Article

2004-07-26 Fifth Column

Michael Moore: undermining military morale

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Posted by someone 2004-07-26 2:47:34 PM|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 This is what M. Moore was after. I'll bet he's pleased. I wouldn't put it past him to have a big "Mission Accomplished" sign behind him when he talks in Boston.

I feel like spitting...

Posted by eLarson 2004-07-26 3:33:40 PM|| 2004-07-26 3:33:40 PM|| Front Page Top

#2 I wonder what FDR would have done about Michael Moore.

Posted by Dave D. 2004-07-26 3:41:34 PM|| 2004-07-26 3:41:34 PM|| Front Page Top

#3 I don't know.

I do know that FDR threatened to revoke the broadcast license of anyone who told the truth about the Katyn Forest Executions.

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-07-26 3:42:49 PM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-07-26 3:42:49 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 I don't know either, but I can tell you what the British did to Lord Haw-Haw.

Posted by Matt 2004-07-26 3:46:23 PM|| 2004-07-26 3:46:23 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 They gave him hang-hang, didn't they? Sounds good to me.

Posted by Dave D. 2004-07-26 4:00:56 PM|| 2004-07-26 4:00:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 Yep, even though he was born in New York.

Posted by Matt 2004-07-26 4:03:32 PM|| 2004-07-26 4:03:32 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 Here's another question: what effect will a Kerry victory this November likely have on enlistment and retention rates in the military?

Posted by Dave D. 2004-07-26 5:31:40 PM|| 2004-07-26 5:31:40 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Some Marines I've spoken to think retention rates will fall through the floor if Kerry wins. There is a lot of fatigue already amongst the reserve ranks. Add to this Kerry's record of not supporting the military and actually betraying his fellow soldiers and you have a recipe for disaster. The soldiers, airmen and Marines I've spoken to do not like this guy one bit.

Posted by remote man 2004-07-26 5:40:15 PM|| 2004-07-26 5:40:15 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 Hang Hang? Ha! Howsers haven't happened heavy 'henuf. Thank heavens.

Posted by Lumpy R 2004-07-26 5:58:00 PM|| 2004-07-26 5:58:00 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 I'll answer with a different question: How would Kerry use the military? Given what I've seen of Kerry so far, there seem to me to be two basic possibilities: (1) One is that he won't use the military at all, since he's highly prone to paralysis by analysis. A bad outcome, but at least one that affects us all more or less equally. (2) He'll continue the LBJ-Clinton tradition of using the military in a half-assed limited way. We'll send a battalion to Snoozlestan because some of Kerry's supporters think we need to take action in Snoozlestan, but we won't support that battalion because other Kerry supporters think we shouldn't be in Snoozelstan at all. "You can stand there, but for gosh sake don't shoot anyone." Not good for troop morale; even worse for force protection.

Posted by Matt 2004-07-26 6:02:35 PM|| 2004-07-26 6:02:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 From what I can tell, Kerry seems to think that the WoT is a low-level, behind-the-scenes affair, using cops and special forces to seek out and kill individual terrorists. This fits well with a Clinton-like "holiday from history" approach to foreign policy, where the nasty business is invisible, so that the pacifists here and in Europe can be mollified. He has revealed nothing, if there is anything to reveal, about what he thinks of rogue states and failed states. These states are at least as big a problem as Al Qaeda, since they have the capability and the will to support terrorism and to inject WMD into the mix.

Posted by virginian 2004-07-26 6:26:49 PM|| 2004-07-26 6:26:49 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 He has revealed nothing, if there is anything to reveal, about what he thinks of rogue states and failed states.

He's all for them; remember his stands on communist Vietnam and Honduras.

Posted by Robert Crawford 2004-07-26 6:29:40 PM|| [http://www.kloognome.com/] 2004-07-26 6:29:40 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 Agreed RC. And he has already stated that he thinks the WOT is a law enforcement issue.....

Posted by CrazyFool 2004-07-26 6:39:09 PM|| 2004-07-26 6:39:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 I do know that FDR threatened to revoke the broadcast license of anyone who told the truth about the Katyn Forest Executions.

Say what?!?!? Are you serious?

