Six years ago today, I lost my Dad. I miss him terribly. This is a repeat post, written in the wake of one of lt. Kerry’s “botched jokes” last year.

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Dad passed away one month before 9/11. As much as I’ve missed him since, a part of me is glad that he didn’t witness that awful day. I think I know what he would have done. After a few reflective days, he would have gone down to the sporting goods store and begun stocking up on ammunition and survival supplies. Just like I did.

Mom gave me his old leather jacket, and his shotgun, earthly treasures with a value steeped in sentiment and respect.

I’m missing him now as I write, in a way that I haven’t felt for some time.

He joined the US Navy at age 16, toward the end of WW II. I asked him once how long he served. He winked and said, “Long enough. Duration plus six months.” He served, all the while homesick for his family in Edwards, Mississippi, and missing his mother’s cooking. It’s really not fair to call Edwards a town. There are only a few dozen residents in that sleepy little hamlet, a few miles from Vicksburg. He was the youngest son in a family of three girls and five boys. All of his brothers served, all in the Navy.

In the last few months of his life, I saw something in his eyes that I had never seen before. I saw for a moment, a look of fear in his eyes. And, it was only for just a moment. He called on me to help him do something that I had seen him do hundreds of times. Perhaps what I saw was born more out of his frustration than fear. Frustration from the physical limitations put on his body by advancing years. But I recall these things, and I think of my uncles who served in two wars, my cousins who served in Vietnam, and I know in my heart that I am not ready to let go and move on from the simmering anger that I feel regarding John Kerry’s most recent insult to the men and women who serve.

If you’re not old enough to remember the Winter Soldier hearings, then you’ve probably seen the videos… the handsome young man, the articulate patrician soldier, speaking of the grisly atrocities committed by our own. Those speeches launched his political career, supported by the often reported myth that he spoke to Congress under oath, subject to the penalties of perjury.

He was not under oath. Nor were any of the Winter Soldiers who gave “testimony.”

He was free to promote the slanderous lies of Winter Soldier and the entire V.V.A.W. with the full knowledge and support of the media. And, that is exactly what he did. Just as Sy Hersch is doing today: undermining, maligning, and slandering our men and women who serve, for the sole purpose of doing political damage to George Bush. Kerry disgusts me. Hersch disgusts me.

I’m mad as Hell, and I’m not about to let go and move on.

UPDATE: bonz has passed along this timely link from WSJ

Propaganda Redux—>
Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America’s enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.

My father spent most of his life working for General Motors in Romania and had a picture of President Truman in our house in Bucharest. While “America” was a vague place somewhere thousands of miles away, he was her tangible symbol. For us, it was he who had helped save civilization from the Nazi barbarians, and it was he who helped restore our freedom after the war–if only for a brief while. We learned that America loved Truman, and we loved America. It was as simple as that.

Later, when I headed Romania’s intelligence station in West Germany, everyone there admired America too. People would often tell me that the “Amis” meant the difference between night and day in their lives. By “night” they meant East Germany, where their former compatriots were scraping along under economic privation and Stasi brutality. That was then.

But in September 2002, a German cabinet minister, Herta Dauebler-Gmelin, had the nerve to compare Mr. Bush to Hitler. In one post-Iraq-war poll 40% of Canada’s teenagers called the U.S. “evil,” and even before the fall of Saddam 57% of Greeks answered “neither” when asked which country was more democratic, the U.S. or Iraq.

UPDATE 2: Continuing along the theme of democrat lies, distortions, propagandizing, and aiding/abetting the enemies of the Republic, The Weekly Standard is reporting that “ Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp–author of the much-disputed “Shock Troops” article in the New Republic’s July 23 issue as well as two previous “Baghdad Diarist” columns–signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods–fabrications containing only “a smidgen of truth,” in the words of our source.”

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