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  From: Ronnie

  Sent: Wednesday, July 24,2002 10:28 PM

  To: Colmes

  Subject: you

  I just want you to know that I honestly hate you! I would never really do this, but, when you talk I fantasize about shooting you. I pretend I have a pistol in my hand and I shoot you all over. I pretend to shoot you in the head and in your torso. I despise you because of the way you think as evidenced by your line of questioning. If you died I would celebrate!

  What Made Me Liberal?

  I wonder if I'd grown up in a different time or in a different family whether I would have many of the views I have today. I had an iconoclastic mother who was critical of all politicians, regardless of party or ideology, and a father who was completely apolitical. My sister worked for many years as an assistant district attorney on Long Island, where we grew up. Although she's solidly Republican, she's not quite as far right as her husband, who each year serves up a healthy side of political debate with the Thanksgiving turkey. Sean Hannity likes to joke that all of the members of his family are conservative because there are no defective genes in his family. Although his family's influence shaped his views considerably, my views had more to do with the events of the day as I became more interested in the world around me. Maybe Hannity versus Colmes is nurture versus nature.

  The names and faces change as years go by, but the basic issues don't. Americans are debating taxes, ways of dealing with poverty and medical care, family values, war and peace, just as we always have been. I would hope that regardless of the era in which God placed me, I would still stand for the values I believe in today. And I like to think I'm open to new views, and to reexamining my old ones on a regular basis. I don't take my ideologies for granted. And sometimes, to paraphrase Mark Twain, I question whether I want to be part of a political party that would have me as a member. As you read on, perhaps you'll reexamine some of your views, too, even if you already agree with what's being said.

  I can't recall when I first thought of myself as a "liberal." Coming of age during the Vietnam era, I became interested in government and politics when I, and many other Americans, discovered our elected officials were lying to us. On August 6, 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin, the destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy were on patrol. The captain of the Maddox determined that his ship was under attack, and both ships began firing, with airpower added for support. The trouble is, there was no attack, just a misreading of instruments by a captain whose ship actually had been attacked two days earlier, and who soon acknowledged that nothing had probably happened on August 6, after all. James Stockdale, who many years later ran for vice president as Ross Perot's running mate, was the pilot of a Crusader jet that did a reconnaissance flight over the Gulf of Tonkin that evening. When asked if there was an attack by the North Vietnamese, Stockdale said, "Not a one. No boats, no wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat impacts, no torpedo wakes—nothing but black sea and American firepower."

  The Johnson administration, however, used this nonevent to escalate the war. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House 416 to 0 and the Senate 88 to 2, giving the president authority to "take all necessary measures to repel armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." This led to a much larger commitment of troops and resources and an ultimate death toll of 58,212 American lives. The escalation and the resulting deaths were all based on a lie.

  I became further disillusioned upon learning about the My Lai massacre, which took place on March 16, 1968. American soldiers systematically killed hundreds of innocent Vietnamese, including infants and the elderly. Americans later found out that leaders of the U.S. military lied to us about troop strength, casualties, how well the war was going, and how chemicals used affected our fighting forces (lies that were repeated during successive wars).

  We will forever debate this unjust and immoral war, and in spite of our political differences forever be grateful to those who sacrificed life and limb. Unfortunately, it was the poorest of the poor and those with the fewest connections who were shipped off to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. Those with the most connections either avoided the draft entirely or were able to secure cushy spots stateside. Say, for example, you were from a political family, and you knew people who knew people. And let's say those people, whom you knew, helped you get into the . . . oh, I don't know, let's just say, "National Guard." That way, if you ever ran for office, you could always say you served, even if you were AWOL for a year and they couldn't find you when it was medical exam time. Besides, when you're young and irresponsible, you're young and irresponsible, right?

  Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose

  I stayed up nights worrying about being drafted, knowing I couldn't support the war. I attended a meeting of conscientious objectors to see if that was a path I could take. Shortly thereafter, my number came up in the lottery that determined who would be sent to war, and it was high enough to keep me out of the service. Had that not been the case, I can't say I wouldn't have tried for CO. status. Sometimes, we like to think we would have acted courageously had circumstances been different. Had I been drafted and asked to serve in Vietnam, would I have gone? And would that have been the courageous tiling to do? Conventional wisdom might say yes, risking your life for your country when it asks you to, even if you don't agree with what your country is trying to do, is heroic. During this time, some American boys made a very different and difficult decision and chose to flee to Canada. Odd as it sounds, I believe this might also be considered a heroic choice. In a way, it seems that leaving your homeland, going to a strange place with little money, no friends, and the condemnation of the majority of your fellow citizens because you strongly believe in a principle—that, to me, is heroic, too. This may anger conservatives who can't imagine this as a heroic—even patriotic—choice, but I can't deny that my romantic view of "what might have been" has me leaning this way. I have tremendous admiration for those who have defended and continue to defend this country, and for all in uniform vho serve at the pleasure of our commander in chief. But I didn't believe that the war in Vietnam had anything to do with defending our country, just as I didn't believe that the war in Iraq had anything to do with defending our country. I trace my political roots to those days when we were warned that if we didn't take over Vietnam, the Commies would be on the shores of San Francisco when Khrushchev predicted that they would bury you, us, under Communism.

