"They have no decency. Not a sliver...

not a shred."

James Wolcott tears 'em up.

Look at how Max Cleland has been treated, look at how George Soros has been smeared as some sort of Jewish intriguer who oozed his way out of Nazi Germany by Tony Blankley and a drug kingpin by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, look at--oh, we know what the examples are.

Limbaugh wanna-be Ben Ferguson tipped him over the edge into pure shrill with a wisecrack about John Kerry's war injuries, but Wolcott correctly identifies it as a continuous thread in the attitude of the American right wing over a period of decades.

Ben Ferguson can snicker that if John Kerry had incurred real injuries he'd be in a nice wheelchair today and the middleaged white fools sitting in the bookstore don't even raise a peep, which makes you wonder if ten years from now it'll be open season on any American vet from the Iraq campaign who's missing limbs or carrying shrapnel and gets out of political line. There is a myth that the Left spat on returning Vietnam vets in the Seventies. Well, the Right spits on Vietnam vets every day with impunity, and will spit on future vets. Conservatives support the military only in the vague abstract; beneath their patriotic bluster and sentimentality, they basically think soldiers are chumps, risking their lives when they could be staying home, making money, and carving out a neat career, as Ben has done.

The business of how we were treated by who when we got back from Vietnam has always been a sore spot with me. Both before and after I went to Vietnam, there was a steady drumbeat on the left to 'oppose the war, not the warrior.' They knew we were mostly a gaggle of working class kids caught up in a situation beyond our control and in most cases beyond our comprehension.

It was the left that set up the FTA coffehouses, that provided readjustent counseling, that fought to get Agent Orange victims the treatment they needed. Vietnam vets didn't leave their service off of their resumes for so many years because the left was making the hiring decisions in corporate America. The left didn't run the VFW and Legion posts that turned us away, leading to the creation of Vietnam Veterans of America. World War II vets didn't need their own group, nor did Korea vets. We did, and the left wasn't the reason.

If you support the troops, those of yesterday, today, or tomorrow, you've got no damn business voting for the right wing Republican chicken hawks that have made careers out of smearing the service of others.

No damn business at all.