I saw this at Washington Outsiders.
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Mitt Romney: perfect Tough Guy for right-wing war cheerleaders
A New York Times profile this morning details what Mitt Romney was doing during the Vietnam War. Although the article reflects quite poorly on his character, it demonstrates why his candidacy is resonating among our country’s right-wing war-cheerleading faction. Romney’s life reflects that faction’s perverse “values” perfectly.
While many of his fellow citizens from 1966 to 1969 were being killed in Vietnam, Romney — “a sheltered child of privilege” — spent those years in Paris and other cities in France trying to convert the French to Mormonism, which enabled him to obtain a “missionary” deferment. When Romney and his fellow Mormon missionaries encountered anti-American sentiment from war opponents, they decided that the French — unlike Romney and his war-supporting, war-avoiding friends — were “weak”:
The missionaries had often met with hostility over the Vietnam War. “Are you an American?” was a common greeting, Mr. Romney recalled, followed by, “‘Get out of Vietnam! Bang!’ The door would slam.” But such opposition only hardened their hawkish views. “We felt the French were pretty weak-kneed,” [Romney’s fellow missionary Byron] Hansen said.
So early on, Romney shared one of the defining values of the political movement he now wants to lead: namely, the belief that those who want to send other people off to fight wars are “strong” and “courageous,” while those who oppose sending others off to war are “weak.” As Romney’s co-missionary put it, perfectly encapsulating the right-wing war-cheerleaders of both then and now:
Most of the missionaries, though, were also relieved that their service meant a draft deferment. “I am sorry, but no one was excited to go and get killed in Vietnam,” Mr. Hansen said, acknowledging, “In hindsight, it is easy to be for the war when you don’t have to worry about going to Vietnam.”
What’s particularly reprehensible about all of this is that so much of the Republican Party spent years mauling Bill Clinton for avoiding service in a war that he opposed. But for years, Romney emphatically supported the Vietnam War, yet actively avoided service and never enlisted:
Many church leaders considered the war a godly cause, and Mr. Romney said at the time he thought that it was essential to holding back Communism. . . .
The above is by Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com. Republicans love wars they just don’t have the balls to fight ’em. Piepr and broadway Joe, check out my spelling and criticize it-I don’t type well. But ball-less the Republicans are , have been and continue to be. Sto the fuckan war.
Rally and march in Olympia to support port activists
Saturday, Nov. 17, 1:00pm
Carpools leave Seattle at 11:30am
from New Freeway Hall, 5018 Rainier Ave. S. (Coffee and donuts 11-11:30am.)
Please call 206-722-2453 if you need a ride or can offer one.
Anti-war activists have been blockading military shipments through the Port of Olympia since November 5. On Tuesday night, 57 women held the front line of the blockade and stopped the movement of military equipment until the Olympia police arrested them and then began their assault on the remaining demonstrators.
The police have escalated their violence using batons, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and teargas against non-violent demonstrators. Olympia Port Militarization Resistance has called out fosupport on Saturday at a gathering that begins at Percival Landing and will end at the Port Plaza.
Directions: Percival Landing is just North of the intersection of State Ave. NW and Water St. SW. in Olympia. Take the 105B Exit from I-5. Go north on Plum St. SE to State Ave. NW. Turn left on State and go west approximately 9 blocks. After you cross Columbia St. SW, the street curves left onto Water St. The rally site is on the right near a large statue of two people kissing.
Contact Olympia public officials
Call and email city officials to insist they put a stop to the police brutality and arrests of community residents expressing their constitutional right to dissent. Olympia’s port should not be used for military purposes in the unjust war on Iraq.
Mayor Mark Foutch – mfoutch@ci.olympia.wa.us
City Manager Steve Hall – shall@ci.olympia.wa.us
Phone: 360-753-8447 for both
Police Chief Gary Michel
Phone: 360-704-2740
STFW: Religious deferments were/are always been allowed. The US DoD allowed this. But as you show in your bias SFTW… this fact was missing in your brain.
