Tom Meyer's cartoon from the 11/05/06 San Francisco Chronicle catches well my own perspective on the stupidity of the Republicans' pseudo-outrage at John Kerry's "insult" of of American soldiers.
The cartoon itself is an interesting combination of images. The soldiers are in combat gear. In the back are smoking ruins, which no one will have a problem recognizing as a symbol of the current situation in Iraq. They are looking at a newspaper vending box like those found on the streets of any American city - complete with coin slot, reminding us that US soldiers are also people just like the ones we see walking around every day.
Behind the ruins are crouching what looks to be Karl Rove and Shrub Bush, one or both of them saying, "They're smarter than we thought ..." But the "they" in this case obviously means both the soldiers and the voters back home, once again emphasizing that soldiers are regular Americans, not The Troops of the increasingly bizarre Republican fantasy world. Bush's helmet shows us he's playing military dress-up as the so likes to do.
And the soldier's comment sums up the absolutely emptiness of the Republcans' attempt to equate "support the troops" to "support Dear Leader Bush and all his holy works". In fact, the Republican Party is trying to hide behind their idolized image of The Troops, just as Bush and Rove crouch behind the ruins representing the Iraq War.
This is the first time in my three-year blogging career (has it really been that long?) that I've spent several paragraphs explicating a cartoon. It's the influence of the genuinely inspired Comics Curmudgeon. If you like the "funnies", you should definitely be reading the Comic Curmudgeon on a regular basis.
I've deliberately tried to avoid getting into the details of the Kerry flap. Although in our degenerated media culture, of course the pundits and news outlooks give it the kind of coverage the Republicans wanted and expected.
But if the Democrats win either House of Congress this coming Tuesday (in the name of Andrew Jackson, let it be so!), the Republicans will go into an orgy of partisanship that we haven't seen in this country since the Southern "fire-eaters" of the 1850s. And a big part of it will be their attempt to pose as the defenders of The Troops against the wicked Dems. And since it's obvious that there's hardly a Republican in Congress who has taken their real responsibilities seriously toward the soldiers or the rest of the public seriously when it comes to the Iraq War, they'll be grabbing for symbolic openings like the Kerry flap last week.
Joe Conason (The real insult to our troops: BushSalon 11/03/06) sums up the Republicans bashing of Kerry very well, although he argues that Kerry should have first apologized and then gotten in the Reps' faces over the thing. I still think he should have just gotten in their faces as long as it took for them to shut the [Cheney] up about it. But still, Conason's dead right about the following:
Unlike George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh, to name only a few examples, Kerry left his cocoon of privilege at Yale to face combat in Vietnam. For the past three decades he has maintained friendships with men who were under his command. Nobody who knows Kerry - including his supposed friend and fellow senator John McCain, who played the political hack by attacking him this week - believes that he regards American soldiers and officers as losers.
But what about Mehlman and his masters in the White House? Their accusations against Kerry sound like a projection of the inner thoughts of the Republican upper crust. Bush got a coveted berth in the Texas Air National Guard as a result of his family connections and disdained to complete his service. Cheney used various student and family deferments to avoid military service because he had "other priorities." Rove obtained a student deferment, dropped out of school and then somehow escaped induction when he was working for George H.W. Bush at the Republican National Committee. Much as the Bushes believe in war, no member of that wealthy and well-connected family has seen combat for more than half a century.
So much for Kerry's clumsy misspoken joke, which scarcely compares with the president's recent claim that he has "never been 'stay the course'" in Iraq. What would the joke have meant if spoken as scripted for him? According to Kerry aides he was supposed to say, "If you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't you get us stuck in Iraq."
Perhaps it is petty at this point to mock the president's intelligence, but Bush's lack of due diligence in promoting, planning, launching and overseeing this war is so obvious, so gross, so tragic and so indisputable that Kerry's quip sounds almost too mild in comparison. All the lethal stupidity was compounded Wednesday when Bush reiterated his confidence in Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense whose failures and misconduct have outraged Republicans as well as Democrats.
It's ironic, though not accidental, that a Republican Party that spent the last two decades or so obsessing over the alleged liberal tyranny of "political correctness", has now become even more obsessed with imposing their own version of Patriotic Correctness on us all by trying to intimidate us out of saying anything critical Bush by antics like the one over Kerry's comment last week.
Today's San Francisco Chronicle carried another article that illustrates how silly some of this has become: Mixed feelings on media call for Rumsfeld's job by Jill Tucker, John Coté and Robert Selna 11/05/06. They report:
Toni Colip, president of the Vintage Valley Blue Star Moms, said she believes criticism of how the government is handling the war undermines the troops overseas.
"That affects our children in terms of morale," said Colip, of Vacaville. "I think criticism of the war is a bad idea. ... I think it can be critiqued at another time, not when we're at war."
Colip, a member of the Naval Reserve, served in the gulf during Operation Desert Shield in 1990 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Her 25-year-old son is on active duty stateside in the Army.
This is more starkly argued that we often see it, although Bush himself has made the "hurting morale" argument. But the heavy implication of the Republican accusation that war critics are failing to "support the troops" is that the critics are damaging their battlefield morale and therefore endagering their lives and tacitly helping The Enemy.
It's an argument worth challenging head-on. On the one hand, combat morale is a subject that has been examined intensely in many different situations, for the very obvious and very practical reason that armies need to know what drives it. Short version: unit cohesion is the key factor, although obviously many other things are involved.
But we should expect those who make that accusation, whether it our Dear Leader Bush or Toni Colip, to provide some evidence for it. Is there any evidence at all that hearing news of people criticizing the war has damaged combat morale? Given the fact that a large percentage of soldiers actually in combat in Iraq favor an early withdrawal (they are real human beings, like I said, and not The Troops of Republican fantasy), is there any evidence that soldiers critical of the war or some aspect of the Bush policies are throwing down their weapons in the middle of firefights?
Republican conservatives are also scrambling to find excuses of why the war is going so badly? Do the war fans think that those criticisms are equally damaging to soldiers' morale? Are the people who say that the answer is to "kill and torture a lot more of them A-rabs faster" (the redneck version of the stock Republican tough-guy standard) also damaging morale? Is the morale of the 25,000 or so mercenaries there also damaged by criticism of the war?
Has any battle been lost in Iraq because soldiers' morale was damaged by hearing people point out obvious problems in the Iraq War? Since Gen. Casey, the top commander there, is still claiming that the US hasn't lost a single battle, something tells me that argument would be a little difficult to make at this point. Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on 08/03/06, speaking of both the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War, "It should go without saying that, in five years of war, we have never lost a major engagement to the enemy anywhere in the region".
That's not to say there aren't significant morale problems. There are. But especially since the Republicans will make accusations like this against the Democrats and any war critics (except for the critics who call for escalation) for the next two years especially, it's important to keep our feet on the ground in looking at this issue.
The bottom line on this topic: we can deal with this war in the real world, or we can deal with the Iraq War of the Republican/FOX News/OxyContin fantasy world.
Tom Meyer's cartoon from the 11/05/06 San Francisco Chronicle catches well my own perspective on the stupidity of the Republicans' pseudo-outrage at John Kerry's "insult" of of American soldiers.
