Rep.Walter B.Jones, Jr Channels John Kerry

posted by sam 10/21/2015


Walter B. Jones, Jr is a queer old duck. I don't mean queer as in queer, just queer- as in a queer old duck. He has been a congressman from North Carolina for twenty years. He is a Republican who was once a Democrat in his younger and more carefree days and later, as the political winds of expediency shifted markedly during the Nixon years and the ascendancy of Jesse Helms he eventually saw the light and declared for the Republicans and he is not just any Republican shade but a member of the House's "Liberty Caucus", thats how you can tell just how serious a representative is: there is the word liberty or sometimes, freedom, attached to all they do."On March 23, 2007, Jones was one of two Republicans to vote for a bill that would require President George W. Bush to bring combat troops home from Iraq by September 1, 2008. The other Republican was Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland's 1st congressional district."(Wikipedia); He has actually been kicked out of several committees and senior positions because of his stance on issues not in synch with the "Republican leadership"; He is a popular candidate with the African-American constituency in his home district; what he finds "en rapport" with his compatriots in the Liberty fringe is for you to say.

Rep. Walter B. Jones, Jr

His father, Walter, Sr was a congressman too. He was a Democrat and served his district in North Carolina for over a quarter century until his death in 1992.(Thank you Wikipedia) Personal note to me: I wonder if father and son ever played "catch" before dinner in the hushed summer twilight of a Farmville evening-(See a previous post anent the lessons of baseball). I got to be honest with you until the entry in the Congressional Record (see below) I wasn't aware of either Jones but thats certainly no failing of their's but rather my usual soporific browsing of the New York Times and from watching the Joe and Mika breakfast show. The younger Jones (he's 9 years older than I am!) certainly seems an independent fellow -as independent as a member of the republican party can be without becoming a part of its lynch mob mentality ( and I don't use that word lightly). According to my internet sources (Wikipedia, Google..) he was one of but a handful of Republicans to vote against Paul Ryan's proposed "Path to Devastation" Budget; one of the very few Republicans to vote to censure his fellow Rep. Joe Wilson ("You Lie!")  for conduct unbecoming a human being; voted with that nutty Ron Paul on some anti-Bush stuff ( and was smart enough to stay away from appearing in a Borat movie);he was a strong supporter of the Iraq War who has since become one of its most fervent critics -I know its easier to say now but I think he genuinely regrets his vote although he was a firm advocate and a prime sponsor of having the french fries in the House cafeteria re-named and listed on the menu as "Freedom Fries" -

now thats something I bet even his grandchildren can kid him about;

His speaking out on the no COLA for Social Security recipients and our disabled vets is what drew our attention in the first place- that and the fact that I have nothing else to do today except wait for my wife to order Chinese take out for our anniversary- and he has strongly made a case that the money that we are wasting in our mis-adventures in Afghanistan (and other places?) can be better used here at home for our seniors and our disabled vets. 




THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES -- (House of Representatives - October 20, 2015)

[Page: H6983]  
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   The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) for 5 minutes.

   Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, this weekend, I learned that there would be no cost-of-living adjustment this year for those living on Social Security. Not only will Social Security recipients not see a cost-of-living increase this year but, also, disabled veterans.
   There are over 131,000 veterans on disability in North Carolina who will be suffering this year. Our senior citizens and disabled veterans are having a difficult time making ends meet, and it is not fair that the Federal Government continues to waste money with failed policies like Afghanistan. It is disgraceful.

   Mr. Speaker, we will be raising the debt ceiling of this Nation for years to come because of wasteful spending. This means we will be borrowing more money to continue spending more than we take in. Our annual Federal deficit is still over $400 billion a year.

   The American people are sick and tired of our wasteful spending, and I know they are frustrated. Once again, our failed policy in Afghanistan is a prime example of the waste, fraud, and abuse of the American taxpayer dollar, but it continues on and on for years to come. 

   In the recent House-Senate conference bill, Congress included $38 billion for the Overseas Contingency Operation, which is a slush fund used to get around sequestration spending caps for the Department of Defense.
   We have already spent over $685 billion in Afghanistan since 2001, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, we will be spending at least $30 billion a year in Afghanistan for the next 8 years, and Congress has never debated the policy of Afghanistan.

   This slush fund goes to fund our never-ending wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. We continue to spend money on a fool's errand in the Middle East. Meanwhile, our disabled veterans at home cannot keep up with the rising costs of daily living. President Obama will be keeping 10,000 troops in Afghanistan through all of next year and at least 5,000 there after 2016.

