<p>There may be some here who are too young to remember Chappaquiddick, or who never really knew all the details. The history is here, and it makes plain what a truly odious person Ted Kennedy is.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ytedk.com/chappindex.htm[/url]”>http://www.ytedk.com/chappindex.htm</a></p>
<p>Ted Kennedy is the senior senator from Massachusetts period! He is not the leader of the democratic party and while I don’t condone his actions, I find it amazing that a thread discussing veterans running for the House of Representatives somehow gets reduced to the actions of one man. I think that CGM’s point is that personal attacks, not a discussion of the issues, is what Republicans due best. The previous three posters have made her point.</p>
<p>What about Clinton? 
(all those posts about Teddy makes me think we have forgotten him!)</p>
<p>
CMG’s posts are all stream-of-consciousness, so her threads just go where they go…get used to it.</p>
<p>My question was/is sincere. We may have some bad apples in the Republican Party - but I don’t know of any serving Republican members of the U.S. Senate who’ve done anything close to Chappaquidick - getting drunk with a bunch of young girls, driving away with one, driving off a bridge and waiting 12 hours for it to be reported. PLEASE - tell me how Democrats live with this man? How would you explain his behavior to your children?? I’m not even referencing his cheating at Harvard. He is considered by most as a Lion of the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>I think I’ve got it - anytime you want to quiet Democrats, ask them to explain Teddy Kennedy - they can’t except to say that he isn’t the whole party. No, they also have Robert Byrd (ex-Ku Klux Klan), Howard Dean (need I say anything else), Barbara Streisand (preaching energy conservation for the masses while flying around in a private jet and living in a mansion), Tom Harkin (who lied about his Vietnam service), et. al.</p>
<p>Okay, Kennedy did a very very bad thing…guess Bush was lucky when he was driving drunk…</p>
<p>At least we don’t see our leaders as omnipotent and god-like </p>
<p>And who was it that left his wife while she was dying of Cancer?</p>
<p>Keep bringing up Chappaquidik, its okay…the Republicans have several members NOW going to jail, many more indicted, some that won’t take the oath when they testify, and more under investigation</p>
<p>Is that the best you got? My, at least the Dems serve, unlike the chicken hawk republicans that talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk</p>
<p>With regards to my question which someone called an attacke: A poster said that they changed parties because their family values were assualted, that is a pretty grandiose claim to make</p>
<p>I simply asked how? If someone makes a claim, then explain it</p>
<p>And I never brought up Kennedy…I started talking about a group of noble men who are running for office, everyone else started the insults</p>
<p>Please, blame the messenger once again and not answer the questions</p>
<p>BigGreen - do you want to take on responsibility for every right wing politician in America, and justify/rationalize their being a leader of “your party” in light of everything they’ve ever done in their entire life? Can you justify/rationalize Pat Robertson? Jerry Falwell? I wasn’t there with Kennedy decades ago - and you weren’t either, despite your often repeated and obsessive fixation with those events. I also wasn’t with George Bush when he snorted cocaine, or when he got arrested for drunk driving. I wasn’t with Duke Cunningham when he sold his house for twice its worth to a lobbyist. I wasn’t with Abramoff when he headed the Campus Republicans, or when he sold Congress to the highest bidders. I could go on, (and on and on) but I doubt if you will ever get the point: if your idea of rational political analysis is to block out everything but the perceived personal moral failings of an individual who is on one side of an issue or another, whoever is feeding you your political propaganda is doing an excellent job of drowning out any rational analysis of events which are actually important.</p>
<p>By the way, BigGreen: Weapons of mass destruction actually weren’t found in Iraq in 2003. You just thought they were.</p>
<p>Duke Cunningham and Abramoff won’t be speaking to the next Republican Convention. Personally, I think Duke Cunningham should be tried for treason and if he’s lucky spend his life in jail. Maybe Bush did snort cocaine - never caught or convicted, I think the story comes from his ex-sister-in-law after a bad divorce from his brother. Drunk driving - yes, bad - paid fine at the time. Didn’t kill anyone. </p>
<p>I guess I am fixated on Kennedy - I just don’t understand and you still haven’t explained how he got away with what he did. And, since he did get away with it, why anyone would listen to him now or give him any position of honor at any Democratic event. The voters in Massachusetts may just be stupid - but what’s the excuse for the national party. </p>
<p>And to have to listen to the bag of wind during the Alito hearings lambaste Alito about some Princeton Alumni group and then find out that Kennedy has been paying dues to the all-male Owl Club at Harvard for 50 years. It’s just too much.</p>
<p>BG - you are obsessed. That means you have an uncontrollable, unhealthy fixation with something which is, at it’s core, irrelevant to anything important. Yet you can’t let go of it. Instead of poring over what might have/must have/definitely could have happened at Chappaquiddick 37 years ago maybe you should look in the mirror and give some thought to why you can’t shake the feeling that it is vitally important - so important that you should ignore things like people dying in Iraq, the distribution of income and wealth in America shifting to the wealthy in a manner unseen in over a century, global warming, etc., and belabor, over and over, the feeling of overwhelming injustice you feel that one fat old guy from Massachusetts hasn’t been drawn and quartered when you are sure, sure, sure that justice will only be served by… oh, there it goes again. Back to the obsession. Can’t let go. Must think only about Teddy. Bad Teddy. Everything else recedes in the background. Bad Teddy. Nothing else matters. Just Teddy. Bad, bad, Teddy…</p>
<p>BigGreen - who do you think plants those ideas in your head? Who keeps whispering to you: “Teddy…Teddy…Teddy…”? If you could tear yourself away from that obsession you might figure it out. But you can’t, can you?
