Mike Sylwester: “They earned their ribbons and medals serving in the war, and so they could throw their ribbons and medals away at an anti-war demonstration if they wanted to do so.”

I remember it too, and it made no sense to me. Later that year I graduated from High School (late, went to Summer School) and promptly joined the Navy hoping to get to the war. I did get there and earned medals of my own (well, two counts!). I had always been pro-war because I knew of the terrible results of a Communist take-over from having read the accounts of those who had escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. I specifically went to oppose this outcome and was bitterly disappointed when Congress threw the whole thing away in ’75.

I subsequently went to college on the GI Bill and drifted Leftward until I woke up to the fact that Leftist dogma was even more closely defended than the doctrine of the Catholic Church in which I had been raised. I also noticed that the defense of Leftist principles was entirely polemical rather than rational. A polemic is an argument that sheds more heat than light, and I chose the light.

I was not impressed by Kerry in 1971, and still less in 2004. If there was ever any honor in him it has vanished.