"Several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country." John Kerry April 1971
The Houston heat and humidity was back, but the roaring industrial fans placed around the Ice House floor could not drown out the smirk on Bubba's face. I hadn't seen him so happy since George Bush dropped 30,000 weapons of mass destruction on downtown Baghdad because Saddam was going to attack us with weapons of mass destruction he didn't have. Bubba told me war hero Bob Dole had weighed in and asked Kerry to apologize for claiming our troops in Vietnam had committed war atrocities. Rather than rain on his parade, I complimented Bubba on at least getting to the nub of this entire Swift Boat matter. That it wasn't about purple hearts or medals for bravery, but rather about the long festering political hatred directed at someone who told the truth about Vietnam.
Bubba went on about how everyone in Vietnam did not kill babies, and for Kerry to say everyone did was a lie, a smear, and unAmerican. I tried explaining that neither was it "everyone" or what Kerry said, but what he said he heard other Veterans say. That of course got nowhere. I then asked if he doubted that American war atrocities were prevalent or that officers condoned or looked the other way when it happened. That was skirted by general accusations of Vietcong war crimes. I explained My Lai to Bubba, how 300 unarmed women, pregnant women, old men, children and babies were lined up in ditches and shot to death. It was real, documented and the truth. And much like Abu Gharib today, the military tried to play it down blaming a few "out of control" enlisted men and women. My Lai, like Agu Ghaib was no aberration, it was the one they got caught at. Though war crimes on as large a scale as My Lai were by no means everyday occurrences, that is not the case with heads and ears being lopped off, civilians murdered, villages burned, and prisoners shot or thrown out of helicopters. It is the truth, and no one should every have to apologize for telling he truth.
Not a ripple in the Bubba Smirk! He went on to say how Bob Dole called Kerry's wounds superficial and they didn't bleed! I hit all the points; that superficial wounds get purple heats in combat, that Kerry has a piece of shrapnel in his leg, and saying none of Kerry's wounds had bleed, Bob Dole tossed his credibility to the wind trying to save the sinking Ship of Bush. Nope, that had no impact either.
So I tried one last burst. I reminded Bubba that Kerry had volunteered for Vietnam, volunteered for combat, got three deserved or underserved Purple Hearts, one deserved or underserved Bronze Star, one deserved or underserved Silver Star, one serious or superficial piece of shrapnel in his leg and four months of combat duty MORE than George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and his idol Rush Limbaugh put together.
Bubba laughed, all my arguments didn't mean a thing because the Swift Boat ads, true or false, worked. Kerry is losing more and more veterans as the media reruns the ads. It looked like the centerpiece of Kerry's campaign has been neutered by chickenhawks and cowards. Bubba was right, and I ate crow and gave him his day of glory.
I stayed at home to watch George's acceptance speech, I didn't want to take the chance of sitting at a table next to a standing franticly cheering conservative who could very well release a splash of bodily fluid into my beer.
I just can't seem to come up with much to say about the speech. All the other speakers were better, and all he said was that everything is swell and he will kill as many people as it takes to keep it that way, without wavering. Don't think think twice, its all right.
So rather than go over his hour of boring nonsense, I close this GOP campaign week with some math. The score is the Muslims have have killed about 4000 of us and we about 40,000 of them, putting the Muslims behind 36,000. So they have a lot of killing to do before they get even. And as we have seen from the GOP convention this week, getting even is what its all about.
On the third night of the convention Bubba, Okra and I were in the throes of discussing queers getting married. Okra sited the Bible and Bubba John Wayne, but both came to the same end, ITS DISGUSTING! I asked what was disgusting? The love they felt for each other, or wanting the same advantage of family rights as anyone else? Other than the silly conservative slippery slope argument that it would mean people will then get married to a clam AND a penguin, they concluded that it was what they did naked that was so disgusting. I asked if they judged everyone in terms of what they did naked. I even asked them both if they spent a lot of time thinking about what I did naked, adding that I sure as hell haven't spent a nanosecond thinking about what either of them did naked. That generated a bit of anger so I closed up saying that what my parents did naked sure as hell disgusts me, I just don't dwell on it.
The bit of anger at our table was soon drown out by the evenings keynote speaker. In fact I cannot recall ever seeing so much anger presented at a convention, or for that matter, by anyone outside a 1930's Nurenburg rally. As Zell Miller went from angry to mad to insane, his bloodlust not only usurped the floor of Madison Square Garden with foot stomping abandon, but also the floor around my table at Jesus' Ice House. The juices flowed as the national scream for an ever rising body count swept the land.
