"You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext." --US Secretary of State John Kerry on Face the Nation, 2 March 2014
To show that this was the official unironic talking point of the US State Department, here was his statement when he moved from CBS's Sunday talking heads show to NBC's.
"You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests.” --US Secretary of State John Kerry on Meet the Press, 2 March 2014
I think it's been a while since I've gone off on a language rant here, but is everyone else (other than the usual suspects within The Beltway and The Media) as sick to death of this never-ending use of "boots on the ground" as I am? The attached clipping in which John Kerry, Bob Menendez, and Bob Corker all employ the overused military jargon is from Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times yesterday, but it could just as easily have come from any other story about Syria, or the mouth of any "expert" I've heard on NPR or the PBS NewsHour in the past decade discussing our current or future quagmires.
The lazy use of this metaphor for ground forces -- for actual young humans placed in harm's way by politicians -- seems to flow most freely out of the mouths of old men in dark suits trying to look manly in front of old men in brass-encrusted uniforms, but can we please stop it?
Amazing what you can find on the internet. This video is from the first national peace march I went to on April 24, 1971. I was fifteen -- I went on a bus from Philadelphia organized by the Student Mobilization Committee with a 16-year-old girl I really liked (more than she liked me) and her very cool parents, leaving Philly very early in the morning and coming back that night.
I vividly remember Peter, Paul, & Mary taking the stage that day (I didn't know from my vantage point that they had been joined by the less cool John Denver) and singing Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" and Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance". They brought a connection to a famous earlier march in 1963 that made a very strong impression on this young peacenik.
This mass march on the weekend was only part of a much bigger couple of weeks in late April and early May that bore more than a passing resemblance to the current Occupy movement. In the days before the mass march, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted their "limited incursion into the country of Congress" that included camping, demonstrations, throwing medals back over the walls around the Capitol, and Lt. John Kerry's famous testimony in front of the Winter Soldier Investigations -- "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" -- that announced this young veteran as a political figure on the national stage.
The days after the mass march saw planned acts of civil disobedience around the Capitol by the Mayday Tribe that led to the arrest of over 13,000 people between May 1 and May 4 (one year after four were killed by the National Guard at Kent State). These events deserve a larger space in our collective memory. The public reaction against the mass arrests is one of the many events in the late sixties and early seventies that helped turn the mass of the American people against the war in Vietnam. I wanted to be one of those Mayday demonstrators blocking avenues, running from tear gas, and being penned up with my fellow radicals behind fences around RFK Stadium. I guess I understand now why my parents didn't let a high school sophomore take that extra step. I'm glad they let me take the bus for the one-day demonstration. It was one of the highlights of my life.
Thanks for sharing this moment of nostalgia with me.
Why didn't you vote y esterdayJohn? Why couldn't you add your voice to this important stand? Do you have more important things to do than to take every chance to vote on the record against John Bolton? Are you too busy (secretly) publicizing The Downing Street Memo? Or is it just that you don't want to be called a flippity flopping filiblusterer or an obstructionicating massachusetts librul in your next Presidential debate against a Rove-coached Jeb Bush in 2008?
You know what? To get to that debate, you have to win some Democratic primaries first.
"German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry."
This is what T.B.L. still doesn't understand. Why were those Catholics who supported an illegal Iraqi war -- condemned by the heads of the Roman Church and the United Nations as such -- and why are those Americans who support the death penalty, allowed to accept the church's consecrated cookies?
And if this ex-Nazi Youth's aim was to influence our election, isn't there a little matter of the church's tax exemption for some activist judge to reconsider?
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
