Convention Blues

Sydney H. Schanberg writes an excellent article for the Village Voice on the tone of the Republican Convention. He makes one particularly good point about the $87 Billion that I've thought but haven't expressed very well.

Senator Miller, a conservative Democrat from Georgia who recently threw his support to President George Bush, again and again smeared Democratic candidate John Kerry and his party's leadership as unpatriotic and therefore unfit?all the while insisting that he wasn't questioning anyone's patriotism, just "their judgment." His tone was brutal and sneering.

"For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak, and more wobbly than any other national figure. . . . As a senator, he voted to weaken our military. And nothing shows that more sadly and more clearly than his vote this year to deny protective armor for our troops in harm's way, far away."

I realize politicians of all parties twist history every which way to their benefit, but wasn't it the Bush administration that sent the troops into Iraq without enough body armor or armor for the sides of their battle vehicles? Casualties rose as a result. Soldiers' parents went on the open market back home to buy state-of-the-art body vests with ceramic-plate reinforcement, and then shipped them to their sons and daughters in Iraq. Not until early this year did the Pentagon begin to fill the gap. No part of this failure had anything to do with a vote by Senator Kerry.

This is a question that isn't asked very often and certainly isn't answered. Why did our troops go to Iraq without protective armor in the first place?

Of course, we know the answer; the Bush administration appears to have believed the cakewalk scenario where our soldiers wouldn't face too much danger. And they wanted to minimize the cost of the war for various reasons. So they did it on the cheap, and our soldiers and our soldiers families have paid the price.

For all of this, the article isn't manifestly critical of the President; indeed, it's a call for the President to reject the ideological blinders and negative campaign and reread and absorb the speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt that he claims to admire.

In that spirit here is a selection from a speech President Roosevelt made on February 23, 1942, in remembrance of Washington's Birthday.

Here are three high purposes for every American:

First. We shall not stop work for a single day. If any dispute arises we shall keep on working while the dispute is solved by mediation, conciliation or arbitration-until the war is won.

Second. We shall not demand special gains or special privileges or advantages for any one group or occupation.

Third. We shall give up conveniences and modify the routine of our lives if our country asks us to do so. We will do it cheerfully, remembering that the common enemy seeks to destroy every home and every freedom in every part of our land.

This generation of Americans has come to realize, with a present and personal realization, that there is something larger and more important than the life of any individual or of any individual group-something for which a man will sacrifice, and gladly sacrifice, not only his pleasures, not only his goods, not only his associations with those he loves, but his life itself. In time of crisis when the future is in the balance, we come to understand, with full recognition and devotion, what this Nation is, and what we owe to it.