   Mr. Speaker, years ago, I reached out to a former commandant of the Marine Corps whom I knew, and I asked him to give me his advice on Afghanistan. Many times he has given me his best advice, but one that has stuck with me for years is this--and I quote the commandant:
   ``What do we say to the mother and father ..... the wife ..... of the last marine or soldier killed to support a corrupt government and corrupt leader in a war that cannot be won?''
   Mr. Speaker, that is Afghanistan. It is a waste.

   How ridiculous it is that Congress and the administration think we can change history. The history of Afghanistan has shown that no outside military force has ever changed it, from Alexander the Great, to the British, to the Russians. It is truly the graveyard of empires, and I hope we won't have a headstone there, waiting, that will read, ``Welcome, America, to the graveyard of empires.''

   Mr. Speaker, this poster beside me is a reminder of the cost of war in Afghanistan. There is a little girl holding her mother's hand as they are waiting to follow a caisson down to bury the little girl's father and the wife's husband.
   Congress, wake up. We are heading for collapse in this country. Let's not continue to spend and waste money, blood, and limbs in Afghanistan.

   Mr. Speaker, I ask God to please bless our men and women in uniform, to please bless the families of our men and women in uniform, and, God, please bless America and please wake up the Congress before it is too late.


I  wonder if Rep. Jones realized that he was almost "channeling" the young John Kerry of 44 Springs ago as the then returning decorated soldier and spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War testified before Senator William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee asking for an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam.

April 23, 1971

It was a beautiful and passionate plea by a very brave and articulate war veteran who is still shown the disrespect and contumely by the very members of Rep. Jones' Republican hate-mongers that greeted him those many Aprils ago. That testimony is too recorded in the Congressional Record (April 23, 1971- seems like yesterday). We of course recommend to our reader to re-visit young Mr. Kerry's words in full. For our immediate purpose we will gratefully submit:

"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something the entire world already knows, so that we can't say we have made a mistake. Someone has rto die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first president to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about this because: how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations..."

And whatever happened to that young man, anyway?

From the Congressional Record of March 5, 2019

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Ms. Gabbard).
  Ms. GABBARD. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the life of my 
friend, Congressman Walter Jones, Jr., a man who was known by all of us 
throughout his many years serving in this chamber for his kindness, his 
southern charm, and his big heart, his fierce independence, and his 
pursuit of peace.
  Walter left us on February 10, his 76th birthday. He lived a long 
life of service: four years in the North Carolina National Guard, ten 
years in the North Carolina General Assembly, and nearly 25 years 
serving in these halls.
  Walter stayed true to himself throughout this time, following his 
heart. He was never afraid to challenge the status quo, often to the 
chagrin of his party leaders.
  We found a common bond and friendship around shared ideals, of 
putting people before politics, putting service above self. He knew 
that when we see each other as people, as public servants, not just as 
Republicans and Democrats that this is when we have the opportunity to 
find common ground and work toward our common goal of serving the 
people of this country.
  Now, in 2002, Walter voted for the Iraq war, the war that I served 
in, the war that took the lives of my brothers and sisters in uniform, 
the war that took the lives of over 4,000 U.S. servicemembers and over 
100,000 Iraqis.
  Walter shared with me, as he shared with many others, that this vote 
that he took was the biggest regret of his time in public service.
  He shared how when he attended a funeral at Camp Lejeune for a 31-
year-old marine that was killed in Iraq in March of 2003 while 
evacuating wounded troops, everything changed for Walter, because he 
sat there and he heard this marine's widow, in front of their three 
children, read the final letter that this marine sergeant sent home, 
and he saw those three kids, knowing that they would never see their 
father again.
  This impacted him so deeply, and maybe for the first time caused him 
to realize the cost of war and who pays the price. So Walter started 
writing. He wrote over 12,000 letters to families who lost their loved 
ones in both Iraq and Afghanistan and shared how he begged God to 
forgive him for his mistake.
  He memorialized those who died from North Carolina's Camp Lejeune, as 
you see here, with photos that he displayed for all to see before they 
could come inside his office here in Washington.
  He became a leading voice not just in his party, but in Congress, 
pushing for additional oversight over matters of war and peace. He 
called for ending illegal regime-change wars that put our troops' lives 
on the line, leaving their families behind. He pointed out that our 
taxpayer dollars should not be used to be the policeman of the world.
  Walter and I didn't agree on many things, but we also found many 
opportunities to work together on things that we strongly believed in.
  We cosponsored and co-led the No More Presidential Wars Act, which 
rightly put the responsibility back in Congress' hands to declare war, 
as the Constitution provides.
  He cosponsored my bill, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, to make sure 
that taxpayer dollars are not being used to directly and indirectly 
fund terrorist groups, as we have seen done in both Syria and Yemen.
  We cosponsored the Weekend Voting Act to strengthen voting rights.
  We worked together to strengthen civil liberties and privacy, 
upholding our Fourth Amendment rights.
  Walter was courageous. He didn't care about party politics, and as a 
result, he suffered the consequences in tough primary elections, but he 
didn't care. He never hesitated to stand up for what he believed in.

