The Amazing Sam Johnson of Texas
Sometimes the duty of a blogger is to very self-conciously add to an echo-chamber. Hence… the dualing quotations of Republican Representative Sam Johnson. Followed by some commentary on what stuns me about these quotations.
December 1995, regarding Clinton and Bosnia:
I wholeheartedly support withholding funds… Although it is a drastic step and ties the President’s hands, I do not feel like we have any other choice. The President has tied our hands, gone against the wishes of the American people, and this is the last best way I know how to show my respect for our American servicemen and women. They are helpless, following orders.
…
Thirty years ago when I was sent to Vietnam in a similar situation, Vietnam started out as a peace type mission, no defined goal, no exit strategy, no idea whose side we were on, and a created incident to gain support of the Congress. A peacekeeping mission? Come on. Does this not sound just like a carbon copy? I think it is.
AND, thank you this guy for the February 16, 2007 address:
We POWs were still in Vietnam when Washington cut the funding for Vietnam. I know what it does to morale and mission success. Words can not fully describe the horrendous damage of the anti-American efforts against the war back home to the guys on the ground.
Our captors would blare nasty recordings over the loud speaker of Americans protesting back home…tales of Americans spitting on Vietnam veterans when they came home… and worse.
We must never, ever let that happen again. […]
Now it’s time to stand up for my friends who did not make it home – and those who fought and died in Iraq – so I can keep my promise that when we got home we would quit griping about the war and do something positive about it…and we must not allow this Congress to leave these troops like the Congress left us.
Today, let my body serve as a brutal reminder that we must not repeat the mistakes of the past… instead learn from them.
We must not cut funding for our troops. We must stick by them. We must support them all the way…To our troops we must remain…always faithful.
I can shrug off politicians’ tendency to say two separate things at politically different moments. Â In fact, to oppose or support the mission in Bosnia is not a contradiction with supporting or opposing the mission in Iraq, even as one may end up saying things that seemingly contradict.
But this one is a doozy. This is, quite simply, the most amazing flip flop I have seen. Sam Johnson is flip-flopping on the very meaning of the Vietnam War, and is taking opposing sides in a crucial crux of the Culture Wars that emenate from the 1960s. I don’t know of any parallels here.