----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen Philion" <philion at hawaii.edu> To: "lbo" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:49 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Perle snaps at Steve from Minneapolis, "What do YOU know about my family??!!"
> Found an effective way to get under Richard Perle's skin this morning. He
An amazing post on Perle is at CalPundit's weblog. He took it out of that book on our effort to dislodge the Soviets from Afg., something like _Mr. __??__'s War_. CalPundit points out that the section of the book he quotes from shows that Perle really *is* nuts. (In this case, Perl et al. thought that they could use loudspeakers to get the enemy to defect, overlooking the fact that few had been taken prisoners, and of those that were, most of them had been brutally sodomized, etc).
> was on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning program this morning, a call in
> show, pushing his new book calling for endless war.
> I asked him how come, if the war on terror is such an important war that
all
> americans should make sacrifices for, aren't Bush's nephews or Cheney's
> nephews, grandchildren, or Richard Perle's grandchildren, nephews, signing
> up for the war against Iraq, the one for the missing WMDs? The host of
the
> program asked me to clarify something and I followed up noting that
> Minnesota Norm Coleman's children, for example, are going to college
instead
> of signing up for the "war". Jeb Bush's sons, in their twenties, the
> same....
>
> Perle got all feather ruffled and snapped back angrily, "What do you know
> about my family, first of all?" A funny response, if he wanted he could
have
> rebuffed me by stating that he had family members dying. Then he claimed
I
> was 'demogoging' and went on with the usual rhetoric about a 'volunteer
> army'.
>
> The show's format doesn't allow follow up questions, but the host pressed
> him on the 'shared sacrifice' issue. He had trouble dealing with that one
> too, a hard start for a program on which he was trying to push his call
for
> war. Really every member of the adminstration should be called on this
war
> on terror hype in the end.
>
> I don't mean to make the argument that *only* lower income men and women
die
> in this war against Iraq, but it is a transparent fact that those dying or
> getting their limbs blown off are not the relatives of anyone in the Bush
> administration. How odd, such a major 'threat' is seen to exist, yet the
> leading war hawks' children stay home and choose not to fight.
>
> I can put up the link to the exchange later if folks like.
>
> steve
>
>
>
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