"I hated the g****. I will hate them as long as I live."

[ProSense]

John McCain's racist remark very troubling

Thursday, March 2, 2000

By KATIE HONG
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

On his campaign bus recently, Sen. John McCain told reporters, "I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." Although McCain said he was referring only to his prison guards, there are many reasons why his use of the word "gook" is offensive and alarming.

It is offensive because by using a racial epithet that has historically been used to demean all Asians to describe his captors, McCain failed to make a distinction between his torturers and an entire racial group.

It is alarming because a major candidate for president publicly used a racial epithet, refused to apologize for doing so and remains a legitimate contender.

Contrary to McCain's attempt to narrowly define "gook" to mean only his "sadistic" captors, this term has historically been used to describe all Asians. McCain said that "gook" was the most "polite" term he could find to describe his captors, but because it is simply a pejorative term for Asians, he insulted his captors simply by calling them "Asians" -- a clearly disturbing message. To the Asian American community, the term is akin to the racist word "nigger." A friend of mine, a white male Vietnam veteran, pointed out that veterans, especially Vietnam veterans, know how spiteful the term "gook" is. It has everything to do with labeling someone as "other," the enemy and yellow. McCain sent the message that all Asians are foreigners and remain forever the "other" and the enemy.

link

Except the one who drew the cross in the sand?

[babylonsister]

1. Oopsie! Nice catch! nt

[billyoc]

2. McCain cosponsored PNTR for Vietnam. I guess money makes the hate go away...

:eyes:

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. Probably one of the few decent things he's done, though

Motivations aside.

[Mabus]

4. Even more disturbing is that the media took McCain off the record to protect him

from himself.

Why can John McCain gab so freely as he rides around on his bus? Let’s go back to Campaign 2000, when this glorious joy-ride began; let’s recall what made it so easy for McCain to blab back then. Perhaps in the grip of the “Stockholm Syndrome” which Joe Klein attributed to McCain’s press corps, Nancy Gibbs blurted an embarrassing truth, right in the pages of Time:

GIBBS (12/13/99): There is no entourage, no bubble of staff members around him...And then there are the stories he tells—to which, if there's a pattern, it's to exalt other people and deflate himself. A presidential candidate is not supposed to talk at length and on the record about the rules he broke or the strippers he dated, or the time he arrived so drunk that he fell through the screen door of the young lady he was wooing. The candor tells you more than the content, and reporters sometimes just decide to take him off the record because they don't want to see him flame out and burn up a great story.

We’ll hold McCain’s stripper-dating tales until a later point in the week. But why could McCain blather freely back then, as he rambled about on his bus? Oh! According to Time’s top political writer, the boys and girls who were munching his donuts had cooked up a strange bit of journo group culture. When McCain engaged in too much “candor,” they would “sometimes just decide to take him off the record because they didn't want to see him flame out and burn up a great story!” Let’s translate that into simpler language: At the same time these inane gorillas were inventing wild statements and pretending Gore said them, they were providing an opposite service for McCain, the virile scourge of the broken screen door. Here goes: If McCain said stupid things, they would agree not to tell you about them! For the record, Gibbs and Dickerson weren’t alone in copping to this remarkable conduct; many pundits copped to this tale. For example, two days after the Gibbs piece hit the stands, Howard Kurtz quoted Jacob Weisberg:

KURTZ (12/8/99): "At one level, the press protects him," says Jacob Weisberg, political writer for Slate magazine. "He delivers these stupid lines all the time. The typical response from journalists is either not to report it or to congratulate him for being so blunt...”

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh040208.shtml

That's right, right after vilifying Clinton for having extramarital sex, the press kept quiet about McCain because they liked him.

[OwnedByFerrets]

5. K and R

[TexasObserver]

6. I hate to admit it, but it took me many years to erase the word.

The two words heard most in Southeast Asia among servicemen were "fuck" (or some derivation of it; i.e., "cocksucker," "motherfucker," "fuckhead," "fuckstick," etc.) and "gook," (or some derivation of it; i.e., "gooker").

As with many such things, there is an incongruity that doesn't make sense. Everyone had Asians they liked and thought highly of, but when the bitching started about Asians, you could be sure that words like "gook," "slant eyes," "slopes," "slopeheads," and "zipperheads" would fly.

I don't defend it. Dehumanizing the enemy and any who might sympathize with them is a method of facilitating warfare among young men.

I had to work hard to expunge such terms from my mind. McCain should have done likewise, but he's proud of his hatred. He's proud to think we're the righteous side and they're the bad side. If he hasn't figured out we were wrong in Vietnam by now, that's part of the problem. When it finally sinks in that we were wrong, that we were the ones who were the bloodthirsty killers of ordinary folks in their homeland, then redemption can occur.

Sorry for the language, but sometimes you have to use it to condemn it.

[truedelphi]

7. I still cringe when I hear that word.

After all, like you say, "When it finally sinks in that we were wrong, that we were the ones who were the bloodthirsty killers of ordinary folks in their homeland, then redemption can occur."

