Sunday, July 15, 2007
A: Our Dear Embattled Leader
Q: What do you call a Republican who loses the support of military families?
Not only has he lost the support of the American people, according to the latest NYT/CBS poll 74% think the war is going badly, but a poll taken in May shows 53% of military families feel the same way.
Not only has he lost the support of the American people, according to the latest NYT/CBS poll 74% think the war is going badly, but a poll taken in May shows 53% of military families feel the same way.
Penny Preszler, 46, a furniture refurbisher in Phoenix, said she had stopped wearing red on Fridays as she had done for the past year to honor the war effort. “It was when my son started saying he wished he could be injured so he could come home,” Ms. Preszler said.And consider this conversation between a Marine getting ready to deploy to Iraq and her Marine husband who is currently in Iraq.
“There was no pride left in his voice, just this robotic sense of despair,” she said, describing a telephone conversation with her son, Skyler, 24, an infantryman on his second tour of duty in Iraq. “Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice,” she recounted his saying.
The same week, she said, her son told her he thought he had seen the worst when he had to pick up the body parts of his dead buddy, but then he saw an Iraqi boy picking up what was left of his dead father.
“He started telling me that he doesn’t want me to go and do the things he has been doing,” said Corporal Ponce De Leon, 22, speaking by telephone as she boxed up her belongings in their apartment near Camp Lejeune, N.C.These are the people that Republicans in Congress should be listening to, the people who have a very large individual stake in what happens in Iraq and in Congress. The people who can no longer be reliably counted on to vote Republican. These are the people that Karl Rove can't replace.
“He said that ‘we have all decided that it’s time for us to go home.’ I said, ‘You mean go home and rest?’ And he said, ‘I mean go home and not go back.’
“This is from someone who has been training for the past nine years to go to combat and who has spent his whole life wanting to be a marine,” she continued. “That’s when I realized I couldn’t support the war anymore, even though I will follow my orders.”
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