“Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.”
Senator George McGovern
35 missions as a B-24 pilot in WWII, Europe.
4 comments:
Not a big fan of McGovern; yet he's right in that the US carried out Vietnam way too long and is now about six years too long in Afghanistan. Read your Kipling. Western powers can't win there.
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
"Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Can you Imagine what TR would have made of today's Congress and Pentagon bureaucracy?!?!?
TR (who did many great things) was, unfortunately, a war-monger that got us into the Spanish American War based on no valid reason.
That eloquent speech also assumes no gross amounts of dumbassery.
Too bad the Usa goverment never learns from history. Lets face it the next useless war will arrive shortly.
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