March 04, 2008

Bush apologizes to Keeble

Sioux Indian receives Medal of Honor for heroism in Korea"On behalf of our grateful nation, I deeply regret that this tribute comes decades too late," Bush said at the White House medal ceremony. "Woody will never hold this medal in his hands or wear it on his uniform. He will never hear a president thank him for his heroism. He will never stand here to see the pride of his friends and loved ones, as I see in their eyes now."

But, Bush said, there are things the nation can still do for Keeble, even all these years later.

"We can tell his story. We can honor his memory. And we can follow his lead, by showing all those who have followed him on the battlefield the same love and generosity of spirit that Woody showed his country every day," the president said before a somber East Room audience that included three rows of Keeble's family members.
Comment:  The way to "show the love" for our soldiers is not to send them into wars unnecessarily and to bring them home when we do.

The Keeble story got a minute or two on this morning's CBS news. I'm wondering when was the last time an individual Indian got a minute of coverage on a major network. Did anyone report on Russell Means when he declared the Lakotas' independence? You might have to go back to Ward Churchill's being fired from the University of Colorado to find an example.

3 comments:

dmarks said...

No war is truly necessary, you know. What does it matter if North Korea had won and South Korea was a starving hellhole instead of a democracy like it is now? Or what would it have mattered to us if (absent the presence of the US) the Nazis in WW2 had wiped out Great Britain and had been successful in maintaining a large empire for decades?

writerfella said...

Writerfella here --
Egad, DMarks (with Rob's shirttail sticking out from under that coat) is paralleling the plot of writerfella's most recent screenplay, T-DAY. Owing to an artificially-created timeline, what we see as history actually is a delicately fragile progression, whereas the original timeline saw the Germans and Japanese continue WWII ten years longer with Britain overcome and the US forced back within its own borders. The US and Canada are near collapse with Axis forces holding both coasts under siege. A time traveler from Dartmouth University in that 1954 goes back to 1944, stops a bomb assassination of Eisenhower and the entire Allied staff, and warns that Axis agents have infiltrated the Trinity atomic bomb project in New Mexico. Thus, WWII ends as we know it to have. But four technobrats (two white, one Navajo, one 'Tiger Woods' mixed-race) at Dartmouth in our 2010 find that hidden time device and shut it down before it completes its decades-long operations. BANG! The original timeline slams back into existence and the boys suddenly find themselves in a 1954 America where WWII rages on with coastal invasions imminent. They must find the original time device in that era and try to put things back the way they were...
The screenplay illustrates the principle that wars truly are necessary to SOMEONE or they would not happen, as Gulf Wars I and II were necessary to the two George Bushes, and also that Gulf War III will be necessary to John McCain when he and the 'dominant culture' defeat Barack HUSSEIN Obama for US President, IF Obama gets the Democratic nomination. And then nothing and nobody will be able to put things back the way they could and should have been,...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'

Rob said...

If you want to get technical, nothing we do is truly "necessary." We could solve humanity's problems in an instant if we all committed mass suicide.

When we talk about a war's being necessary, we mean whether it's necessary to preserve our freedom. By that standard, World War II was necessary and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq weren't.