History Repeating Itself

September 8 2004
Counterbias.com
Marc Krug

''At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency? Have you no shame left?''

Seething with disgust, Attorney Joseph Welch made these charges against Senator Joe McCarthy some 50 years ago during the televised U.S. Army hearings. At the time, McCarthy was convinced that the Army harbored a cadre of dreaded Communists.

What had ignited Welch’s indignation were McCarthy’s constant mendacious innuendos and vicious verbal attacks. Both of these maneuvers were, unfortunately, symptomatic of how McCarthy treated people whose beliefs differed from his.

Furthermore, if anyone subjected to McCarthy’s inquisitions were to disagree with him, their love and devotion to country was somehow questionable. They were made to look as if they lacked the proper values and were not true Americans. 

Memories of these grainy McCarthy films sat at the back of my mind during the earlier segments of the Republican convention. Rarely did they leave my consciousness during Zell Miller’s vitriolic diatribe.

As Senator Miller gave the keynote address, I felt as if I were listening to a man who had truly lost all sense of shame and decency — and a good portion of his sense of reality and history as well. Mostly, I felt embarrassed, if not completely mortified, at the sight of someone so willingly debasing himself for so dubious a purpose before so large an audience.

But no, I never believed that the dislike I had for Miller put me in any danger. People like Zell haven’t the power McCarthy once did. What Zell is now, and what he did that night, is more to be pitied than feared.  

Even so, the address he gave the convention Monday night was so strewn with half-truths, mistruths, and slanderous vilifications that it deserves some rebuttal. To let it go entirely unanswered would be tremendously remiss.

Zell began his keynote address by saying that since he “had last stood in that spot, a whole new generation of the Miller family had been born: four great-grandchildren.” As the fates would have it, Zell was the one who gave the keynote address to the 1992 Democratic convention, also in New York.

He spent some time talking about his family and the worries he had about the world they would grow up in. Then he claimed he would be willing to entrust their future only to one man: George Bush. Admittedly, this was an odd statement for someone to make whose current web site still lists him as a Democrat.

Somehow it’s even odder when you examine the site further and find a 2001 speech Zell gave in which he introduces John Kerry as “one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders and a good friend.” Zell also makes the remark “John has worked to strengthen our military...”

But back to Zell’s speech at the Republican convention. He next went on to extol the virtues of Wendell Wilkie, who, like Zell, was a lifelong Democrat before becoming a Republican. According to Zell, in Wilkie we had a true bipartisan who would support fellow candidate Roosevelt in his move for a peacetime draft even should it cost Wilkie the election.

Zell carefully left out the part that Wilkie, a politically inexperienced corporate attorney and one of history’s unlikeliest presidential candidates, felt that the Democrats had “a vested interest in the Depression and were throttling the wealth-making and job creating potential of private enterprise.” This was a common Republican fiction at the time.

“Where,” Zell asked, “are such statesmen today? Where is the bi-partisanship when we need it most?” Carefully excluded was that Wilkie once publicly referred to FDR as “that son of a bitch.”

Also left out was that this “bi-partisanship” cost Wilkie essentially nothing. As a political unknown running against a growing American legend, Wendell never stood much of a chance of winning — although he did carry ten states.

Zell’s speech proceeded with this gem: “Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and in the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.”

First, it’s the war in Iraq that’s mostly tearing our nation apart and making it weaker — at least poorer by $132 billion and fewer by the 985 American soldiers who have died there. What’s worse is that this war was started pre-emptively by our Commander-in-Chief, who knowingly lied to the American people as to why.

Second, this country has not been strengthened by the singularly ineffective, yet costly, war in Afghanistan where we have succeeded in dispersing the Taliban to Pakistan but haven’t yet located bin Laden despite a $25 million bounty.

And third, I doubt that wanting to elect John Kerry qualifies as a “manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in-Chief.” For Zell’s edification, this “manic obsession” is a constitutionally guaranteed right accorded Americans every four years. It’s called an “election.”

Unfortunately, Zell was just getting started. It was about to get much worse.

“And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.” Then, Zell, you should be mad at our Commander-in-Chief, who has called them that. Actually in his April 13 press conference, Bush did admit that this was not an ideal situation for the Iraqi people either: “They're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either.”

“Occupier” is not a word infrequently heard in reference to our troops in Iraq. It’s used by most of the soldiers there, a good portion of them Marines like Zell was. It’s used by over 90% of Iraqis, more than 10,000 of whom have died during the occupation. Many of them were innocent women and children, something that should make Zell at least a trifle upset.

Later Zell offers these false praises to the brave soldier: “For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who gives freedom of speech.”

What Zell seems to forget, it “has been” the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights, that gave us these freedoms. And keep in mind that the Bill of Rights was passed when there was no standing American army and thus no soldiers at all.

Next, we are treated to Zell’s somewhat fictional history lesson: “They (the Democrats) claimed Carter’s pacifism would lead to peace’…and later claimed “Reagan’s defense buildup would lead to war.”  According to Zell, in both cases the Democrats were wrong.

We shall forget that under Carter’s watch, no soldiers died and one major Middle East peace accord (Israel and Egypt) was signed. And that under Reagan, we occupied Honduras, attacked Libya by air (accidentally killing dozens of civilians when a missile landed off course), armed the death squads of El Salvador, and aided the Contras' terrorist war against Nicaragua — which led to the Iran-Contra debacle, a scandal many people thought an impeachable offense.

Then there was also the matter of Lebanon. In the spring of 1983, President Reagan intervened in Lebanon's civil war on behalf of Christian President Amin Gemayel.  On March 24, 1983, the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit was dispatched to Lebanon where Moslem and Christian factions were fighting.

