Sorry to be reporting last week's infotainment, but 1.) shout-outs to JK never get old and 2.) it took a while for MSNBC to post the transcript I wanted to look at. Because transcripts, as I know only too well, take a little time.
Last week on Countdwown with Keith Olbermann, Jon Soltz of VoteVets.Org weighed in on what senators are really supporting the troops. Video is here, and I'm pasting in the relevant bit of transcript from last Thursday's show:
Well, I think what‘s interesting is that soldiers are speaking out. When Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was in Kuwait and the specialist spoke up, that‘s why we had up-armored Humvees in Iraq. And last year Zogby did a poll in Iraq of combat troops that were there, 70 percent thought we needed to get out within a year.
And now you have Joe Lieberman, who spent his Vietnam War years in law school, and claims that he‘s some kind of arbiter of patriotism, going to Iraq wearing his fake ugly sunglasses. And it‘s hard for me to know that he actually gets to see the troops, because those soldiers, they wanted to talk to Joe Lieberman, and they wanted to tell him the truth. They wanted to tell him what they saw, which was that they‘re driving around, they‘re getting shot, and they want to know when they‘re going home.
And for me, you know, when I came home, I was lucky to get to meet, you know, someone like Senator John Kerry, who took the time out to talk to me. And he really let me know that my opinion mattered to him. Obviously he had questioned the war in Vietnam when he came home.
But for these soldiers to have to go and talk to a guy like Senator Lieberman, who‘s not going to listen to their concerns, because he‘s—I don‘t quite know why he thinks what he thinks, but it‘s not based on fact and it‘s not based on reality, but it‘s bad for their morale. And it‘s hard for them to do that, like you said, because they‘re inside the military. And, you know, it‘s a culture of discipline. And it‘s obviously very difficult.
But I really wish they would have been able to talk to a senator that would have cared what they thought.
The same video, and lots of other important stuff, can be found at the VoteVets.Org website. Many thanks and a big Kerrycrat salute to Jon Soltz, for telling the truth and taking names when doing so could not matter more.