How many NY Liberals went to Canada during Vietnam STFW? Why did Jimmy Carter pardon them?
BTW What was Clinton’s religious deferment – not inhaling?
This is over the top. I don’t know any on the right who want lead paint or dirty water. Have to come up with something better than this.
Through the dark ages of the early 00s, I kept thinking that we needed these kinds of commercials on television, since the right had succeeded in making the term “liberal” into a disparaging term, the equivalent of “commie” (or worse), and the left had let them do it throughout the Clinton era. “Progressive” is fine, but it’s time also to take back the word “liberal” too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnktauTeIeg
I’m a progressive, and I want more government. Rich people are bad, coorporate profits are bad, free enterprise is bad.
I’m a progressive and I want equity. I don’t want to earn this, I want it given to me becuase it is not fair that there are people with more wealth than me. I’m a progessive.
***How many NY Liberals went to Canada during Vietnam STFW? Why did Jimmy Carter pardon them?***
Well, I don’t know how many went to Canada. They were pardoned because it was the right thing to do.
I will try to explain it so even you wimpy GOPers can understand.
There is a huge difference in not wanting to fight in a war you don’t want, and not wanting to fight in a war you do want.
@7: attaway, RS, find the most stupid interpretation of progressivism you can and spew it. That will move the conversation forward.
Why do you hate clean air and water?
Why do you hate America?
OM @9
I really like both clean air and water….
I love our country. I feel blessed to be a citizen here.
I love the fact that everyday I have the opportunity to maximize my potential, earn a living, raise a family, be active in my neighborhood, and community. I Love This Country…
RS: Great, that’s a positive step. We agree on a lot, apparently. I love our country too. I love the opportunities here and want to keep America great.
I’m not against free enterprise. I am against unbounded free enterprise. I don’t think the market solves all ills. I do believe the government has a role in ensuring that people are treated fairly, that the environment is protected for ourselves and future generations, and that gigantic corporations don’t run roughshod over all of us, including you.
Call me Pollyana, but I’d sure like to see less demonization of the other side and more seeking common ground.
Referring to a post some threads back, that’s what made Dan Evans great. He was all about solving problems rather than scoring political points.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled bitchslapping…
@11 wrote: “Call me Pollyana, but I’d sure like to see less demonization of the other side and more seeking common ground.”
No demonization here just a simple statement: IF YOU SUPPORT A WAR AND YET DODGE SERVING IN THAT WAR YOU ARE A DESPICABLE COWARD.” Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Romney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and all the rest of the neo-cons dodged military service and now their children, brave Republican Warriors every one are dodging service in this war.
Studs Terkel quoted in Amy Goodman’s column today:
Of the government spies and their telecom allies, then and now, Terkel says:
“They are un-American. Thomas Paine, the most eloquent visionary of the American Revolution, speaks of this country in which a commoner can look at a king and say, ‘Bugger off!’ I’ve known this before, because my phone was tapped in the days when the keyword was ‘Commie.’ “”How could it be at the end of World War II, we were the most honored powerful nation in the world? ‘Honored’ is the key word. Today we are the most despised. How come? The American public itself has no memory of the past. Gore Vidal uses the phrase ‘United States of Amnesia.’ I say, United States of Alzheimer’s. What do we know about it — why are we there in Iraq? They say, when you attack our policy, you are attacking the boys. On the contrary, they’re defending those boys. Welcoming them back home with their families. The war is built upon an obscene lie. We know that now. This lack of history has been denied us.”
@12: Dude, I’m on your side.
I was against attacking Iraq before the war started. I think Bush and Cheney are, in any rational world, war criminals.
My message in 11 (denoted at the beginning by “RS:”) was part of the “conversation” I was having with RS, where his reaction to the positive message of the video was to attack progressives.
I’m not advocating everybody holding hands and singing Kumbaya. I was making the point that name-calling doesn’t get anything done either.