  I suppose my Vietnam-era views made me, in the parlance of the day, "antiestablishment." I never consciously set out to be a liberal, but Vietnam opened my eyes to injustice. The men we sent to fight what I believed to be a political war were lied to. It took decades for our government to acknowledge the disfiguring and, in some cases, fatal effects of Agent Orange, just as we're now discovering that "Gulf War Syndrome" has afflicted almost two hundred thousand of America's finest. Gradually, I began to notice similar injustices and inequities elsewhere in our social structure. As I learned about history, I felt as though I was in sync with the great tradition of liberalism.

  When your first impression of the powers that be is one of lying by both omission and commission, of promoting a caste system for the convenience of a politically motivated war, it really shapes how you view the world, and those who run it. And as I see history bizarrely replicating itself, it only reaffirms my pride in being a liberal. True, Bill Clinton lied. It was a white lie, something most of us do. And, yes, to repeat the mantra of the right, "He lied under oath." But rarely does a lie under oath about sex wind up being prosecuted. I'm not excusing this behavior, but don't tell me you've never told a white lie. In Clinton's case, the lie was an attempt to protect his dignity and to save his family from embarrassment. He lied about a personal relationship, not about troop movements and death tolls. And for that they wanted to run him out of town because they couldn't get him on anything else. Yet, we still have elected officials in the highest places telling us lies to promote political wars, hiding information
that taxpayers should know, and advocating a society in which rich and poor are treated much differently by both the private sector and government policy. As the nineteenth-century French author Alphonse Karr said, "The more things change, the more things remain the same."

  And Now, From the People Who Brought You Vietnam ...

  Patriotism seems too often tied up with war, as though supporting a war proves love of country. During Vietnam we saw how those who supported the war were defined as patriots and those who didn't were called anti-American. Now, it's happening again. Standing up for what you believe when you know you're not in the majority and when you know you will face likely ridicule for your views may be the most patriotic position. It's easy to ride with the herd, but it takes more fortitude to buck the tide. Unlike during Vietnam, though, today's government is marketing-sawy. White House chief of staff Andrew Card explained the timing of pushing for war with Iraq by saying, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

  The Bush 43 administration has been effective in engineering a PR campaign to push its idea of patriotism. Literally. The Pentagon pays the Rendon Group, a worldwide PR firm, $100,000 a month to make us look good abroad. On March 12, 2002, the Village Voice reported, "During the Gulf War, Rendon furnished Kuwaiti citizens with American flags, and also boosted the CIA5s effort to oust Saddam Hussein from power, producing videos, radio skits mocking Hussein, and a traveling photo exhibit.. . . Rendon also worked closely with the Iraqi National Congress—they even crafted the anti-Hussein group's name." The Pentagon hired Rendon without competitive bidding, which is how government contracts are usually awarded. Conservatives get bent out of shape about what they believe is misuse of taxpayer dollars going to help the poor. Here we have taxpayer dollars being used to sell war the way advertising dollars are spent on Madison Avenue. But why stop there? Why not use these time-tested techniques to sell whatever policy the government is trying to promote?

  "The people of the Iraqi National Congress:

  They're mmm . . . mmm good!"

  "There's ALWAYS room for missiles!"

  "You're in the Farsi generation."

  "A defense contract is a terrible thing to waste."

  "The death penalty: We take good things from life."

  "American bombs, good to the last drop."

  And what makes us think that terrorists won't take a licking but, in the long term, keep on ticking?

  Before her March 2001 appointment as spokesperson for the Department of Defense, Victoria Clarke, the former assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, was the head of the Washington office of PR giant Hill and Knowlton. Charlotte Beers, formerly of the advertising agencies J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy and Mather, was named undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Maybe the woman who once sold us Uncle Ben's will be able to promote products like "the extra long-range missile." Did we need a PR guru to tell us how bad Saddam was, that he "kills Kurds dead"?