Four days later, a suicide bomber drove a van loaded with 2,000 pounds of explosives into the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans.

At an October 19, 1983 press conference, Reagan was asked about the safety of the Marines in Beirut to which he replied, "We're looking at everything that can be done to try and make their position safer.  We're not sitting idly by."

But once again, four days later, another suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the headquarters building of the First Battalion, 8th Marines, killing 241 American servicemen. 

At any rate, Reagan must have learned something: within four days, concrete barricades went up in front of the White House. They are there still.

Returning to Zell’s speech, we finally get to the tip of the red meat. According to Zell, “No pair had been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.”

Similarly wrong about the Carter and Reagan administrations were The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and countless other newspapers such as Zell’s own Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which, along with a multitude of TV news shows, reported these events. But we digress.

After all, it makes no difference that Zell offers no proof that either Kennedy or Kerry championed “Carter’s pacifism” or criticized “Reagan’s defense buildup.” He doesn’t need to offer any proof: Kennedy and Kerry are Massachusetts liberals. No more “proof” needs to be given.

And from the meat’s tip, we move to the prime cut: the weapon programs opposed by John Kerry — who Zell described in 2001 as someone who has “worked to strengthen our military”.

And the list of weapons opposed by Kerry is nearly as long as it is misleading: the B-1 bomber, the B-2 bomber, the F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft, the M1 Abrams tank, the Patriot Missile, the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, and the Aegis Defense Cruiser.

Kerry did oppose these as a candidate in 1984. But you might also remember that as a candidate, Bush opposed being a “divider not a uniter,” “nation building,” and not “leading a humble foreign policy.”

Kerry later “opposed” some of them by voting against the Defense Appropriations Bill in 1990 (as did 16 others Senators, six of whom were Republicans), in 1995 (as did 38 others Senators, five of whom were Republicans), and again in 1996 (as did 25 others Senators, three of whom were Republicans).

But keep in mind that in these appropriations bills, the weapon systems in question were only a part of a comprehensive, multi-billion dollar disbursement, which included the entire yearly governmental expenditures for defense. These bills did not mention only individual weapons. They literally incorporated thousands of items — such as salaries, medical benefits, tuition assistance, re-enlistment bonuses, and much else. They pertained to all that was required to run the military for that year.

Also keep in mind that Senators might vote for, or against, such bills because they felt too much or too little was being spent on the military, or they did not like the way the money was being spent altogether. Quite evidently, most did not vote against appropriation bills solely to kill a particular weapons system. To believe they did is to engage in a simplistic, inaccurate fiction.

So to repeat the Republican criticism that Kerry, “voted to kill every military appropriation for the development and deployment of every weapons system since 1988,” would not only be misleading, it would be inaccurate. It would also betray a certain amount of ignorance.

Admittedly, Kerry did specifically oppose several weapons systems. He voted against strategic nuclear weapons including the B-2 bomber, Trident missile, and anti-missile devices. But then again, George Bush Senior seemed to have little use for the B-2 bomber or for a few missile systems.

He said as much in 1992 State-of-the-Union Address: “After completing 20 planes for which we have begun procurement, we will shut down further production of the B-2 bombers. We will cancel the small ICBM program. We will cease production of new warheads for our sea-based ballistic missiles. We will stop all new production of the Peacekeeper missile. And we will not purchase any more advanced cruise missiles.”

“The Secretary of Defense (Dick Cheney) recommended these cuts after consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff (one of whom was Colin Powell). And I make them with confidence. But do not misunderstand me. The reductions I have approved will save us an additional $50 billion over the next 5 years. By 1997, we will have cut defense by 30 percent since I took office.”

But Cheney was not content to stop there. He also recommended terminating the F-14, F-15, and F-16 fighters. He similarly called for the end to the Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the Apache helicopter. He also wanted to relegate the Trident and Seawolf submarines to the scrapheap. And he cut the number of A-10 ground attack planes from 435 in 1990 to 159 in 1993, with the intention of phasing it out completely.

Additionally, he delayed development of the next-generation F/A-22 fighter while reducing both the annual production rate and the final production goal — steps that later led critics to claim the plane was unaffordable. Furthermore, while Cheney was Secretary of Defense, the Army lost a third of its active-duty divisions, which later led to greater reliance on Reserves for combat support.

So it might be that Zell’s simmering contempt for Kerry’s alleged weapon cuts is a trifle misplaced. With the exception of the B-1, current Vice-President (and former Defense Secretary) Cheney had opposed every weapon used in Operation Enduring Freedom.

In total, Cheney has actually opposed more weapons than Zell claims Kerry has. And by decreasing it’s number of soldiers, Cheney has lessened the army’s war-making powers more than Kerry ever could.

But Zell was not finished. At least not in terms of speaking time, that is.

Zell then said he “admired” George Bush. In him, Zell saw a man with “a spine of tempered steel.” I suppose it takes a man with such a spine to send thousands to their possible death in war while never having served in one of his own.

Zell ended his address by saying “in this hour of danger, our President has the courage to stand up. And this Democrat is proud to stand up with him.”

Of course what courage Bush needs to “stand up,” while never admitting his myriad mistakes and countless acts of deception, remains a mystery to me. And how Zell could still believe himself a Democrat, after falsely and maliciously slandering that party’s candidate for President, similarly escapes me.

Perhaps I would have answers to these questions if I had Zell’s talent for malice, inaccuracy, and illogicality. But to be honest, that’s a talent I just don’t want.