Useful Fools

Posted By John Moore on May 5, 2004

People from Roger Simon’s blog and commenters community liked the following piece, which first appeared there as a comment, and it was suggested that I post it here. The piece was written in a stream-of-consciousness effort, with no time for editing or review, and I was shocked to find the number of spelling errors. There are probably still a few grammatical whoopses.

This is the story of how I arrived at my current political philosophy and specifically my mission this year of opposing John Kerry’s efforts to win the presidency.

My first comment is that not all information of value comes from the press. I would add that long experience has taught me never to trust the mainstream press as to which items are important and what the full context and facts are. Life experience, friends and contacts, and other sources of information are extremely important. Psychological make-up is important

I joined the Navy 2 days after John Kerry, so as you can imagine, I have some perspective. Some of the silly issues (Bush’s National Guard service) were interesting to watch as the press lapped up and dutifully excreted the lies and innuendos of the Kerry Campaign, in the process showing their utter lack of understanding of the military and their invincible ignorace. The best sources on Iraq come from soldier’s blogs, a sampling of Iraqi blogs, and some of the analysis sites – Den Beste, Belmont Club, Black Five. I’ve had email exchanges with some of the soldiers to ask about specific issues.

I enjoyed Salam Pax’s blog, and we had a short inter-blog exchange (I called him a cry-baby and a whiner, he acknowledged that and miraculously stopped being either) long ago. Unfortunately he is no longer active as far as I can tell. He offered an eclectic view – a rebellious homosexual in Baghdad of all places, an architect, a prankster, and an observer. I am sorry he doesn’t continue to write.

GAC

To answer your question a bit, I arrived at my position from several viewpoints. I will start out with the fact that I am a conservative (and a social conservative, which is less common here and has led to some fascinating discussions on very touchy subjects) and have been since I figured out the “Libertarian” meant “foolish utopian” and most “libertarians” were more interested in “libertinism.”

I started my ideological journey as a ham radio operator and short wave listener tuning in Radio Moscow and Radio Havana in the early ’60s, and studying their techniques. A trip to East Berlin in 1966 showed me a bit of the nature of tyranny, after watching poorly dressed east Germans standing as close as they could get to the wall near the Brandenburg gate, just staring and staring sadly, after which our bus took us to the beautiful (and horribly offensive) monument to Soviet War dead.

Not long after that, I dropped out of college and volunteered to fight in Vietnam, although as it turned out I was never in combat. My understanding of some of the negative aspects of socialism arose from living a socialist/communist life as a low-ranking member of the armed forces – where everything is owned by the government and you are dependent on them for everything. I participated in a couple of anti-war demonstrations after I got out, mostly out of curiosity and because I was angry that we were not fighting to win (in my youthful arrogance, I didn’t realize that by the time I was protesting, we were winning). From those experiences I learned a bit about true radicals – and also from knowing the head of the SDS at my university.

Some economic reading led me to the understanding of the problems of government “solutions” – even in those few cases (such as national defense) where there is no alternative. Hayek is a good source of knowledge in that area.

When we betrayed the Vietnamese, I was so ashamed that I wept. By then, I realized that there were many in our country who did not understand the threat of the USSR and others who didn’t care. When Joan Baez was thrown out of the peace movement by Jane Fonda for “criticizing a socialist state” (Vietnam) when some of the butchery was being done by the Northern conquerors, I saw that part of the movement for what it was: evil.

In 1980, I voted for George Bush in the primaries. I thought that Jimmy Carter was an utterly incompetent President, especially in foreign affairs (you can thank him for greatly enabling the rise of Islamofascism). I thought Reagan too strident.

But I learned about Reagan and came to respect him very much. I also watched the attacks against him, which I knew were exaggerated, and I watched the Democrats try to keep him from blocking communist advances in places like El Salvador and Nicaragua, and realized that the Democrats would stoop to any tactic to stop Reagan and to keep us from fighting the worst tyranny ever to befall mankind. I watched Reagan, who like Bush fooled his detractors by failing to live down to the “stupid” image, provide greatly needed philosophical leadership. I watched him defeat the Soviet Union, quite intentionally and confidently.

