Crossposted from MY LEFT WING
My Father Before His Death
at Khe Sanh
on February 8, 1968
Someone on EuroTrib accused me of borrowing from the Republican playbook by “making light” of McCain’s POW experience and torture with the phrase “…languished, lamentably, tortured in a POW camp, while John Kerry earned those Purple Hearts in combat.”
My response was as follows:
As the daughter of a man who was killed in Vietnam, I do not take lightly ANYONE’s service in war. Ever.
I do, however, take seriously and personally the outrageous mockery and derision THEY heaped upon John Kerry’s bravery and honourable service in that same war.
LANGUISHING in a POW camp is NOT something to be taken lightly.
Please note the definition:
1. to be or become weak or feeble; droop; fade.
2. to lose vigor and vitality.
3. to undergo neglect or experience prolonged inactivity; suffer hardship and distress: to languish in prison for ten years.
4. to be subjected to delay or disregard; be ignored: a petition that languished on the warden’s desk for a year.That’s not taking it lightly.
Nor do I take lightly the TORTURE he suffered — though his fellow Republicans, with their rewriting of the definitions of torture, certainly would seem to, despite their paeans to HIS PERSONAL experiences.
His response — that I still hit below the belt — would suggest, to me, at least, that his original criticism was rather disingenuously motivated in the first place; but I guess I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Nevertheless, I stand by my defense. I am the daughter of a Gold Star Wife, a Daughter of the American Revolution — an orphan of the Vietnam War whose Marine Corps First Lieutenant father was killed at Khe Sanh three months before she was born.
I never met my father because men like John McCain chose sacrificing hundreds of thousands of human beings to the machinery of endless war over admitting their mistakes… or, as I now believe, they made those sacrifices deliberately on the altar of their true gods: money and power.
And now John McCain is an old, rich man and has become the chess player instead of the pawn and aims to sacrifice many more hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to another generation of the military industrial complex, whose only end is money and power.
FUCK THAT, and FUCK HIM. Thirty-some-odd years ago, he suffered greatly as a POW in Vietnam, and I feel for the man he was then. Today, I feel for the people he intends to torture and kill.
FUCK HIM.