  The Real Threat to Our Military

  As for the military, I don't know that what I'm about to say here is a liberal position or a conservative position, but it is an American position. We ask men and women to put their lives on the line for our country; we send them into harm's way and they do so without blinking because they are America's finest. Having offered to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, it is America's greatest shame that we don't take care of our veterans the way we should, and that we lie to them in the process.

  By March 1996, eighty thousand veterans registered with the VA (Department of Veterans Affairs) as sufferers of Gulf War Syndrome. But in June 1997, the General Accounting Office issued a report that said, among other things, it was "unlikely that the health effects reported by many Gulf War veterans were the result of (1) biological warfare agents, (2) chemical warfare agents, (3) depleted uranium, (4) infectious diseases endemic to the region, (5) oil-well fire smoke, (6) pesticides, (7) petroleum products, (8) pyridostigmine bromide, or (9) vaccines."

  The report did go on to advocate monitoring of Gulf veterans and research of these conditions. But this was said after they came to the preceding "conclusions." This is confusing at best, and certainly not comforting to those who were willing to and did serve our country, often making the ultimate sacrifice.

  Paul Rodriguez of Insight magazine has done extensive investigative work on whether the Department of Defense (DOD) has been straight with veterans who became ill serving in the Persian Gulf War. Rodriguez reported, "After a year of stonewalling by the DOD, a new study at the prestigious Tulane University Medical School confirms that victims of a mysterious sickness may have been poisoned." It was long suspected that our troops had been exposed to something that caused autoimmune dysfunction; that antibodies injected to protect our troops from illness may, in fact, have been what made them ill. Rodriguez's investigative work was done without much cooperation from the government that sent these troops off to war. He says, "Veterans' fears are not being assuaged by DOD's refusal to release records involving its experiments with squalene (an antibody) nor is there comfort in its refusal to release details of what its various vaccines during the gulf war contained. The FDA, reportedly at the request of DOD, has declined to provide any information whatsoever related to those vaccines—even to the GAO [General Accounting Office]."

  We already know that the government lied to us about how the Vietnam War was conducted. But it also lied to the soldiers who fought in Vietnam and got sick or died. For years, veterans complained about the ill effects of Agent Orange, the defoliant that was sprayed over a large part of South Vietnam so our troops could see the Viet Cong troops. Health concerns surfaced in 1970, and a 1984 class action suit resulted in chemical companies settling out of court for $180 million, while still denying any link between Agent Orange and cancer. It wasn't until 1990 that a formal link was made between Agent Orange and cancer. In March 2000, the air force found a "significant and potentially meaningful" connection between diabetes and bloodstream levels of dioxin, the harmful chemical contained in the herbicide. The VA concurred by August 2001 and announced it would begin to compensate veterans who experienced adult-onset diabetes, thanks largely to the efforts of Congressmen Chris Shays of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Also in 2001, United States and Vietnam officials agreed, for the first time, to jointly study the effects of this poison. Today, more than ten thousand veterans receive Agent Orange-related disability pay, and the Supreme Court is considering allowing veterans whose illnesses surfaced after the 1984 settlement to take action against the chemical companies.

  As recently as January 2003, almost thirty years to the day since the end of the Vietnam War, the VA agreed to pay benefits to veterans with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL. Not only did government officials finally agree there was a link between Agent Orange and this disease, but they also estimated that they'd discover five hundred new cases a year. And who knows how many other valiant warriors became ill and died without proper acknowledgment and benefits from the very government whose actions resulted in their conditions.

  Sadly, the story of Agent Orange parallels an often-recurring relationship between our government and the men and women of the military who do its bidding. A staff report prepared for the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and released on December 8, 1994, had some chilling findings. Among them: "For at least 50 years, [the Department of Defense] has intentionally exposed military personnel to potentially dangerous substances, often in secret; DOD has repeatedly failed to comply with required ethical standards when using human subjects in military research during war or threat of war."

  Shockingly, this Senate report reveals that the pattern of deception is more recent than many would have us believe and dates back decades:

  As recently as 1993, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences reported that an atmosphere of secrecy still existed regarding World War II testing of mustard gas and lewisite. . . . During the years immediately f
ollowing World War II, military personnel were intentionally exposed to radiation during the testing of atomic bombs and during radioactive release. . . . Similarly, military personnel were intentionally given hallucinogenic drugs to determine the effects of those drugs on humans. The service members were not told that they would be given experimental drugs, they had no choice of whether or not to take them, and even after the unusual effects of the drugs were obvious to researchers, the unwitting human subjects were given no information about the known effects of the drugs.