Bob Dole versus John McCain, and Take it away Smedly Butler.
Enter Bob Dole. Patching up the lagging neo-version of the Committee to RE Elect the President — obfuscate a little more before the coming fog-drift clears it all up, because, as Tom Oliphant puts it: My own guess is that the higher the profile of this mess the more it looks like the smear it is, and the more it risks boomeranging on the president.
Bob Dole’s role is akin to that of Colin Powell’s when he delivered before the UN the, quote-in-quote, “Adlai Stevenson Moment” for the Iraq War. ‘Cause he’s respected, you see…
But, before he developed his persona as a respected pragmatic Republican, busy getting things done and a professional all the way, and before he reinvigorated that stalid image as a professional pragmatic conservative politico with Viagra ads and Pepsi ads with Britney Spears and self effacing humour– he was an attack dog. Most famously, his incomprehensible attack on “Democrat Wars” during the 1976 vice-presidential debate, but there are prior squealings showing him as loyal to a fault.
One interesting thing about his loyalty is that it wasn’t always recipocated: back in 1972, while he was in charge Republican National Committee and electing Senate candidates, Dick Nixon didn’t bother sharing many of his resouces — creepy or otherwise — to Dole. In the year of Nixon’s 49-state landslide re-election, the Republican Party lost two senate seats. (on the other hand, that is also a testament to the Democratic Party hierarchy abondoning a sinking ship in McGovern mid-election.)
From his 1988 campaign autobiography, stolen from John Micah Marshal:
As we approached the enemy, there was a brief exchange of gunfire. I took a grenade in hand, pulled the pin, and tossed it in the direction of the farmhouse. It wasn’t a very good pitch (remember, I was used to catching passes, not throwing them). In the darkness, the grenade must have struck a tree and bounced off. It exploded nearby, sending a sliver of metal into my leg–the sort of injury the Army patched up with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart.
Which brings us to another angle on this whole contrived controversy, an indictment on the government exploring the real purpose of awarding medals:
Smedley Butler, will you do the honors?
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share — at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn’t.
Napoleon once said,
“All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them.”
So by developing the Napoleonic system — the medal business — the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it.
While I’m at it, that wacky Liberal Newscreed, the Murdoch owned Bill Kristol edited Weekly Standard, has this to say of the current controversy:
But now Republican activists are forcing on the campaign obsessions of their own–almost a mirror image of the Democrats’ desperate overcompensation. The dissonance and frustration this year’s election rouses in the mind of the dedicated Republican cannot be underestimated. Conservatives actually do revere the military, without reservation. It is not their inclination to debunk combat heroes. Some Republicans, when they drink enough beer, really do wonder whether civilian control of the military is such a great idea. For them, it was never plausible that our boys in Vietnam had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,” and so on, as young John Kerry testified they did.
Yet in 2004, Republicans find themselves supporting a candidate, George W. Bush, with a slender and ambiguous military record against a man whose combat heroism has never (until now) been disputed. Further–and here we’ll let slip a thinly disguised secret–Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing. This is not the choice Republicans are supposed to be faced with. The 1990s were far better. In those days the Democrats did the proper thing, nominating a draft-dodger to run against George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest combat pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II, and then later, in 1996, against Bob Dole, who left a portion of his body on the beach at Anzio.
Republicans have no such luck this time, and so they scramble to reassure themselves that they nevertheless are doing the right thing, voting against a war hero. The simplest way to do this is to convince themselves that the war hero isn’t really a war hero. If sufficient doubt about Kerry’s record can be raised, we can vote for Bush without remorse. But the calculations are transparently desperate. Reading some of the anti-Kerry attacks over the last several weeks, you might conclude that this is the new conservative position: A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam in the first place.
Actually, that tells us exactly why the Republican Party needs to bring Bob Dole into the picture, as they transition their way from the discredited medal controversy (muddled in the public conciousness) to the issue of Kerry’s Vietnam War Protest years. It could come to pass that the actual fly-by-night organization “Vietnam Veterans for Truth” have now served their purpose, and their actual mendacity just no longer matters to the upcoming attack on Kerry’s Vietnam War protesting.
Welcome to the intricacies of CREEP II. At this point in time, we can only hope that CREEP II will do to Bush what CREEP I did to Nixon — only without the two year lag time.