-OM
Mitt Romney, Brave Republican Warrior–his story continued from above. Read on brave Republican Warriors and beam with pride.
Many church leaders considered the war a godly cause, and Mr. Romney said at the time he thought that it was essential to holding back Communism. . . .
Eventually, the great debates of the day intruded even at Brigham Young. In the fall of 1970, the student government president and others distributed a pamphlet encouraging opposition to the Vietnam conflict by quoting past Mormon leaders on the evils of war, stirring a predictable campus fury.
Mr. Romney wanted no part of such things. “If we had asked Mitt to sign that pamphlet, he would have had a heart attack,” said Terrell E. Hunt, a fellow Cougar who signed it.
Mitt Romney, then and now: showing what a super-tough patriot he is by cheering on wars that other people — but never he nor his family — risk their lives to fight. What makes it all the more repellent is that while many Mormons did enlist — Brigham Young was one of the few campuses that was a hotbed of pro-war activism — Romney actively avoided service, first with his missionary deferment, and then by obtaining a student deferment once he got back from France.
And now, he has the audacity to claim that he wanted to fight, but cites his high lottery number as a reason why his supposed desire was never fulfilled — as though there was no such thing as voluntarily enlisting:
Mr. Romney, though, said that he sometimes had wished he were in Vietnam instead of France. “There were surely times on my mission when I was having a particularly difficult time accomplishing very little when I would have longed for the chance to be serving in the military,” he said in an interview, “but that was not to be.”
Note the lack of agency that he tries to insinuate — military service “was not to be,” as though he so desperately wanted to fight but it was just a matter of bad luck, having nothing to do with his own actions, that he never managed to make it to the glorious combat fields of Vietnam. It’s exactly the same, deceitful little act which we recently heard from our brave, combat-avoiding Warrior-in-Chief whom Romney wants to replace:
President Bush wishes that he could be alongside the troops in Iraq — except that he’s too old.
At least that’s what he reportedly told a blogger embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. . . . ” N.Z. Bear,” one of the eight guests sitting around a table with Bush at the White House, reported: “Responding to one of the bloggers in Iraq he expressed envy that they could be there, and said he’d like to be there but ‘One, I’m too old to be out there, and two, they would notice me.'”
Poor Mitt Romney and George Bush, such frustrated would-be warriors, wanting so badly to fight in combat but thwarted at every turn by circumstances beyond their control.
So what exactly was it that prevented Romney — along with his powerful “shoulders [that] you could land a 737 on,” as The Politico’s Roger Simon droolingly put it — from fulfilling his wishes to fight? A video narration accompanying the NYT article contains an interview with one of Romney’s fellow missionaries at the time. He playfully explains how he and Romney found zany costumes and dressed up in them and formed a group that had a “fun time doing little Vaudeville routines” — all while Romney’s fellow citizens were being slaughtered in the Vietnam War that he so believed in:
By rather stark contrast, these were the costumes which Romney’s fellow citizens were forced to wear because of the war he supported:
[photo credits: here, here, here]
More repugnantly still, both the NYT article and accompanying video contain all sorts of quotes from Romney and his co-missionaries complaining about how very hard life was for them in France because it was so difficult to convert people, without any sense of how that “hardship” compared to their fellow citizens’ fighting and dying in the Vietnam jungle. It’s hard to put into words what twisted self-absorption and lack of empathy is required to wallow in such self-pity — exactly the same strain that led Romney earlier this year to equate his sheltered sons’ work on his presidential campaign with other Americans’ sons and daughters who are in the Iraq war that Romney so loves and exploits for political gain.
Romney’s draft-avoidance isn’t quite as shameful as Super Tough Guy Rudy Giuliani’s, whose deferment request was denied in 1969, thus placing him at imminent risk of being drafted, when he somehow convinced the federal judge for whom he was clerking “to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an ‘essential’ civilian employee.” The very idea that a first-year judicial clerk, just out law school, is “essential” for anything is absurd on its face. Yet the swaggering tough guy Rudy Giuliani used that blatant lie to ensure that someone other than himself was sent to fight in Vietnam.
