How insulting is this? People who fought in Vietnam are afraid of some sarcastic dweebus on the internet?

Ya that's exactly what I was referring to

Yeah, it is. Here's my evidence for that:

You posting about it.


And because of that illiteracy thing, all this time you were walking into this:

Lembcke is himself a Vietnam vet! Please stop doubting or attacking the credibility of our troops, rara!


I remember the 2004 RNC.


I remember Trump, right now, currently feuding with a war widow.

Seriously this **** is painfully insincere.



P.S. Uh, they are incredibly open about their experiences. Very open after seeing Rambo. Much less open at the time this **** allegedly happened, though.

There are WWII vets that don't speak of what they went through even now same as Korean War vets. Why would Viet Nam vets be any different?

I said it before and I'll say it again when I was walking on the side of the road with a group of other sailors in Ct. a passing car drove by a threw trash at us, this was in '80. So if Viet Nam vets say that they had things similar to them happen then I'm going to tend to believe that it did.

And this dumb mother****er is a millionaire. God bless America.

fyp

Right.

A veritable barrage of unending spit and refuse is now a less dramatic single incident the 2nd time around.

We had the trash thrown at us in Ct. while walking along route 12 headed back to base. We were spit at outside of the Groto also in CT. I don't care if you believe me or not. I was in Groten fresh out of boot camp when I was going to Sub school.

My last post was just a little more specific.

I never said it was unending, I said it happened to me.

functionally illiterate seems to be the best description really.

Well, flesh out the story for us. It's obviously not a trivial incident in your life.

God, imagine having voted for W in 2004. Just having to live with that **** for the rest of your life

Worth reiterating the whole tangent started here:


This thread proves the point. I am sparing myself from quoting a third post, but remember this is one of the fundamental pillars of the reactionary right + moderate + sensible liberal coalition: The leftists did it. 'It' is forever changing, immune to the effects of observation, and always offensive to America.

lol good one.

And before Paul D et lose their ****, I am not saying the far right and the centrists unite on everything, but on this core point about leftist duplicity against America's Heros, they absolutely do. There's a mix of hapless sensible liberal types who are gamed endlessly by the far rights insincere norms and desperately trying to prove their bonafides because they think the right-wing super patriots have channeled some unspoken American virtue here and caught the leftists doing wrong, and sensible liberal and radical woke centrists types who are probably not so naive to think there are any standards here but seethe with such hatred for the left that they will temporarily ally themselves with the right to put the left in their place.

The combined forces together allow these memes to hold a deep place in the American psyche where it just becomes common sense wisdom that this happened and the left is very very guilty.

The Purple Heart band-aids were a real eye-opener. Like, that **** went completely unchallenged by pretty much everyone on the right and in the media.

In hindisight, the Trump takeover of the GOP had a ton of foreshadowing. Kerry playing up his military service bona fides was a lot like Hillary playing up Trump's racism and incivility: ultimately, a huge chunk of the electorate doesn't actually give a **** about our supposed core values.

credit should go to fly

Definitely. I've shared my personal history but at the time, I was working in sort of professional political pursuits and absolutely part of the Sensible Liberal crowd that just sort of assumed pre-2004 that all of this was common sense wisdom and we shared norms about respect and the military and the right, the elites, and the public would never, ever buy into shaming a decorated military veteran like Kerry for his service.

Thank goodness I wasn't posting on 2p2 yet, because in the summer of 2004 or whatever, I'd have embarrassed myself with my predictions. I remember thinking the Swift Boat stuff would have been the death knell for Bush, the Purple Heart bandaids would win a swift rebuke across the political spectrum, etc. etc. I'd have bet a bunch Bush was going to lose Florida because he so alienated the military and the vets, whatever. You could see since the 1990s the right was lurching into more reactionary positions, talk radio and Drudge and FreeRepublic were full of miserable deplorables, Fox News was for racist old idiots, etc. but I naively thought THAT was the moment the right went too far and they would pay the price.

Lesson learned. There is no bottom. There are no norms. It was never about that.

This New Republic piece's last paragraph has some relationship to this argument:
https://newrepublic.com/article/1454...-george-w-bush

^^ normalizing the the atrocities of the W presidency is going to be a lasting effect of Trump.

I thought for sure Dole or McCain or someone on the right would stand up and say "guys, let's knock it off" or whatever, but no, the entire "moderate" wing of the party kept quiet as W slappies smeared a decorated veteran. We were sensible once, and young.

I get that the discussion could offend some people who were disrespected, but the truth is important. Distorting what happened is part of what shuts down opposition to war. It's what makes the media (and congress) flip from allowing any debate to just being in awe over the precision of laser guided bombs at the instant combat starts. That might have been great for WW2, but it's a big part of what keeps us at our perpetual war, killing people, getting killed and making the world a more dangerous place.

It's a sensitive issue for sure and could be treated that way, but this is the internet. And some people (you maybe?) don't think it's even ok to discuss this. Even questioning the number of vets spat on is like questioning the number of people killed in the holocaust. But, like I said, the truth here has a big impact and questioning anecdotes and second hand stories, many of which end up with answers like "well, we might as well have been spat on" is valuable even if there is some collateral damage.

You are unable to ever turn that lense inward. It makes sense that you don't get it. Everything I observed about you stands true and I never took any of it back, but it's boring and useless and the only damage you ever did was getting my energy level up thinking it was worth my time to froth with you for a while.

You must have been mad about the way Kerry was treated at the time.

This is interesting. I mean the guard rails are off. There is no bottom.

How can a bring my point up another way that doesn't remind you of apologist centrists? Pretend for the sake of the ****ing conversation, not lol respect, that I fit in the 5% of different motives. Like, what the **** else could we possibly do different than what we have been doing? I'm not claiming to know but....here we are with the regrown legs itt after the only way to address the problem happened. Is there a point were we plan ahead and present so that in--likely less than a few years---we aren't wondering why we were playing the wrong game again?