Conservatives go after Shalikashvili’s stroke

January 6, 2007

As I noted earlier this week, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili, wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for the end of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. It was a strong piece, especially for someone who has defended the policy in the past, saying the end of the ban on gay soldiers is “eventual and inevitable,” and that the military “cannot afford to lose” those who want to serve.

Concerned that the tide might be shifting against them, some far-right activists decided to push back against the retired general. You won’t believe the chosen line of attack.

Conceding that the General’s stance would assist efforts to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, [Agape Press, the news service of the American Family Association] reported that [Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative military watchdog group] said Shalikashvili is “struggling” to keep his health. “She says it is ‘really sad’ to see someone like the General being used by the homosexual propaganda machine as ‘the latest tool of a public relations campaign,'” reported Agape. […]

Contacted by PageOneQ, Donnelly said she “wished the General well in his continuing recovery.” When questioned further as to whether she had knowledge that the General had not recovered, Donnelly replied, “Yes, I do not think he — wait, that is all I am going to say, I wish him well in his recovery.” […]

Donnelly told PageOneQ, and Agape reported, that Shalikashvili suffered a stroke within “the past year or so.” In fact, his stroke took place in August of 2004, two and one half years ago.

A decorated four-star general comes to recognize the error of an indefensible policy, so the right goes after him for being a stroke victim?

Just how callous does a person have to be launch such an attack?

Steve Ralls, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network told PageOneQ that, “Even for Ms. Donnelly, her newest line of attack is an all-time low. To even insinuate that a four-star General is unable to reach his own conclusions about this issue is outrageous.”

“How can Ms. Donnelly claim to have any respect for our men and women in uniform when she treats military leaders with such distasteful disregard?” asked SLDN’s Ralls. “Left without a single fact to support her bigoted views, she has stooped to a new low to divert the public’s attention from the truly courageous stand General Shalikashvili has taken. Shame on her,” he continued.

Of course, Ralls is assuming Donnelly is capable of feeling shame, which appears unlikely.

“Just how callous does a person have to be launch such an attack?”

Easy to do when you’re a career political Repub hack like Elaine.

For the past several years, I’ve gotten the feeling that we’re stuck in a real life version of Anton Myrer’s “Once An Eagle”. Except the careerist assholes (the Courtney Massengale types) are the civillians in charge.

  • The Spartans and the Athenians used gay soldiers. I think I heard on the History Channel or something like that somewhere that one of these states had a unit of soldiers consisting of pairs of gay lovers who were very vicious and feared in battle- I think they were archers. Also I think it may have been the Spartan army in which it was routine for the enlisted men to have homosexual relations with their platoon mates.

    It was a strange, ultra militant culture. It was like the women were just there to have the babies back home. Anyway I think we’re modern enough now to include gays and women in our militaries and the prohibition of gays was just a blip in our history.

  • The strategy among the Republicans has shifted: it’s all the military’s fault. I suspect many generals will now be declared infirm.

  • I wonder what they’ll say about this guy (from CB Wednesday mini-report):

    We can add former Defense Secretary (and former Republican senator) William Cohen to the list of those who no longer support the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

    I had problems with Shalikashvili’s op-ed because the jist of it was “Now that things are really desperate, we’ll allow some gays to catch bullets.” However, he at least was perhaps trying to make the point that the policy harms the army. And is stoopid. And those objections fade when confronted by useless dipshits like Donnelly. Is there a way to chuck these clowns into a room occupied by a few gay Navy Seals and Marines? I’d volunteer to scrape up the offal afterwards.

    I wonder what she’d say to the armies that have succumbed to the “Homosexual Agenda”? I.e. most of the armies that make up the coalition forces, including the UK and Australia. “Go home you pansies, leave the fightin’ to the REAL men?” Sure, here’s a gun Donnelly, make your country proud. Or maybe we should just shoot her since she admires the military policies of Iran and North Korea.

    Seriously, I can’t help but think that DADT has some effect on the way other soldiers view our military. To the ones that allow gays to serve we have to look like slope-browed Bible humping loons. To the ones that don’t we have to look like chickenshits that gave in to “H.A.” (Not that I care but I think a few of these armies are with us in Iraq.)

    Ambigious, that’s us. I can’t imagine soldiers care for being lead by ambigious folks.

  • It’s the typical right wing way – don’t acknowledge the merits of the argument at all – instead do anything and everything to personally discredit the person making it. Several wingers, most famously Charles Krauthammer, actually questioned Al Gore’s sanity and mental health when he started making speeches opposing the Iraq invasion back in 2002 and 2003. Anybody who resorts to this form of argument, the vilest of personal attacks IMO, really forfeits any further right to be heard or take part in the discussion.

  • Isn’t it amazing how the Republicans have adopted the Soviet Style: Their character attacks, appointing political hacks and infusing science with faith are so reminiscent of the way Russia treated its dissidents (they’re sick or insane), their officials (only requirement, party loyalty) and science (mustn’t disprove any party beliefs).

  • Swan (#2) was referring to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Though his father Philip put them out of business once and for all at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), and with them the traditional hoplite formation, Alexander the Great later credited them with being the fiercest fighting group he had ever encountered.