But Romney’s record is hardly better. Although he claims he was ultimately convinced by his dad that the war was wrong, he spent most of the war cheering it on — from the same safe and sheltered distance where one finds most of our right-wing tough guy warriors today, the ones who understandably recognize themselves in both Romney and Giuliani. Needless to say, a centerpiece of both of their campaigns is how “tough” and courageously pro-war they are.
— Glenn Greenwald
That ad is so dumb.
@4 “Religious deferments were/are always been allowed.”
They were/are also at the discretion of the government. During Vietnam, for example, you couldn’t get a CO deferment unless your religious objection to war was based on membership in an organized church that officially prohibited its members from serving in the military. If your conscientious objection was based on personal moral or religious beliefs, rather than affiliation with a government-recognized church organization, your application was denied and your choices were reduced to serving in the military or going to prison — regardless of the sincerity of your beliefs. In fact, you didn’t even get a hearing on the sincerity issue; in the federal courts, where draft evasion cases were prosecuted, it was deemed irrelevant.
@4 “Why did Jimmy Carter pardon them?”
For the same reason Lincoln pardened the Confederates after the Civil War. Carter pardoned them to bring about national reconciliation in the wake of an unpopular war. The alternative was for the divisions, conflicts, and hatreds engendered by the war to endure and to have a perpetual corrosive effect on our society. Lincoln did it, and Carter did it, to keep America from becoming what Northern Ireland became. But you’re too stupid to figure that out.
So, should we liberals consider forgiving Republicans for all the evil they’ve done? Yes, after they’re out of power, when they’ve laid down their actual and rhetorical arms and promised to “make no more war, forever” on lbierals, and with conditions. There needs to be accountability for crimes and corruption. This means some of them will go to jail.
@7 “Right Stuff says: I’m a progressive …”
Bullshit.
@10 “Right Stuff says: I love our country.”
Double bullshit.
@11 “Call me Pollyana, but I’d sure like to see less demonization of the other side and more seeking common ground.”
Yes, you’re a Pollyana. We tried that, and it didn’t work. We tried working with Republicans and they knifed us. Their whole mantra is, “no negotiation, no compromise, do it our way or hit the highway.” They’re fucking dictators. They’ve resorted to lies, slander, smears, dirty tricks, and election stealing to get their way. It’s now ass kicking time. The only way to deal with these nazi scum is to kick their asses back into the gutters they crawled out of. I’m done with trying to cut deals with Republicans. They wanted a civil war, and civil war is what I’m going to give them.*
* Just kidding! Joke ripped off from Newt Gingrich Humor Productions, LLP, no royalties paid.**
** “[T]his is a civil war, … only one side will prevail, and … the other side will be relegated to history. This war has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars. While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefields, nonetheless it is a civil war.” — Newt Gingrich, in a 1988 speech to fellow Republicans, quoted by David Brock in “Blinded by the Right,” at p. 51.
Of course Republicans are despicable cowards. They’ve proved that countless times.
@19
We agree, absolutely right..
I AM AN AMERICAN!!!!!!!!!!!!
wow…so in commie land copyright laws aren’t in effect? i wonder what apple computer thinks of this “ad”?
hmmmm…..i’ll have to ask!
Hilary Clinton is showing her progressiveness:
HRH’s campaign put pressure on Eliot Spitzer to drop his disastrous licenses-for-illegals plan because it made her look stupid on National TV.
Sorry illegals, no progressiveness for you!
Pelletizer (TM) My comment of why did Jimmy Carter pardon them was rhetorical. Of course it was the right thing to do! Rhetoric, something lost on you.
WDRussell says: Nothing of significance.
The difference was the draft to a war escalated by Democrats vs. a volunteer army now to a war escalated by Republicans.