The president said to Vietnam vets "you came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated," thus perpetuating the rightwing notion of dirty hippies spitting on heroic veterans, a trope he directly reinforced in his transformatively transformative second book.
He also said "you should have been commended for serving your country with valor," as if the mission we drafted a generation of young men into were truly in the service of a decent national aim.
The horrors we subjected them to, and the ones we sent them to visit upon so many others, are not—or by gum should not be—something to celebrate.
Pity, learn from, heal from, yes. But to use the language of disgrace to describe some Americans' reticence to celebrate Vietnam troops as conquering heroes is a vulgar display of pandering for the head of a nation that remains ready, willing, and able to repeat the sins of that war as long as our empire has bullets, bombs, and Selective Service and military volunteers.
I saw this ad on Facebook today and wondered two things about it.
1. Did ACLU use member donations to pay for a pro-Obama ad formatted in the Obama campaign style, with the familiar blue-white center gradient? Or did the Obama campaign sponsor it or independently pick up on the ACLU petition to run their own ad, labeled as something from ACLU?
2. Did ACLU run internet ads and a thank-you petition when Dick Cheney made history by being the first US VP to stand up for gay marriage, with the same states' rights caveat, eight years earlier? VP, of course, is a lesser office, but taking that stand as a Republican in 2004 was quite notable, and celebrating that break from the then-bipartisan orthodoxy against this LGBT-rights advancement could have sped progress. If ACLU did run such an ad, was it designed to look like an ad from the GOP?
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