Okra, tuckered out in a joyous blush, had to sit down and rest leaving only Bubba standing and cheering to the end. I noticed her quick glance towards Bubba's waist and back down to her Zima. Zell was so good at what he was doing it had given Bubba a stiffy. I had always wondered what conservative did to get it up in the bedroom, but now that I knew, I became so disgusted I decided it was time to enact legislation to keep conservatives from marrying.
Later that night watching the pundits it got even worse. Chris Mathews asked Zell about his remark that Kerry wanted to use spitballs against al Qaeda. Zell replied in his very unfunny rabid manner that he wished he was in the studio with Mathews so he could answer that question properly. When Mathews replied with an incredulous blank stare to the threat, Zell went on to say he wanted to shoot Mathews in a duel. Hey, I have often wanted to give Mathews a poke in the nose myself, but not shoot him. I am just not angry enough I guess.
The second night of the convention at the ice house was a different evening for me. Bubba had brought his sister-in-law along. Okra was not a selfish bigoted secular conservative like her brother-in-law, but a selfish bigoted Christian conservative. We moved from our regular spot at the bar to a table not too close to a floor fan so we could hear the TV above us set in the rafters. I immediately found Okra's bad side by asking if she had any siblings named Grits. I knew Bubba had warned her about me when she said she had heard I was the Ice House Godless baby killer. She said it with that fake smile crap I can't stand, so I replied it was better than being a hard green vegetable that tastes like shit, and then laughed like hell. We were off to a good start.
Bubba shushed us as Arnold took the stage. The next 20 minutes seemed a page from Kafka, there were these two hardcore Republicans booing the keynote speaker at the Republican Convention, while this baby killer applauded from time to time. When it was over I told them that besides his stupid comment about a Nixon Speech which made him a Republican, it was the best speech I had ever heard from a white man. "EXACTLY!" the two of them cried in unison.
Okra called him a liberal baby killer, but Bubba was only annoyed that Arnold's speech lacked the proper conservative bile and bloodlust. And not once did he say he would eliminate Bubba's taxes.
Laying in bed that night I sorted it out. Much to my dismay, Arnold, more so than Giuliani, represents the future of the Republican Party, a big smile attached to a reasonable ideology rather than that humorless smirk of religious intolerance in control of that party now. With their choice of convention speakers, the GOP realizes the majority of us have had enough of that crap. Aronld's delivery was Reaganesque and he came off as a very pleasant, though not brightest of bulbs. A win-win for the GOP. For few Americans want anyone smarter than they are in the White House.
Though I doubt three fourths of us will decide to change the constitution to make Arnold president, he is the face of the GOP future, which may be far harder to beat than the GOP of today.
Bubba and I had a date to watch all four nights of the GOP convention down at Jesus' Ice House. We spent most of our time the first night shouting FOUR MORE YEARS and TWO MORE MONTHS respectively. A little later we each found ourselves seething over two fellows who were not even politicians. Bubba went purple seeing a shot of Michael Moore laughing in his seat after being singled out from the podium and then shown sitting in the audience as he had hoped. Bubba says someone has to take him out, for chicken fried steak I assume. But it was a step up for Bubba, for it was the first time I've seen him go purple over anyone white. I admit to going livid listening to Ron Silver, for like Dennis Miller, it depresses me greatly to see a liberal going over to the dark side only because they want to see higher body counts.
It was the night for Rudy Giuliani and John McCain to endlessly intone 911 and explain why it was necessary to invade and occupy Iraq no matter what the rest of the world thought. And that we have a lot more killing to do, without wavering.
Leadership was not only the theme of the night, but that of the entire convention and campaign. Leadership meaning the propensity to awesomely bomb a country into destruction with one hand, while giving the rest of the world the finger with the other, and not wavering. When I mentioned that to Bubba, he stood up on the bottom rail of his bar stool, raised his arms in the air and shouted "Halleluiah! He finally gets it!"
I explained to Bubba that from that same criteria Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, FDR and Mao Tse Sung were the greatest leaders of all time, and asked if he would have voted for all of them too? Bubba often loses his sense of humor, though he contends it only happens when talking to me.
