Military service and disservice

Mike over at Cold Fury compares and contrasts the military service, or lack thereof, of the following three people:

• Bill Clinton. He quotes heavily from the letter that Clinton wrote in 1969 to Col. Eugene Holmes, then Director of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas. He then includes excerpts from Col. Holmes 1992 affidavit, in which he addresses Bill Clinton and the draft. Mike sums up with:
  

  In summary, Clinton was then and remains now a duplicitous, conniving, self-seeking dirtbag, unfit to command a military he has little regard or respect for, as I said about a certain someone else at Bill’s joint last night. Unless you’re a Democrat, that is, in which case Clinton is the greatest President we ever had, an honorable man worthy of respect and high regard, and far less morally objectionable than George “AWOL” Bush.



• Al Gore. He presents documentation that Gore's service in Vietnam was likely not as dangerous as it has been portrayed.


• John Kerry. There's some question as to the actions for which Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. However, that's not what's important. It's Kerry's actions after he came home from Veitnam which are the real issue and Mike addresses them as many others have.

And then he wraps it up with this post. Some excerpts:

Kerry may have served with distinction, but his conduct after the war reveals him to be cut from the same cloth as Clinton and Gore. In my comment at DP I referred to Kerry as “Clinton V2.0 (or, maybe, 1.0.1)” and said that he seemed to be “the best the Dems could do, and the sanest, most mainstream of the lot of them.” But it ought to be plain to the meanest intelligence that if this is in fact the best the Dems can do, then their best is just not good enough. Not now, not in a dangerous age when we’re going to be relying on the US military for so much.

...

Clinton is by any standards indisputably a profoundly dishonest and dishonorable man. It’s my belief that he’s borderline sociopathic in his pursuit of his own interests, and regardless of what you may believe about the role of the federal government in the life of the individual, there were plenty of perfectly justified reasons to despise Clinton. Some on the Right may have taken their loathing of the man to ridiculous extremes, and the wish for vengeance against them on the part of the Left is understandable; but the kind of smear campaign mounted against Bush since day one of his presidency is hardly explained by that alone. (And Day One is really what it all comes back to with Bush, I think; they’re still so angry about losing the 2000 election it’s driven even some of the sanest among them right over the edge.)

...

The Dems and their supporters are now in the wholly unenviable position of having to hitch their rattletrap wagons to a dim and feeble star like Kerry because he at least has some claim on an honorable military record - and all the while they’re smearing a man who did a dangerous and perfectly respectable job in the Texas Air National Guard as a coward and a deserter. Their now-familiar desire to paint all conservatives as bloodthirsty megalomaniacs has come back to haunt them in an almost hilariously ironic way. The Dems’ election hopes now rest entirely on the ability of their lapdogs in the media to prevent the ugly truth about who and what Kerry really is from coming to broader notice. (That’s assuming Kerry will be the nominee, by the way, which is hardly a given but seems reasonable at this point.) They may well succeed, but anybody who truly cares about the nation’s future would have to hope that they do not.

The lie that Bush was AWOL from the Texas National Guard has been thoroughly debunked. It's amazing that this lie is still being disseminated by his opponents. I personally don't consider military service a prerequisite for being President. If you didn't serve, that's fine as long as your honest about it. And if you did serve, be honest about that, too.