  So while Walter and I were two very different people coming from two 
very different places, Walter was my dear friend, fellow servicemember, 
and my brother. He will be deeply missed.
  My heart and prayers go out to his family, his friends, and his loved 
ones.
  We all know that Walter's legacy of service and his principles and 
values will continue to live on in Washington, in the Halls of 
Congress, and in the lives of the many people who he touched.

---

Another excerpt from Criticizing Fear (working title)

  The first Kishinev pogrom (in modern times?) occurred during the first week of the 1903 baseball season which was eventually won by the Boston Americans, the godparent of the Red Sox and almost a decade before Fenway was built. It also fell on the Russian Easter which traditionally has not been one of the Jews' favorite holidays. Soon after the pogrom Russia's ambassador to the USA "Count" Cassini blamed the Jews for this because we would not "soil our hands by being farmers but would rather sit on our Jewish asses and lend money. I'm paraphrasing what I read in Wikipedia which is more than Rand Paul can say. This was the same head-scratching logic that just 111 years later the Turkish prime minister would use in his recent remarks regarding the events transpiring in Gaza and Israel. 

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Yale chaplain quits in wake of letter blaming Israel for rising anti-Semitism

September 8, 2014 11:37am

(JTA) — The Rev. Bruce Shipman, an Episcopal chaplain at Yale University, resigned in the wake of his letter to The New York Times that blamed rising anti-Semitism in Europe on Israel.

The Episcopal Church at Yale issued a statement on Sept. 4 announcing that Shipman, “on his own initiative, had resigned as Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale, effective immediately.”

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Israel-natch- being the prime cause of anti-semitism in the world. The "Count" if you're keeping a scorecard was the grandfather of the guy who designed the "Jackie" look back during the Kennedy Administration. It was this pogrom that inspired W.R. Hearst to ask the great Irish patriot and labor leader, Michael Davitt, to travel to Russia and investigate  

Michael Davitt

 the anti-semitic outrages. His book, Within The Pale, The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia, was published in October, 1903 -perhaps on the day Cy Young outpitched Brickyard Kennedy of the Pittsburgh team. I have always found the story of Hearst and Davitt fascinating - Hearst was sort of still at the beginning of his outrageous career recently cashing in from his unctuous role in the Spanish-American War and Davitt was sort of at the end of his more illustrative life of fighting for the poor and oppressed- something Hearst too had visions of at one time. In one of the appendixes of Davitt's book - a Reuter's telegram from St. Petersburg dated June 13, 1903 echoes the thoughts of the "Count"( and prime minister). It relates the recantation of "the famous Orthodox priest", Father John of Kronstadt:

      "To my beloved brethren of Christ in Kishineff: From the newspaper accounts that followed those first published about the Kishineff catastrophe, I have come to the conclusion that the Jews themselves were the cause of those disorders and the murders committed on April 6 and 7. I have arrived at the conclusion that it is the Christians who have suffered in the end, and that the Jews have been doubly repaid for their losses and injuries by their own brethren and others...I say to Kishineff Christians, forgive the reproach I cast upon you alone on account of the horrors perpetrated. From letters of eye witnesses I am convinced that one cannot lay all the blame upon the Christians, who were incited to the disorders by the Jews, and that the latter are mainly responsible for the catastrophe." 

