Oberleutnant zur See John Kerry (2 of 2)

(Cont. from Part 1) The prominent place given in this article to Kerry's combat experience and antiwar activism reminded me of something that I'd been thinking, about why conservatives seem to be foaming at the mouth about Kerry, a genuine war hero, protesting against the war in which he fought.

The reason why is summarized well in just that paragraph above. That's what the anti-Vietnam War movement was about. And that doesn't fit at all with the rightwing Republicans' preferred image of the war as a "noble cause" that was won on the battlefield but undermined by a bunch of protesting privileged college students and cowardly Democrats back home. War veterans like John Kerry and other like him were leaders in the antiwar movement. Soldiers in the military actively opposed the war: sometimes by openly protesting, some by deserting, some by actual acts of sabotage.

John Kerry the antiwar war hero opposing George Bush, who couldn't even complete his own service as Leutnant in the Texas Luftwaffereserve, could undo three decades of blowhard macho culture-war rhetoric about Vietnam and "the sixties." Oh, the possibilities.  As Kerry says, "Lasst ihn nur kommen!" [Bring it on]