  • Ed at 7

    Yeah, but besides that there was also a practice of gay love between regular soldiers in the Athenian or Spartan army. I think it wasn’t a universal practice among all the troops but it was widespread.

  • The ancients, not plagued with the mental baggage of Judeo-Christianty, didn’t even possess our concepts gay and straight. “Homosexuality” is a word coined in 1886 by the psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing to label what he (and the Victorians generally) regarded as a mental illness (rejected, incidentally, by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973).

    Just scratching the surface of same-sex relationships, and focusing only on males, Latin American cultures nearly all assume, in the contrast to our (usually young) male couples, a “macho” and “femme” pairing. Ancient Greeks, with notable exceptions, expected older-young couplings, so long as there were status differences (teacher-student, officer-soldier, artist-protege); any relationship which went beyond these, or lasted past the maturity of the junior partner was ridiculed on the public stage. All adult Greek males were expected to marry females (think Socrates). In certain tribes (e.g., the Xiti, the Semang) everyone is expected to play the submissive homosexual role during periods of training, and virtually no one remains “gay” into adulthood. Among the Comanche a successful warrior was often give a male wife (berdache) in addition to his female one. The varieties are endless and, needless to say, virtually unknown to Americans.

  • Ed, I’m very impressed that you know so much on this subject. Being gay, I naturally read everything I could on the subject in my younger days in the coming out process, and even moreso as I get older. I think it’s a fascinating, yet sadly neglected, area of scholarship

    Hell, you’re even more informed that most of the younger gays I know now. Sadly, they have no real interest in their history.

  • Michael W (#10). Thank you.

    I was chairman of Sociology/Anthropology Department for four years back in the ’70s, and taught Sociology for thirty-two years. If you keep your eyes and ears open you’re bound to learn something in that time.

    The guy who chaired the Soc Dept (I split up the combined one) after me, E.R. “Bill” Mahoney, authored an excellent textbook entitled Human Sexuality (McGraw-Hill, 1983). It covered it all: the biology, psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, criminology and even economics of sexuality. We discussed much of it while he was writing the book, often during our regular Thursday night dinners together.

    That book was an object lesson to me about publishing in America. We learned later, when Bill was ready to submit an updated second edition, that McGraw only bought the first one to bury it. They were already publishing two texts in Human Sexuality, distinctly inferior if you ask me, and buying up the rights to Mahoney’s meant that no one else could re-issue it. Capitalist control of knowledge is a very bad thing. I became painfully aware of that back when I was an undergrad chem major: I interviewed a researcher at the Shell plant in SF’s East Bay and learned he wasn’t alllowed to publish, or even let me look at, his work, which was owned by Shell. For that reason I’ve always made my own work available for free, through scientific journals, and about twelve years ago in a free online summary written in an intentionally non-textbook style.

  • A decorated four-star general comes to recognize the error of an indefensible policy, so the right goes after him for being a stroke victim?

    Just how callous does a person have to be launch such an attack? — CB

    It’s no different than saying, in your campaign ads “don’t vote for X because he’s had a heart attack, is at the death’s door and won’t serve you through his term”. Or words to that effect. I don’t remember the precise wording, but some repub did have such an ad this past electoral cycle (in CA?)

    re male homosexual relationships. Ed, don’t forget the Japanese, who had a very similiar (older/more important person having a younger, often underaged, lover) tradition in place *much* later than the Greeks. Everyone knows about the ancient Greeks because of Plato and his “Feast” (? Is that the title in English?), but not many people think beyond the “cradle of the Western civilization”.

    As someone who discovered the joys of reading Colette’s Claudine series at 14, I never could understand the Anglo-Saxon fuss about homosexuality and youthful experimentation with same. How can you tell who you are, if you’ve never determined who you are not?

  • libra (#12),

    Plato’s book was the Symposion — literally Greek for “drinking together”, but usually translated as symposium. Which, imho, sounds like a rather stuffy academic exercise, which Plato’s book definitely was not. It’s really a great and actually very funny work, even though I’d like to think I’ve grown beyond Platonism with all its spritual mysticism. I do agree with you: I have never understood what the Anglo-Saxon fuss was all about.

  • How can you tell who you are, if you’ve never determined who you are not?

    In the case of the US I would ask: How can a country fight off imperial rule, become the model for industry and democracy the world over, win wars, mind the affairs of other countries, put a man on the moon and so on, but still have time to throw fits over what consenting adults do with their lives? Or; Is the US a busy nation or a nation of busy bodies?

    Perhaps puritan brains had a bad and permanent reaction to the water. Or maybe it was the jimson weed and infected rye. Yeesh.

  • Bitch.

    I doubt Shali would have gone after for her utter and complete stupidness because she was female. Well this just shows what kind of person she really is. I bet she goes to church on Sunday and pats herself on the back about what a good Christian she is. Well God knows what is in her heart and hears/see what she does when she passes through the Church door.

    I have no real problem with her disagree with Shali on this issue, but disagree honestly for heaven’s sake, this dismissal/attack is low even for a bitch like her.

  • The Soviet Military also banned Homosexuals… In fact, being gay in Soviet Russa could get you put in jail. Odd that the Chistian Right hated the communist…

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