I have a slightly different take, which is that since the whole "the troops need our undying respect and constant adulation" is basically just a Vietnam Era faux norm/standard which emerged to take down the left, there's hardly ever any mileage for Democrats to gain by deploying it themselves. The criticism and narrative was always pretense, always overstated, always contrived to basically just be a criticism of the left, nothing more. There was never really a standard or principle you can adhere to since the criticism was just ad hoc to beat the left over the head with. It was mostly a right-wing fantasy that the troops came home and hippies and leftists and ungrateful Democrats spit all over them, burned the flag, and dishonored the sacrifice. Democrats would swear up and down they didn't, and Republicans would then just say Well Actually the Real Crime was how Democrats like LBJ lied and killed all the American boys even though we knew we could never win. Then Democrats got blamed for quitting, stabbing everyone in the back and left POWs to rot and die. We did 30 years of investigations, discovered that never happened, the whole POW/MIA stuff were scams but whatever, the left did all of it actually. On and on it goes.

It's like that whole "Romney will NEVER recover from RomneyCare" type punditry, which assumes 99% of right-wingers had a ****ing clue about health care policy. They don't, and the unpopularity of ObamaCare and Common Core and a litany of other things are just contrivances and narratives divorced from facts. The left bothers conservative people for all the predictable reasons (too much concern for the poor, too many civil rights afforded to black people, too much questioning of American foreign policy) and the criticisms and standards are invented and crafted on an as-needed basis as the situation demands.

Democrats are never, ever going to win playing Who Loves the Soldiers More since there was never a principle there to violate, just some ad hoc and made-up rules that right-wingers invent on the spot. You can't win those kinds of battles where your critics make all the rules and amend them as needed, and there's no point in trying. The standard isn't "be sensitive to war widows" but "let their conversations with the President be private and its unfair politicizing to talk about them" and the rules will be re-written in the next 48 hours to reflect that.

I think this is fine as a generic rule but remember the leadership and decency is centered around how to treat the military. And our political culture just has so many embedded frames that old white conservative guys are literally are incapable of disrespecting the flag and that national disrespect can only, by definition, be something that the left and Democrats do. So in this specific case it's a waste of time.

I heard a historian talking about how that was almost completely made up. The first written account of people spitting on soldiers returning from Vietnam was in 1991 or 2 in the lead up to the first Gulf War. There were a couple (probably revisionist as well) accounts of soldiers being called "baby killer" in protests dating to like 1976.

So was the whole POW/MIA "you left our boys behind!" narratives. We spent like millions of dollars and decades investigating anyway.

The right is correct LBJ lied consistently about Vietnam though so I'm not saying Democrats were blameless in Vietnam. Different point. Only that genuflecting to the troops and these transparently uber nationalist sentiment stuff are rules manufactured by right-wingers and ~all of the violations are fantasy of right-wingers and therefore the left will spin themselves into circles trying to keep up and simply lose no matter what because the whole thing is right-wing kayfabe and they do all the booking.

I was naive once about this too, but 2004 drove this home so hard when the draft dodging coke addict became the Super Patriot and the guy with a chest full of medals became a degenerate lying traitor. Since then these stories play out basically the exact same way, always. Democrats try so, so hard to show their super patriot bonafides and/or lambast right-winger politicians for transgressions against what-they-think-are-shared-patriotic-norms only to find out that Democrats Did the Bad Thing Against America, always.

The right doesn't really love the police or soldiers, they really just love that people are locked up or killed.

They love their political usefulness and their utility as stag props in their theatrics.

But of course the biggest spinners here are not really the "left". A lot of Democrats try to beat the Republicans to the table to vote for war resolutions and defense spending. Some people might attribute that to trying to compete with the Republicans for the war hawk vote. Or you might just accept that more than half of the Democratic party is every bit as hawkish as the Republicans - at least as far as the politicians go as opposed to the voters.

Conceded.

BS. This is the only country that while in uniform not only was I spit on but had trash thrown at me and my ship mates from a moving car multiple times.