Posted by Rafael 2004-07-26 6:43:50 PM|| 2004-07-26 6:43:50 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 This account at

http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art6.html

doesn't mention threats to revoke anybody's broadcast licenses but it does touch on Roosevelt's deep-sixing of reports that the Soviets, not the Nazis, had perpetrated the massacre:

"In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. FDR rejected Earle's conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility. The report was suppressed. When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle--who had been a Roosevelt family friend--spent the rest of the war in American Samoa."

Posted by Dave D. 2004-07-26 7:14:57 PM|| 2004-07-26 7:14:57 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 Dave D. has already posted one of the links I was planning to post; here's the other:

http://hnn.us/articles/5136.html

To illustrate the "denial," Klehr and Haynes cite liberals' continuing repression of the Katyn Forest massacre, Stalin's World War II extermination of the core of the Polish elite, regular and reserve officers who had been made prisoners as a consequence of the collaboration between Stalin and Hitler that began the war. I recently experienced the denial first-hand when, in a conversation with a west coast history professor, I suggested that we had had enough discussion of the number of those executed by the Soviets and that historians should begin to examine the cover-up of Katyn on the part of the Roosevelt administration. There was no response to my suggestion. I had touched a sensitive ideological nerve; I had had the temerity to impugn one of liberal academe's most dearly embraced historical memories, the integrity of the Roosevelt administration in its alliance with Stalin during World War II. Nevertheless, I suggest that Klehr and Haynes's treatment of the American response to Katyn be extended somewhat to include the significance of the American cover-up in later years.

No one who was not alive and aware in the United States during the war can imagine the deference to the Soviet Union and its war effort exhibited by Franklin D. Roosevelt's war-time administration and the American media. For example, not only did the Office of War Information blame the Katyn executions on the German army; OWI also implicitly threatened to remove licensure from the Polish language radio stations in Detroit and Buffalo if they did not cease broadcasting the details of the executions. In all the long years when Alan Cranston served as U.S. Senator from California no one mentioned his part as an OWI functionary in the intimidation of the Polish-American radio station managers. The London-based Polish government-in-exile, whose leaders had requested a Red Cross investigation of the affair, was characterized as having "stupidly walked into Goebbels' trap". Was that the initial manifestation of what later became America's favorite ethnic stereotype?

I've been reading a lot lately by some critics of the current administration, that they haven't mobilized the country to the extent that the US was mobilized in WW2.

This argument is starting to bug me a lot; Roosevelt was able to mobilize so much during wartime because he had a great deal of political power. Heck, thanks to his efforts to pack the Supreme Court,FDR had more power in the peacetime period of the 30's than Bush has had in the current war.

It's a lot easier to mobilize the country's economy to war when you've got it under centralized control to begin with.

And frankly, the party that believes in centralized control of the economy seems to be the one least suited to actually run a centralized economy; they complain about "blood for oil" but are the main impediment to more oil exploration and production domestically. They claim to like alternate energy sources, but if one of those starts threatening to actually work, they seem to change their minds, and move the goalposts... the various brouhahas about wind power, off of Nantucket or in Altamont Pass, are one example of this. Nuclear fission is another.

I am fairly sure I've ranted on this in the past, and I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record, and it's off-topic for this thread, so I'll stop now.

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-07-26 7:45:41 PM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-07-26 7:45:41 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 , thanks to his efforts to pack the Supreme Court,
that was a massive political failure, didn't happen.
FDR political power was on the wane until Pearl Harbour.

He barely passed Lend Lease and the draft continuation when it was already apparent that US involvment in the war was imminent.

Posted by Shipman 2004-07-26 8:07:17 PM|| 2004-07-26 8:07:17 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 During the first months of the war in Iraq, I heard on WLS radio that people could write our troops to keep morale high. I haven't heard anything since, and I imagine support from Americans would be even more appreciated now. Does anyone know of website(s) that we can write to, that soldiers have access to, for lending them our support?

Posted by jules 2 2004-07-26 8:07:37 PM|| 2004-07-26 8:07:37 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 Shipman: do you think Bush could pass Lend Lease or institute a draft today, even now, _after_ 9/11 and the start of the war?

From where I'm sitting, it looks like FDR had a lot more power, even when you say it was waning.

