Another Trained Dog to Disenfrachise
Today’s disenfranchisee is Manuel E. Nunes of Garbage Garden Grove, whose moron letter to the L.A. Times ran today.
Re “Bush Campaign Steps Up Attacks as Kerry Gains in Polls,” Aug. 16 (sic, 13): Vice President Dick Cheney engages in distorting Sen. John Kerry’s comment about the U.S. having to be more sensitive toward engaging in world issues.
Nice try, Manny, but Kerry promised “a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror.” This is a call for a “sensitive war,” not for sensitive diplomacy. The only other possibility is that Kerry is one of those ‘tards who still thinks the war on terror is a metaphor (a la “war on poverty” or “war on drugs”) and not a real war. I’m not sure which is worse.
Ironically, the hallmark of the current White House administration is insensitivity. This alone has caused our beloved country to be loathed in the world as never before. Incidentally, they accomplished this in a mere four years in office.
Well, he’s got a point there. Speaking as one who resided in three foreign countries for a year apiece (Mexico 1981-82, Germany 1987-88 and Austria 1989-90), I can’t tell you how much I long for the good old days when Mexicans showered us Americans with praise, West Germans and West Berliners lauded their hero Ronald Reagan following his brave call to “tear down this wall,” and the nominally neutral Austrians cheered as one former Warsaw Pact nation after another joined up with their good buddies in NATO. Oh wait, I almost forgot, none of this actually happened. Never mind!
August 17th, 2004 at 9:53 am
Where were you in Austria, XRLQ? My Viennese family (14th district, near Schoenbrunn) were quite anti-Communist in the 1980s; while they didn’t exactly like Reagan, they were most decidedly cheered by the end of the Cold War. They weren’t alone either, judging from discussions with their friends and neighbors…
August 17th, 2004 at 10:49 am
I was in Klagenfurt, which is the capital of Carinthia (Kärnten). Carinthia, you may recall, was the stomping ground of everyone’s favorite idiot-Aryan, Jörg Haider, who was governor at the time. Everyone I knew was happy to see the Berlin Wall come down, of course, but they also did backflips to avoid giving an ounce of credit to then-President Bush, to Ronald Reagan, or to any other U.S. President since JFK. And they openly mocked the notion that a reunified Germany might eventually become a member of NATO.
As an example of how anti-communist everyone wasn’t/isn’t, I distinctly recall passing Karl-Marx-Straße daily on the way to work. [It's still there, BTW.] On the bright side, I never encountered an Adolf-Hitler-Straße or a Josef-Stalin-Straße, so I guess I should be thankful for small favors.
August 18th, 2004 at 1:25 pm
I was in Italy in ‘98 when Clinton was president, and boy those Europeans sure didn’t seem to like us then either. Imagine that, anti-Americanism pre-dating Bush.
August 18th, 2004 at 9:49 pm
We missed Carinthia when we visited Austria. If we’d had another several days, we would have gone. What did we miss?