Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

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Once Upon a Time in America
There were Honorable, Republican Leaders -- A Salute to General and President Dwight David Eisenhower
by Lonna Gooden VanHorn
November 14, 2005

http://www.opednews.com

Once Upon a Time in America We had Good, Honorable, Republican Leaders…
By Lonna Gooden VanHorn, November 14, 2005

In “Where Have the Honorable Republicans Been?” Andrew Bard Schmookler mourns the fact that Republicans who many Democrats have regarded as worthy of respect have not spoken out about this administration that is ruining their party, as well as destroying America. He listed John McCain, Howard Baker, and Warren Rudman among those "honorable Republicans."

In “We’re Not in Lake Woebegone Any More,” Garrison Keillor wrote:

“Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican.”

A Vietnam veteran friend of mine wrote that if he saw John McCain hug G.W. Bush one more time, he was going to puke. McCain obviously both liked and respected John Kerry, and to his credit, he defended him against scurrilous attacks and asked that the president specifically denounce attacks by the Swift Boat Veterans. But, being the unprincipled “do whatever it takes to win” man that he is, Bush knew the ads were effective, and he did not specifically denounce them. As for McCain, have his own presidential ambitions superceded his conscience? Is that why he supported Bush in 2004? In return for promises of support in 2008?

Like Schmookler, I do not hate all Republicans. To the list of decent Republican leaders he named, I would add Chuck Hagel, Ron Paul, and Jim Leach, among others. And like Keillor, in my research over the past few years Dwight D. Eisenhower has become one of my heroes, for a number of reasons. Below I have condensed an article in which I quoted what he and other war heroes had said and compared it to what Bush/co said.

I have many of these quotations in large print on my “book on wheels.”

These quotes and the fact that under Ike the richest among us were taxed at 90% and corporations at 52% and against Republican pressure he refused to support lowering those rates are why I consider Ike a hero.

In his farewell address Ike warned that the interests of the military-industrial complex would come to determine policy. The rage a decent man like him – a man who cared about his soldiers -- would feel against a president and vice-president who stood to gain politically and/or financially from a war they fear-mongered and misled the country into largely to benefit their former companies and corporate campaign contributors would know no bounds!! I believe Ike would have considered Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld among the “domestic enemies” he had sworn as a soldier to protect this country against!”

Read his words and weep!!

General and President Eisenhower:

“A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility. I don’t believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked to me about such a thing.”

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

“There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone.”

“Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions whose chief concern is the long future of themselves and their children will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it.”
and

“If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.”

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms in not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron…

What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.
The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

General Douglas McArthur:

“I have known war as few men now living know it. It’s very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.”

“The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear: Keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”

“We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.”

General Omar Bradley:

“The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”

“War can be prevented as just as surely as it can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent it must share the guilt for the dead.”

Marine Commandant General David Shoup:

I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. One that they design and want, one that they fight and work for. And if, unfortunately, their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refused to share with the "have nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.
Shoup resigned his commission in 1963 because he did not believe the Vietnam War was worth one American life.

Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler one of only two, two time Congressional Medal of Honor Winners:

“War is just a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses… of course it isn’t put that crudely in wartime… It is dressed into speeches about patriotism and love of country and putting one’s shoulder to the wheel, but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket and are safely pocketed.”

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-NationalisticCapitalism…

I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Others:

“If we go in (to Iraq) unilaterally, or without the full weight of international organizations behind us, if we go in with a very sparse number of allies, if we go in without an effective information operation… we’re liable to supercharge recruiting for al-Qaida.” <> General Wesley Clark

“It’s pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others who have never fired a shot, and are hot to go to war, see it another…We are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started…”
General Anthony Zinni, former Head of Central Command for U.S. Forces in the Middle East.

Under Eisenhower the richest among us were taxed at more than 90% and corporations at 52%, and against Republican pressure, Ike refused to support lowering those rates. There were also, not then, the offshore tax havens for corporate cheats, like Halliburton, that there are now. Eisenhwoer would never have advocated cutting taxes during war time!! I think he would have considered that treason

Tax cuts for the rich do not fuel our economy, war spending fuels our economy.

I have on the door of my “book on wheels”

Question: Do you believe Congress voted for tax cuts for the rich because

(1) they believe taking in less revenue will help pay the country’s bills,
or
(2) because they like the president are rich, and they, like the president couldn’t wait to get their hands on an extra $90,000 a year or so, and to heck with the needs of the country??

Only the soldiers and their families are asked to make any kind of a sacrifice, while many at the top are enriching themselves from war profits. The tax cuts for the rich that have been one of this administrations top priorities from the beginning, guarantee they will pay even less taxes on their “blood money.” Soldiers now, like soldiers in the past are beginning to see this and resent it.

Stewart Nusbaumer, who lost a leg in Vietnam wrote in “The Cost of War at Walter Reed”

“To this day, some 38 years later, when I hear someone on the radio discuss the World Series in 1967, or some similar remark about 1967, I cringe. That was the year I was fighting in Vietnam. That was the year thousands of young Americans were dying and losing limbs and their minds for, supposedly, their country. But our country was excited about the World Series, and....

“If a war is important enough for soldiers to be maimed and to die for, it is important enough for all Americans to sacrifice something. Something!”

But those in this administration will sacrifice NOTHING, and they do not ask the people, except the soldiers and their families, to sacrifice anything!! But the corporate greed and enabling they are fostering guarantees the common people, including the veterans who fought wars that made many of the too rich, (like Bush, Sr. from the Carlyle Group, richer), will have a lower standard of living. We have already seen this happening to airline employees, and now to GM employees. It is a given that other automobile manufacturers will follow GM’s lead.

Right now the soldiers are paying, but the “heroes walls” the cutesy little news anchors gushed over during the 2003 invasion are gone. The war is old news. When the broadcast media does have to cover what is happening in Iraq, it is almost as if they begrudge the airtime. One soldier wrote that that was what hurt the worst. Seeing ducks caught in a storm drain being covered as news, while news of American casualties in Iraq was relegated to the newswrap that snakes across the bottom of the television screen.

Another soldier on his second tour in Iraq wrote:

“There are battles which need to be fought and battles which serve no good purpose. Afghanistan and Bin Laden lay forgotten as if they were discarded toys left by a spoiled child. Iraq is the new frontier of poor foreign policy and poor planning. Even the soldiers can see it. Why do you think nobody is re-enlisting? They don’t want to fight a losing battle, and to die for an empty promise… that somehow staying in Iraq makes America safer. We have created a martyr factory here, and we are beginning to wade through the next Vietnam. How wrong do you want to be before you send the troops home” 2000 dead…How about 10,000?”

BUT… they are not your kids. They are not G. W. Bush’s kids.

Ike, that good man, would consider them his kids…


Bio: Lonna Gooden VanHorn was born and raised on a small farm in Minnesota. She is the mother of 6, a grandmother, and the wife of a Vietnam veteran. Formely a person who did not "get involved" in controversy, she has decided to become a trouble maker in her old age. Lonna has articles on many websites. Archives of some of her articles may be accessed here: http://www.opednews.com/archivesgoodenvanhornlonna.htm and here http://oldamericancentury.org/vanhorn_bio.htm Pictures of her “book on wheels” may be accessed here: http://oldamericancentury.org/lonna_002.htm Click on the thumbnails, and the pictures will enlarge so must of what is on the signs can be read. If you would like transcripts of the entire contents of her information truck, e-mail [e-mail] and she will send you her truck file as an attachment.