Teddy… Bad Teddy…Bad, bad Teddy…</p>
<p>BG, I agree with Kluge: you’re fixated. I don’t know what happened at Chappaquidick all those years ago except that a life was lost. Kennedy’s culpability is beyond me to determine…I’ve read the conspiracy theories and the apologists alike and I simply do not know.</p>
<p>However, before you hold Kennedy and by extension Democrats who support him responsible for that life lost not as a result of his public works, let’s first deal with the lives:</p>
<p>–lost in a stupid ego-boosting invasion that has created more terrorists than it’s killed, is burning through our military capacity that may be needed for more real, immediate threats elsewhere</p>
<p>–lost or damaged by a cavalier approach to health care which reduces to giving citizens a choice of which health care provider they wish to enrich instead of distributing health care as broadly as possible, plus actively blocks economic market measures that would drive the cost or prescriptions downward</p>
<p>–loss or damage of life due to failure to pass or complacent, non-existent, and insufficient enforcement of occupational safety and anti-pollution measures?</p>
<p>–the practice of rapacious class warfare, giving massive tax cuts to the rich, passing on massive debts to our children, and failing to take even rudimentary steps, such as pushing public transportation, that would ease the life of grinding poverty among the working poor</p>
<p>Oh yeah. And to get it over with, I’ll stipulate here and now that Clinton lied about sex and that was wrong. </p>
<p>Now can we get on to the more serious matters?</p>
<p>You mean like Ted Kennedy’s support for the Clinton/Albright policy of killing Iraqi children?</p>
<p>Back to the OP, I think the anti-Bush veterans are going to be a compelling narrative along about September/October. I’m sorry that it appears that Paul Hackett, the Marine major running for Senator in Ohio and who called Bush a liar and and a chickenhawk, looks as if he will be beaten by Sherrod Brown in the primary.</p>
<p>But, allowing that there might be some lightweights and kooks somewhere in the mix, I’ve read the bios of at least a dozen of the Democratic contenders. Two Bronze Star winners. Helicopter pilot amputee. Multiple 20+ years of service types. Bush can’t swifboat 'em all and their sheer numbers shatters this nonsense that it’s treason to question the misson once troops are committed. And good news from two days ago, James Webb, former SecNav under Reagan, has entered the Virginia Senate race as a Democrat. </p>
<p>As an old “Scoop Jackson” Democrat, the Republican hypocrisy about the military…like the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, who are all for the war but, like Dick Cheney, have other priorities than going over to fight it…is galling. The moment the Republicans morphed Max Cleland into Osama bin Laden during the 2002 is the moment they turned me into a relentless adversary. It will be altogether fitting if Cleland, in his association with the Band of Brothers, becomes an instrument of their political destruction in return.</p>
<p>If the anecdotal reports are even halfway accurate, Bush’s support among the military, while 10-15 percent above the general population, has dropped precipitously. Tempers are flaring between officers in the Regulars and the Guard/Reserve as many of the former are going into bunker mode, evaluating every action in terms of “How does this affect my career?” instead of “How does this effect the mission?” </p>
<p>You have ad hoc inefficiencies, Air Force personnel in charge of contractor-driven supply units under an Army chain of command having to deal with Marine checkpoints who, as one complained, “They shoot even if you do have the right passwords.”</p>
<p>Our ROE’s are screwed, we’re politically tone-deaf, and culturally out to lunch. At a lot of the military candidates are willing to call it like it is.</p>
<p>CGM – this is what I said:</p>
<p>“But I’ve grown so tired of the invective and what feels like an assault on my family values from the left, that I eventually changed my party registration.”</p>
<p>It is not a “grandiose claim” as you suggest, just a statement of fact. I’m not obligated to explain or justify my actions. And CtyMomTeacher expressed my feelings when she said “it is very aggressive and suggests that you are waiting to attack the response.”</p>
<p>I should know better than to wade into a political discussion here in the cafe. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone expects to have a reasonable discussion of issues when it’s all about name calling and hyperbole – neither side can actually be as bad as some people would imply.</p>
<p>Major Bryan Lentz is dropping out of the race to replace Curt Weldon in the PA-7, running for a state legislature position instead against a particularly odious opponent. In favor of recently retired Vice Admiral Joseph Sestak. Yup, gonna be hard to swiftboat this crew of candidates.</p>
<p>And I wanna see the smack when someone tries to suggest to Admiral Sestak that it’s treasonous to question our policy with the troops committed.</p>
<p>Here is the counterpart to Band of Brothers:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.midwestheroes.com/indexxxx2.shtml[/url]”>http://www.midwestheroes.com/indexxxx2.shtml</a></p>
<p>I believe it is playing in the Midwest only but coming to a TV station near you. I’ve seen it three or four times in the last few days during the Olympics. Warning : Don’t show it to your kids if you are concerned with the family value of telling the truth.</p>
<p>Liz, what is it that you object to?</p>
<p>Speaking of fixations…do you think that anyone here is fixated with George Bush? Just asking.</p>
<p>Sjmom,
I object to them saying that we are fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq - Al Qaeda is part of the insurgency NOW but they were not aligned with Iraq in the 911 attacks and were not in Iraq at the start of the war.</p>
<p>Brownie, if we’re fixated on George Bush, it’s because of his policies that are ruining our country, not because he lied about a consenual sex act. Got it?</p>