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-07-26 8:14:02 PM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-07-26 8:14:02 PM|| Front Page Top

#20 Excellent points, all. We have never been more free - we flirt with anarchy now, gleefully dancing on the edge, in the name of freedom. But as Phil suggests, it's not liberty they seek. It's some strange demented Norman Rockwell cum Peter Max vision of what they think the 1960's era was about. I was there, just as most here were, and it wasn't Nirvana, it was chaos - and an ugly motherfucker at that. Perhaps they believe their own lies... you know the ones where they got laid more often. I recall a concert in Red Rock Canyon where this love-child and I...

But through their rose-colored memory mists (allusion to old Doonesbury on Reagan's Brain intentional, just reversed roles) and the half-baked drivel they've now indoctrinated some of our children with, it's become a mantra or meme. They want to go backwards to the goofy 60's - how progressive, lol! Fuck 'em. These are the misfits who kept their idiocy under wraps until they became the Deans, Professors, Middle Mgrs, Ethicists, and State Dept Foreign Policy Advisors - and were thus empowered to peddle their idiocy as reasoned thought.

They have given liberalism a case of jaundice, for they hate the very system that created the stability that allows liberalism to exist. It's not a requisite for survival, it's a luxury item only available when there is such strength that stability is ensured. Once at that point, it serves us exceptionally well, but it cannot exist without the strength to protect the society.

I believe the violence is coming. The True Believers in the meme have few qualms - they're defending their dream-world - and all bets are off when you (or reality) threatens someone's dreams, no matter how demented. Sounds like the Islamofacists and the Caliphate, no?

And I like my drivel well done, thanks. Paper mache' giant puppets and pink tanks don't do much for me. It's a reality thing.

Posted by .com 2004-07-26 8:15:46 PM|| 2004-07-26 8:15:46 PM|| Front Page Top

#21 "I believe the violence is coming. The True Believers in the meme have few qualms..."

They have none. Nor do they know any restraint. Nor do they give a damn about the destruction they are causing, long term or short term. They want the world and they want it NOW.

My concern is that these people, if left unchecked, will end up causing a situation so horrible that someone decides to correct it-- and them-- with concentration camps and mass graves.

Posted by Dave D. 2004-07-26 8:44:58 PM|| 2004-07-26 8:44:58 PM|| Front Page Top

#22 Phil, I expect Bush could pull off Lend Lease given the same near set of circumstances, but nothing short of a Mexican invasion will bring back the draft, and then only if Mexican light infantry penetrated to Chicago.

Wait a second....

Posted by Shipman 2004-07-26 9:17:31 PM|| 2004-07-26 9:17:31 PM|| Front Page Top

#23 Shipman: Maybe.

Remember, it all would depend on whether the Molotov-Ribbentroff pact was still in effect. If it were, the loony liberal left would feel honor-bound to sabotage any anti-Nazi action, any way they could.

I wish I could find the article I read a while back that said this was actually a factor in the fall of France.

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-07-26 11:14:34 PM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-07-26 11:14:34 PM|| Front Page Top

#24 Although Michael Moore is the Jane Fonda of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I can't see him making exercise videos.

Posted by RWV 2004-07-26 11:22:32 PM|| 2004-07-26 11:22:32 PM|| Front Page Top

#25 My son's Marine battalion is deploying to Iraq in a few weeks. It is a bitter thought to contemplate the possibility of him going in harm's way with a man like Kerry in command. I start every day with a prayer for the continued good health and reelection of George Bush.

Posted by RWV 2004-07-26 11:27:40 PM|| 2004-07-26 11:27:40 PM|| Front Page Top

#26 Me, too, RWV, and I'll add your son to my prayers for our troops, too!
God bless him and do thank him for his service to our country and protecting our safety and security!
Bush will and must win reelection in 2004.

Posted by GreatestJeneration 2004-07-26 11:32:34 PM|| [http://www.greatestjeneration.com] 2004-07-26 11:32:34 PM|| Front Page Top

#27 Comrades! Establishment of NKVD "Barrage Batallions" will ensure the continued loyalty of our troops! Trotskyite Deviationist Wreckers will be rooted out tooth and nail!

Posted by borgboy 2004-07-26 11:36:40 PM|| 2004-07-26 11:36:40 PM|| Front Page Top

#28 Dave D. and Phil, thanks for links & info.

Posted by Rafael 2004-07-27 12:08:05 AM|| 2004-07-27 12:08:05 AM|| Front Page Top

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