Reader Responses to Harkin

[DKW 86 7,440]

Background:

Harkin was found to be lying about claiming to be in Vietnam himself.

Harkin endorsed Howard Dean, who got a bogus medical deferment and spent quite some time being a ski instructor/bum in Colorado.

Link to WSJ Opinion Pages

The Gore Strategy

Scott Payne - Muskegon, Mich.

I don't see why you're confining this commentary to lies about Vietnam. The policy of the Kerry Campaign seems to be that of the Gore campaign before it: to tell nothing but lies. The Dems employ marathon lying to divert public attention from their real and very unpopular purpose: to raise taxes, put every third American on the public payroll and regulate the rest of us to death.

The Vietnam War Protestors Were Not Good People

William Woodford - Little Rock, Ark.

The assertion that there were "good people who protested" the Vietnam War is simply not credible. As Messrs. Collier and Horowitz point out in "Destructive Generation," the leaders of the demonstrations were hard-core Leftists who not only wanted America to lose the Vietnam War but to be humiliated as well.

The Vietnam Era protesters weren't protesting the war in general, they were protesting their own country's military effort to stave off Ho Chi Minh's war of aggression.

As Vietnamese Communist commanders have pointed out afterwards, the demonstrations were critical to the Vietnamese Communist strategy. Messrs. Collier and Horowitz note that the major demonstrations were coordinated with the Vietnamese Communists.

Thus they were simply supporting the Vietnamese Communist victory, and by doing so they were promoting the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Communist regimes after the war was over, when the socialist revolutions imposed on South Vietnam and Cambodia killed more people than the war did. They weren't even promoting peace, because the socialist policies imposed on South Vietnam ultimately led to the Third Indochina War, as Elizabeth Becker explains in "When the War Was Over."

It gets worse. The Vietnam War was the centerpiece of the Communist strategy of "wars of national liberation" promulgated by Khrushchev, so the demonstrators were not only supporting the Vietnamese Communists but were also supporting the enemy in the Cold War. In "Vietnam, the Necessary War" Michael Lind points out that the biggest winner of the Vietnam War was the Soviet Union, which took the lead in the Cold War.

Norman Podohoretz points out in "Why We Were in Vietnam," "Normally to side with the enemy in wartime is considered an act of treason," and Dante places the treacherous in the lowest circle of the Inferno, a place where one would hardly expect to find "good people."

Thus the claim that "good people" support the enemy in wartime and promote mass murder and genocide flies in the face of reason in the same way that Bill Clinton's claim that "fine people" supported the Vietnamese Communist victory.

The Dean Endorsement

Rosemarie Osterndorf - New Canaan, Conn.

Why did Sen. Harkin support Howard Dean for president, a man who received a medical deferment then spent those Vietnam era years skiing out west? Ah, the senator's memory is short.

The Peace Party Gets Stuck on a War

Ron LaCanne - Burlington, Wis.

Hmmm! Seems to me that the "Party of Peace" has a real hangup about this war. I wonder what Freud would have to say about this?

Cold War Veterans

Raymond Takashi Swenson - Idaho Falls, Idaho

I appreciate your comments on Sen. Harkin's combined lies and hypocrisy about Vietnam service. John Kerry truly epitomizes the schizophrenia of the Democrats about Vietnam. On the one hand, if they claim to have served there (even when they didn't, ala Mr. Harkin), they claim it was a test of manhood and courage and that anyone who didn't was a coward. But they also embrace the anti-war position of draft dodgers who fled to Canada, claiming they were being "true to their conscience concerning an unconscionable war."

If Mr. Cheney was a coward for getting a draft deferment, the same is true of Bill Clinton, but that was never raised by Democrats during Mr. Clinton's campaigns. The fact is, the majority of people on active duty in the military at the time did not serve in Vietnam. There were hundreds of thousands who served their enlistments facing down the Soviets across the wall dividing East and West Germany. There were tens of thousands who were guarding South Korea. There were a hundred thousand who were standing alert in submarines and missile silos and next to their nuclear armed bombers as a deterrent to a Soviet nuclear attack. And there were many more arrayed around the world watching radar screens and infrared satellite camera views to sound the alarm if the USSR launched an ICBM raid on America.

Back in the late 1960s, only a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when America nearly went to nuclear war, the U.S. was still maintaining an air defense system of radars and nuclear armed delta-wing supersonic interceptors (the F-102 and G-106) that could, with a single rocket-assisted bomb, wipe out a formation of Soviet bombers attacking the U.S., either from Siberia or from their bases in Cuba. George W. Bush was in one of the Air National Guard units doing that job. The Air Force decided that was a job that needed doing, and he volunteered to do it. It was honorable service. If it had been less than that, there would have been a less-than-honorable discharge certificate.

Sounds Like Fibber

Arnie Warren - Plantation, Fla.

While only a certain demographic of your readership will relate to this, but if you listen to Tom Harkin speak he sounds exactly like Fibber Mcgee of the old radio show "Fibber Mcgee and Molly." And now, incredibly, he thinks the same as Fibber, too.

A False Searing

Charles Mitchell - Winchester, Ohio

I'd say the definition of coward more closely fits Tom Harkin than either Dick Cheney or Dan Quayle. Stupid also comes to mind. Coward because Sen. Harkin has made a false claim that he served in Vietnam, thus falsely laying claim to the honor reserved for those who actually fought and died there. Stupid because he thought no one would dare to question his claim. Liar also comes in even though he now claims he actually said he "served in the Vietnam era." I suppose his claim that "One year was in Vietnam," was taken out of context. Speaking of liars, when John Kerry said his memory of spending Christmas Eve of 1968 in Cambodia was "seared, seared in my memory," would it be "inaccurate" to say he's a liar? Or will his next explanation be that because the mail was so slow he didn't get his Christmas packages until January of 1969, thus a false memory was "seared, seared" in his memory that it was Christmas Eve of 1968?