That scumbag war was just another creepy military mission for profits. First job out of H.S. I ever had, clipping the newspaper clippings on all the major players, Honeywell, Raytheon, Dow Chem, etc. to put into their bank account profiles.

It's 1969 and Nixon is saying he has a secret plan to end the war. I am looking at the clippings on my desk and you can see it is NOT gonna end soon. There's the contracts for Raytheon for satellites needed to give information to the Pentagon about the ground situation in Nam, there's contracts to Dow for more Agent Orange, there's contracts and more contracts and some of them aren't even gonna be out of the hopper until '71.

Meanwhile we were destroying Vietnam to save it and THEY were the ones being called "gooks."

[TexasObserver]

11. All true. Young soldiers have a learning curve in life.

Unfortunately, understanding what a war is really about does not occur during service in that war.

I can guarantee you that almost every soldier who either went to Vietnam or worked in the theater in support of the war, had a moment while doing so which can be described as this:

"Goddamn it, these motherfuckers don't even want us here!"

Understanding that not every culture in the world wants to be like the USA, wants to have democracy, wants to have a wall between church and state, wants to have equal rights, wants to have freedom of speech or press is essential to understanding that which is and is not our business in other countries.

We would do much, much better to worry about securing freedoms in THIS country.

[truedelphi]

14. My ex-husband, and one of my first true loves, served over there.

I remember him saying that when his engineering platoon went into an area, the people were all happy and content in their lives. In a way you couldn't see back home, not even in the America of the late sixties. No murder rate, no divorce rate, just people content with their lives.

His platoon did whatever they were supposed to, make sure a bridge could withstand the convoys going across, building structures etc. So he got to build things rather than kill people.

Then they'd be ordered on to somewhere else. When they were ordered back into the area they'd been in previously, it would be all shot up. People definitely not happy. Everyone affected - many lives lost, the survivors' lives ruined.

[TexasObserver]

19. Except for a couple of short TDYs, I was a safe distance away.

But we saw the daily intel, and there were planes that didn't make it back. I was in the Air Force, so we had planes bombing, recon aircraft, and fighters accompanying bombers and recon aircraft in the region. Even from aerial photographs, the carnage on the ground is obvious. That's one reason I hate the sanitized MSM approach to the Iraq war. They'd kill 15 of our guys in a day. We'd kill 200 of theirs. Anyone who died was counted as VC.

It is essential that citizens see the carnage their government is committing in their names.

[Hugabear]

8. No different than what's going on nowadays

Replace Vietnam with Iraq, and one can only imagine all the vicious slurs that are being invented.

[TexasObserver]

12. True. I believe the most common term is "Hajiis"

The film Stop Loss is worth a look. I thought it might be your average pro war tripe, but it really tells the tragic story of how war fucks up these young guys who do not understand what they are fighting about, or whose interests they are serving.

[derby378]

9. "I have never trusted Klingons, and I never will"

"I can never forgive them for the death of my boy."

The Vietnamese are at least as complex as the Klingons were. Only thing is, John McCain ain't no James T. Kirk.

[Bluenorthwest]

10. And the other thing is...

We don't have many Klingons living in the US. Vietnamese on the other hand....

[grantcart]

13. Guards who read Soltzy are given an exemption

[babylonsister]

20. Now that's funny! nt

[ieoeja]

15. Why would he hate our allies?

To the best of my knowledge the only Koreans in Vietnam were South Koreans.

Miguk: (n) Korean word for individuals of Korean ethnic descent


One can picture the first American soldiers in Korea....

"So, what do you call the people of this country."
"Miguk".
"Okay. You gook. Me American".

Ironically, "gook" undoubtedly originated from an attempt at politeness.

[KittyWampus]

16. or the ones who pulled him out of the lake as he was drowning?

[Blu Dahlia]

17. Why didn't warren call him out on that? Since he kept talking about

his faith while a POW. Did his faith include hatred?

[E-Z-B]

18. This used to be on the wikipedia article for McCain for years

I checked a month ago, and it was gone now.

[ProSense]

21. Guess they forgot about

the Internets.

[Blaukraut]

22. knr. n/t

[liberaldem4ever]

23. K&R

McCain is a disgusting, immoral man. I can't imagine anybody with this kind of thinking actually being President.

I think he will make a worse President than Bush even thought about being. George W. Bush is kind of dumb and allowed himself to be manipulated by evil people. John McCain is mean and evil himself.

[ChimpersMcSmirkers]

24. I'm thinking asians might not be too happy to hear this.

Obama has a treasure trove of goodies to smack McFossil with, and I think he will. When the time is right.

[Triana]

25. well. It looks like the "angry black man" in this election...

...is JOHN MCCAIN.

To suggest anything different is a whole lotta projection and hypocrisy.

[Gman]

26. Every single Vietnam vet I know says the same thing

it's not right, but most don't care.

[invictus]

27. The guy had no problem bombing civilians. What do you expect? n/t

[Heather MC]

28. Why didn't he say I hate all gooks, except the one that drew a cross in the sand for me to see

we are Christain bothers
but the rest of them can rott in hell
:rofl: