John O'Neill is a Vietnam veteran and, as a recent CNN article tells us,
"a man who served in the same Navy unit as Sen. John Kerry." O'Neill has been spending his time of late going around saying thoughtful things like: "[Kerry] couldn't tie the shoes of some of the people in Coastal Division 11." Keep on reading that same article, and you get to the description of O'Neill as "a Houston lawyer who joined the Navy's Coastal Division 11 two months after the future senator left Vietnam." Quick reread and, yes, two months after Kerry had left Vietnam. As a fellow veteran, O'Neill might be in a position to comment on Kerry's actions as something of a war protester after he was back in the States. But having not actually witness the man do one single thing for one single second in theater -- you know, saving lives, taking lives, during the actual, you know, war -- seems like it might make it difficult to come to the conclusion that "I saw some war heroes ... John Kerry is not a war hero."
(From what I saw of the television coverage of this, I had thought the two served together. Either my bad or Matt Lauer's.)
In a Houston Chronicle article on the first time O'Neill and Kerry were in the news together, some 33 years ago, there's a quote from Nixon special counsel Charles Colson saying "Let's destroy this young demagogue [Kerry] before he becomes another Ralph Nader." I'm not gonna touch the humor built right into that statement (except to say that we take out "young" and replace "before" with "until" and we got a nice little sentence there), but it reminded me that I don't really know the dictionary definition of that word, "demagogue". So I looked it up in Merriam Webster:
(From what I saw of the television coverage of this, I had thought the two served together. Either my bad or Matt Lauer's.)
In a Houston Chronicle article on the first time O'Neill and Kerry were in the news together, some 33 years ago, there's a quote from Nixon special counsel Charles Colson saying "Let's destroy this young demagogue [Kerry] before he becomes another Ralph Nader." I'm not gonna touch the humor built right into that statement (except to say that we take out "young" and replace "before" with "until" and we got a nice little sentence there), but it reminded me that I don't really know the dictionary definition of that word, "demagogue". So I looked it up in Merriam Webster:
1 : a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power
2 : a leader championing the cause of the common people in ancient timesI like it. Might come in handy in the next couple of months.
7:53 AM
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