Word: vietnamize
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...tight is that the Democrats picked a candidate singularly weak on Iraq. Kerry reflected precisely their own ambivalence. He could never articulate a consistent and coherent alternative policy. The entire Democratic Convention was an exercise in avoiding the issue. Kerry spent four days talking not about Iraq but about Vietnam. This glaring non sequitur gave Kerry the distinction of having a convention with no bounce. Even worse, by gratuitously bringing up Vietnam, a still bleeding psychic wound, Kerry opened himself to weeks of politically damaging attack from embittered fellow swift-boat veterans...
...should require government service of all our youth? Since the end of the draft in 1973, the word duty has been almost totally erased from the American lexicon. That is a real issue. Bringing back the draft might mean we would also face the inequities rampant during the Vietnam conflict, such as deferments of the privileged and politically connected. That type of draft system is a bad idea. We need a whole new mandatory national-service program...
...about how it would survive Bush's August blitz without money of its own to fight back, the strategists had failed to see the sniper that was waiting in the weeds. Just a week after a Democratic Convention that had been a four-day-long infomercial about Kerry's Vietnam record, a group styling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was suddenly dominating the cable airwaves with accusations that Kerry had faked his injuries and lied about his heroism in Vietnam to collect a chestful of medals that he didn't deserve. Kerry's initial strategy was to do ... nothing...
...time he reached his Boston town house at 10 that night, Kerry was livid. He gathered Cahill, communications director Stephanie Cutter, press secretary David Wade and traveling chief of staff David Morehouse in the messy fourth-floor office where he keeps his most precious Vietnam mementos, including a picture of his friend Dick Pershing, from whom he had been inseparable in prep school and college and who had been killed in a rice paddy by a Vietcong grenade. "Every time they attack what I did on those rivers, they attack people who are not alive to defend themselves," Kerry thundered...
...campaign quickly changed gears. Kerry and his aides set to work furiously, turning what was supposed to be a speech the next day on homeland security into a good old-fashioned counterpunch. "Thirty years ago, official Navy reports ... documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is, and I still carry the shrapnel in my leg," he would declare. "I'm not going to let anyone question my commitment to defending America--then, now or ever." After drafting the speech...