendation of those of us who held
the positions of responsibility to take military action," he said. "And at
no time did he ever try to use it or manipulate it to serve his personal
ends."
He added: "I think it's important for that to be clear because that 'wag
the dog' cynicism that was so virulent [then], I'm afraid is coming back
again."
In the wake of the twin embassy bombings, Cohen said Clinton gave the
military the authority to kill bin Laden if the opportunity arose.
Cohen served as a Republican U.S. senator from Maine before Clinton
appointed him to the defense post.
> >>> The Democrats are complaining
> >>> about how long the war is taking.
> >>> But
> >>> It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno
> >>> to take the Branch Davidian compound.
> >>> That was a 51-day operation..
Have we actually "taken" Iraq? No doubt our military did an incredible
job overwhelming Iraq, but now President Bush and the Republican congress
have our troops stuck in the middle of a civil war with no end in sight.
What's the endgame?
The other thing that I find ridiculous is the idea that the Republican
party is more supportive of the troops than liberals like myself.
If you haven't seen it yet, please check out this video montage of
interviews with young people at the Young Republican Convention.
Young Republican Chickenhawks
Watch how many of these war "supporters," young college students choose to
let other people fight for them. If this is such a generational struggle,
why not bring back the draft so that all of us are sacrificing for the war
effort?
Just this week, the GOP who supposedly supports the troops, fillibustered
the Webb amendment which would have required that our troops receive an
equal amount of time stateside in between deployments as the length of
their tours of duty. How is this supporting the troops? RNC chair Mel
Martinez had this to say about the idea of giving our brave soldiers more
time between Iraq deployments:
Giving Troops Time at Home is Demeaning Their Service
"I think we would demean their service if we were to say to them that
there had to be a parity between the time in service out of the country
and the time at home."
I can picture it now. One of our brave marines comes home to spend a year
with his newborn daughter and thinks to himself, "man, those democrats
sure are demeaning my service by giving me more time at home with my
family."
The real reason Republicans won't give our troops more time off between
deployments is because they can't. There simply aren't enough troops
available to give our troops the proper rest they deserve because only a
small number of Americans is actually doing any sacrificing for this war.
All the young Republicans in the above linked video have "other
priorities" like personal career goals that make them just fine with
letting others fight in their place and get less time between tours.
This new generation of Republicans seems a lot like the previous one which
included George W. Bush's dad getting him a safe place in the Texas Air
National Guard in place of service in Vietnam.
Bush Avoiding Vietnam
In fairness, Bush has been candid about why he enlisted in the Air
National Guard. Like many young men of his generation, he wanted to avoid
Vietnam. He told one reporter, "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out
with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to
Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
And then there is our current Vice President Dick Cheney who had 5
deferments during Vietnam.
Cheney's 5 Deferments
Cheney's unself-consciousness about this is (or at least was) so
pronounced that in 1989 he told George C. Wilson of the Washington Post,
"I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
And now the Republicans are outraged by the Moveon ad in a newspaper.
Where was this outrage towards people who attack people in the military
when the Swift Boat group smeared John Kerry's service to our country? A
proper debunking can be found here:
Fact Checking the Swift Boaters
Keith Olbermann puts it well that it was President Bush who injected
General Petraeus into the political process in the hopes of keeping our
troops in Iraq's civil war longer.
Olbermann - President of Hypocrisy
General Petraeus is playing the same role that General Westmoreland did in
the 1970's trying to extend the quagmire in Vietnam. You can read a
transcript of General Westmoreland's comments about Vietnam here and see
some of the parallels between then and now:
Gen. Petraeus sounds like Gen. Westmoreland
We're getting a lot of spin about what's going on in Iraq. One way to cut
through some of that is to follow the money. That is, watch what
investors in the know about the state of Iraq are doing with their money.
In the case of the CEO of Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, when their money is
at stake, they're betting against us achieving our state objectives for
Iraqi security.
Krugman - A Surge and a Stab
There was a reason he placed such importance on oil: oil is pretty much
the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq's G.D.P. and
almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an
agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a
collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on
Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.
What's particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month
the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government,
passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the
provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt
Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.
Now here's the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of
Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt
is a member of the President.s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key
oversight body.
And while it's been frustrating to watch the Republican party continue to
fillibuster and obstruct and the Democrats lack the courage to end the
war, I'm hoping we'll get our brave soldiers out of Iraq's civil war which
has no political solution in sight, and back home to their families.
I have a feeling that if Martin Luther King were alive, he'd be speaking
out against this war (and being smeared as anti-American by FOX News) as
he did against Vietnam. Here's a bit of what he had to say:
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."
"World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable.
All other methods have failed."
"And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every
time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks
eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace
as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that
peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by
which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through
peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means
and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and
ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends."
Here's hoping as we all do, that our troops come home soon.