It is ironic - almost poignant - to consider that one of the more noteworthy incidents in Michael Davitt's life had to do with a popular protest against unfair rents and how land sales were regulated in British-Ruled Ireland ( this was sometime around 1877 to 1881). Davitt and his co-organizer, Charles Parnell, to make their point, had the local farm workers stop their harvesting of the estate of a Lord Erne. Now this Lord's agent or supervisor was a guy named Charles Boycott. To make matters a little more trying for Mr. Boycott the locals closed their shops, shut the laundries , and his mail was not delivered - you get the idea. The protest against Boycott was a big time news story for awhile, making all the local and British newspapers. Mr. Boycott was pretty much isolated after this started and so the local government under the control of the British had to send in what can be considered the equivalent of our National Guard to help harvest the crops and, I guess, do the laundry and deliver mail. It costs the British Government - that is if Wikipedia is right - "at least £10,000 to harvest about £500 worth of crops" and Mr. Boycott gave all English speakers from that time to this a new verb to conjure. (He died at the ripe old age of 65, in 1897, 2 months before the first Zionist Congress)

Capt. Charles C. Boycott

  There was no World Series played in 1904. I forget why, something about John McGraw refusing to recognize the American League's legitimacy? Oddly enough there was no pogrom on the record either. A second Kishinev pogrom occurred in 1905 almost a week after the last World Series game was played. The '05 series was one for the ages. And so was that second pogrom. But I digress- I must ( Note to my reader: You may have noticed that when the subject gets a little too overbearing for me- events too horrible to "read" straight I seek a lighter counterpoint to offset the heaviness of the occasion- it may seem sacrilege and absurd but then again what are you complaining about. Not to wade into the muck of philosophical prosody here but I have always remembered an essay of George Steiner's where he is wrestling with one of those Holocaust themes of interminable meanings for the whole damn human race - actually I think thats a phrase from Mark Twain - and he writes that one of the things that he " cannot grasp, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective, is the TIME RELATION." And as soon as I had read that phrase I knew what he was going to say next: 

         "Precisely at the same hour in which (_______) and (____) were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, 2 miles away on the Polish farms, 5000 miles away in New York were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their existence is so hideous a paradox - Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be - that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, "good times", and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of living damnation? If we reject some such module it becomes exceedingly difficult to grasp the continuity between normal existence and the hour at which hell starts, on the city square when the Germans begin the deportations or in the office of the Judenrat or wherever, an hour marking men, women, children off from any precedent of life, from my voice "outside" in that other time of sleep and food and humane speech. On the fake station platform at Treblinka, cheerfully painted and provided with window boxes so as not to alert the new arrivals to the gas ovens half a mile further, the painted clock pointed to 3. Always." ( In subsequent sources the clock was painted to read 6)

[This passage - actually the whole essay entitled "Postscript" (I hope-see I copied it in a notebook I maintained long ago when I was quite the conscientious undergrad- eager to make known all that I read and thought to the awaiting war wounded world - I kept the notebook- for some reason- and lost the eager lad.) The spell-correct feature on my Mac automatically underlines Treblinka and Judenrat thinking -Macs think? - I must have mis-spelled them because it (obviously) doesn't have such words pre-programmed;  the young programmers never heard of them - I guess- they're unknown- and therein lies another digression - but later.]

Its a little too easy- this evocation of disjointed time- but what better illustrative have we to bespeak our common humanity or is it inhumanity? Clive James, the distinguished and erudite cultural critic from Australia- and what cultural critic is not Australian or at least erudite- in his magnum opus , Cultural Amnesia ,  assays a guy named Wolf Jobst Siedler who I remembered from the indefatigable Gitta Sereny's book on Albert Speer, which is why you read a guy like James in the first place - not only has he read more than you but probably in the original language and besides he is quite fun and articulate at the same time and while I'm offering this priceless advise read Ms Sereny's journalistic journey (sorry); her INTO THIS DARKNESS  and ALBERT SPEER: HIS BATTLE WITH TRUTH  are literally the closest many of us will ever get to, well,  the heart of darkness. Anyway, Siedler, whom James describes as a "fair choice for the title of Most Civilized Man in Post-War Germany, was as it happened to be - Albert Speer's publisher; more like his champion in those post-Spandau years and according to Ms Sereny, was a very smart and successful publisher who came from an intellectual family - his father was very much a liberal and very much anti-Nazi; young Wolf was even imprisoned for a spell for his "subversive" activities and then forcibly sent to serve on the Eastern front. Aside his publishing career James tells us that his "most valuable" contribution has been as an essayist and though criticized by some for being too placating to Nazi/German history James is able to cite this passage from a collection of his essays which I believe offers a glimpse of the man's sensitivities. Here he is alluding to Kristallnacht- Night of Broken Glass, March 9/10, 1938:

"... the most misleading thing about this State was that on the very evening of the burning of the synagogues, an event which brought the Eastern Europe of the Middle Ages into the Germany of the twentieth century, everywhere in the cities of our country festively clad people went to operetta, theatres, and symphony halls, and that, six hours after the deportation wagons left the station platforms of Berlin, the trains for the seaside left also."

AROUND AND AROUND WE GO