Oh and anyone that served in the Norfolk area 80-84 time frame had to walk past a sign to the main base "Sailors and dogs keep off the grass" posted on several yards.

Lol that's hilarious

Oh yeah everyone remembers how much the hippies hated... submarine crews... in the 80s?

You know the guy who put up the sign was probably a retired Army guy, right?

Or an Ex-sailor

"But I *saw* with my own two eyes soldiers being SPIT ON when they came back from Vietnam, happened in my town ALL THE TIME" is in literally every copy of the Children's Treasury of Right Wing Fairy Tales, right after "I saw this black lady with 5 kids and done up nails on a cell phone paying for a new TV with food stamps!" and the traditional white folktale of the mythical sad sack white uncle who had to give up his career as a firefighter because they couldn't pierce through the affirmative action bubble with its enduring life lesson, black people get all the good civil service jobs these days dontchayaknow.

You can't convince a white conservative these things aren't real. They're part of the White People Canon, shared cultural inheritance. Might as well just give up the whole race if these tales aren't true, no point in continuing after that. They happened, just deal with it silly liberal. They saw it. Remember how ikestoys, who is like 30 or whatever, totted around Vietnam Stabbed in the Back Theories and **** like that? Dude obviously sat on his dad or his grandpappies knee and heard these things during White People Story Time but once ingrained in the impressionable young white mind, they can't be shaken.

Related, you know you've got a really classic of the genre when it includes other assorted folk wisdom in the back of the book. "Liberals SPIT ON veterans!" usually comes right before the Common Sense Appendix: Top Ten Life Tips for Living White and Living Right, including #3: It's just Obvious You Cross the Street Late at Night When a Black Man is Coming Your Way and #7: There's All These Crimes These Days, It Was All Different When We Used to Let Kids Pray in School and Everyone Was In Church On Sundays, Think About It

You would never understand the hatred that locals had for military people. I said had because I no longer live near a military installation so I don't know how it is now.

Why did they hate military people? Was it because they were all liberals who protested the war, blamed the soldiers/sailors, and called them baby killer and spat on them because of it?

Or was it because of local problems with the base?

There's another cliche where locals don't like the young military personnel who cause problems. See the movie Heartbreak Ridge and the bar owner for one, but it comes up in a fair amount of military movies.

Does it really matter why people treat you as a 2nd class citizen, refuse to give you service or other such treatment?

And regarding Vietnam vets being disrespected when they came home, I remember vet neighbors in the 70s whose homes were vandalized and spray-painted with "baby killer" on them.

It was a real thing, Fly, not some made up BS in the 90s.

Gonna go with a "pics or it didn't happen" there, champ

lol are you for real? gfy. Champ.

OK. But like, that didn't happen. You heard it happened, but you didn't see it yourself. Because it didn't happen.

The locals pretty much always hate having a base nearby. Bunch of young, pent-up dudes is always going to lead to lawns getting puked on.

90% of those stories of Vietnam vets getting spat on we're urban legends or else wildly exaggerated. Regardless, if you didn't think 1980's America was pro-military enough, I don't know what to tell you.

I live in Hampton Roads (Norfolk area) and am in an upscale apt community that's populated by like 50% military. Can confirm as a young family man that Friday / Saturday nights are annoying because the young folks are playing loud music and carrying on; cops called every third weekend, etc.

TBH it's probably nothing to do with military and everything to do with having a bunch of 20 somethings congregating in the same area and letting loose.

After writing that I realized how old I sound.

Perhaps they were just religiously opposed to war.

We wouldn't want to take away their freedom of religion, would we? Soldiers aren't a protected class, after all.

Spitting happened

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...ts.single.html

Except it was pro-war people spitting on anti-war protesters. For various reasons, the "spitting on a vet" thing never seems to have proof.

Also baby killer appears to have been invented for Rambo. Seems more like the kind of thing an abortion protester would paint on a harlot's garage.