I also started to switch my reading from dishonestly biased sources like Time and Newsweek to honestly biased sources like the WSJ editorial page and National Review. By 1985, I also was active in internet discussions in a forum with 100,000 active readers.

In 1991, I lived in France. On the day the Warsaw Pact died, I was in Czechoslovakia, in a rural region, looking at the trees dying from high sulfur coal pollution and the abject poverty everywhere. I also went to East Germany that day and saw the same level of poverty, with most buildings having never been repainted after World War II. I stopped in a German town that had been bisected by the Iron Curtain. After checking for mines, we knocked off a chunk of it as a souvenir of the war Reagan had won and of the rightness of our cause, which the Democrats never acknowledged.

In 1992 I watched the press cover up many of Clinton’s misdeeds, just as today they are scrambling to cover up Kerry’s. I have become a bit of a student of press bias, and it is fascinating.

However, this year is special. It is special for several reasons.

1) We are in a war to the death, and I mean that literally. Never have we faced the sort of threat we face today, which has the potential to do as much damage to our population as the Soviet Union could have done (and Russia still can do) with its missiles (albeit by a different method), a fanaticism that the communists were rarely able to engender: -suicide operations – the hardest to defend against, an opponent that is ideological but does not rely on state control the way communism did, making it far harder to find and defeat.

I arrive at this view from study of a number of sources, and from a deeper knowledge of some of the aspects of WMD’s than most people have, tied to my engineering training and my daughter’s expertise in neuroscience and genetic engineering, her previous work with BL-3 organisms, my long study of emerging infectious diseases, my knowledge of nuclear physics and many analyses of many sources on the web, some of which from unimpeachable sources.

2) Too many of our population have fallen back asleep. They know about terrorism but have failed to “connect the dots” and don’t realize that 9-11 had a low casualty level compared to what the terrorists were striving for even in 1993. They don’t realize that we will almost certainly suffer a much worse attack – if not this year, then next. They think that a Kerry promise of some social program should make any difference, when our very existence as a free nation hangs in the balance.

3) We are choosing our leader for the next four years of this war.

4) For the first time in my memory, if not in history, we are running for president a person who fought actively against his country and his fellow veterans. He fought in the theater of ideas, and it was in that theater that the war was lost. He fought as an opportunist, using his talents and contacts in that area (including Madame Binh, the enemy’s chief representative) to climb to political power. In addition, this is the first time that my experience as a Vietnam Veteran becomes directly applicable to the fight, and frankly, allows me to speak with more authority.

Give me Clinton or even Carter or, heaven forbid, even LBJ and I would be less motivated to stop him. Kerry has slandered his country and he has slandered me. He has objectively damaged many Veterans who had to wear the fabric of lies that Kerry created – lies that we engaged in atrocities as a matter of officially approved routine; lies that we were baby killers; lies that the result of these atrocities left us psychologically damaged (Kerry used the word “monster”). But more than that, he betrayed his nation during a time of war, while a sworn officer in the United States Navy and then the United States Navy Reserve.

His actions showed his character to be sorely lacking. The actions of his campaign show that this lack is still there. His cover-up of part of his military records (the fact that he was a sworn officer during his anti-war activities) shows more lack of character.

I hope this sheds some light. Not all experience is from reading. It helps to have “been there, done that” in many, many ways.

For example, as a veteran I understand why there is no inconsistency in his nice sounding fitness reports and the expression by those who wrote them that he is unfit to be CIC. The reason is grade inflation – if an officer isn’t rated the very, very top, it means he is a turkey. Officers in veteran’s groups have read those reports and said that they were written to say that Kerry was a problem and should not be promoted. Again, experience counts.

Having been a Reservist who cannot even prove he was ever present at his last duty station, one where I flew a number of hours and was almost killed in an aircraft fire, I understood immediately how silly were the attacks against Bush’s National Guard duty.

As a person whose best friend died doing what Bush did – flying a century series fighter in the Air Guard (in New Mexico in this case) – I know that George Bush put his life on the line.

As a former military aviator who lost squadron mates in accidents, I understand the hazards of naval aviation and was almost killed several times myself (one of the stories would horrify anyone who has ever been a pilot).

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