“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. This is not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House.”
Janeane Garofalo

Almost 100% right, but I would say the tea parties were just about hating Obama and hating losing.

Watching Glenn Beck this afternoon gave me a bright idea about the hate crime legislation being taken up by Congress. There is a request that an amendment be added to the legislation, which the GLBT considers its sole right, to include members of the Military because they are often ill-treated and subjected to crimes of hate. They should be included! So should many of us!

Consider your life for areas open to public ridicule. My particular cross to bear is obesity whose biggest curse is the fact that it can’t be hidden. I just wrote my senators and congressman requesting that he/she introduce or support an amendment to the hate crime legislation to include crimes committed against the obese. My thought is that if congress would be inundated with emails, letters and phone calls seriously requesting that our various differences, oddities and foibles be protected in the hate crimes law, the law may become less attractive and made nonsensical. There are specific things protected by the Constitution and by certain amendments to it. Attempts to single out entities for special protection by doing an end run around the Constitution risks covering everything to the level of absurdity. Well, let’s be absurd and demand to include everything from the start. Perhaps it will frustrate sponsors of this unconstitutional legislation as truly legitimate requests to be included begin to flow in.

Here is my request to my representatives:

I am requesting that you sponsor or support an amendment to any hate crime legislation that includes Obesity as a category of protection. Obesity is a condition which cannot be hidden from public scrutiny and which crosses all lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious or political belief, in fact, any human category you choose. The obese are targeted for prejudice and discrimination in the workplace and the town square, as well as physical, verbal and emotional assaults across the United States. Therefore crimes against the obese which are perpetrated because of the person’s obesity deserve to be elevated to the level of hate crime.

What do you think?

It was the Vets who return and largely LEAD the protest.

I want proof of the spitting — and until that proof comes — then I’ll consider the source as false “recovered memory”.

I lived that era — I KNOW what happened — you baby faced liars were NOT there.

Bob Greene’s 1989 book Homecoming has 63 personal accounts of veterans being spit on upon their return from war. Perhaps you should post a passage or letter from his book as well? Or maybe dig a little deeper yourself.

Remember by saying it never happened, you’re insulting the vets that also served, and came home to be disgraced.

My, an overly sensitive person when it comes to herself, but she surely doesn’t treat others with a fraction of that passion.

The policies of Bush and the republican congress he had for most of his tenure were wrong for this country. His budgets bled money. His decision to go into Iraq and he way he let Rumsfeld conduct it were also wrong. It took a mid-term loss to get him to change course (Gates/Petraus)

The pro-torture @$$holes who have descended on this blog pointing the finger at those of us who do not support it, and who are blaming us for destroying America, are also wrong. You hold that mantle.

Who Spit On Vietnam Vets? Not Anti-War Protesters!

More than a year has passed since the invasion of Iraq. Virtually everything major the Bush Administration told us has turned out to be a lie. The only ones who proved truly accurate were those opposed to war. And yet, though the American people have turned solidly against the war, and Michael Moore has filled the theatres, his claims are scrutinized far more skeptically than anything coming from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice & company. There are many reasons for this, including the widespread perception that anti-war activists are unpatriotic—even traitorous—so nothing they say should be trusted.
This perception is fed by lies.

A prime example is the notion that anti-war protesters spat on returning Vietnam War veterans. This image is deeply ingrained in our culture, casting doubt on every word uttered by any opponent of any war. It is, however, a lie, as Jerry Lembcke convincingly demonstrates in his 1998 book, The Spitting Image—Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. (Text of a speech based on the book is available here.)

Lembcke’s book came out of research stimulated by the first Gulf War. There was a lot of talk then about how anti-war protesters didn’t want to come off as being against the troops. They didn’t want to be like those terrible Vietnam-era protesters, the ones who spit on returning troops.

Lembcke remembered things differently. He remembered serving in Vietnam as a chaplain’s assistant. He remembered returning—like thousands more who also served—to join the protesters who welcomed him with open arms. So he began digging for the truth.

The most damning evidence Lembcke found against this lie was reminiscent of the “curious incident” of the dog that didn’t bark in the middle of the night in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.” Like the missing dog bark, there were no accounts of protesters spitting on veterans when the events supposedly happened—when the nation’s emotions were at a fever pitch, and any such story would have immediately caught on like wildfire. The stories only began to show up later, invariably in urban legend third-person, often in settings and circumstances where they could not have occurred—such as returning soldiers carrying arms, landing in airports where no troops returned. The stories only appeared after the mass media—subtly following Nixon’s lead—had replaced the image of the bad (anti-war) vet with the mad (crazed killer) vet.

Lembcke’s investigation is both fascinating and revelatory. He draws parallels not only to more mundane urban legends, but also to more sinister post-WWI German stories, part of the stab-in-the-back mythology on which the Nazi Party fed, and eventually gained state power. His findings are too rich to summarize here. Rather, I want to develop a point that applies to lies more generally.

It was mainstream culture and society which figuratively spat upon returning veterans—just as the government did, short-changing them on benefits, stonewalling them about post-traumatic stress disorder and the effects of Agent Orange, and doing everything possible to shut them up when they spoke out against the war. The rejection never let up. When homelessness exploded as a national problem under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, at least a third of them would be Vietnam Veterans—a far cry from the post-WWII era when the GI Bill sent veterans to college, and helped them buy houses in suburbia.

The anti-war movement had every reason to embrace returning veterans—as indeed it did, routinely placing a contingent of anti-war veterans at the head of countless anti-war marches across the land. The movement also helped establish anti-war coffeehouses outside military bases, encouraged the publishing of anti-war GI newspapers, and helped resisters avoid combat—sometimes legally, sometimes not. But the government—and its supportive “silent majority” public—wanted no part of real Vietnam vets, who spoiled the noble propaganda war with their first-hand stories of chaos, confusion, corruption, and pointless slaughter.
The reality of this rejection was clearly too painful for many veterans to bear. Over time, the figurative spit-in-the-face from the government and their own hometown communities was doubly transformed—into a literal spit-in-the-face from the one group it was safe to blame, now that the war was over, and the movement was gone—the anti-war protesters.

more at link

http://structureoflies.blogspot.com/2004/08/who-spit-on-vietnam-vets-not-anti-war.html