The real Pat Tillman

"Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead." - Rich Tillman

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/04/SPG5K6FD091.DTL

He seems like a really cool guy, he read the Bible, the Koran, the Mormon books, poetry. He was a tolerant, non-religous, intellectual guy. Not to mention his courage in fighting for what he thought was right. Kinda makes you wonder if he had lived would he have been the John Kerry for a future generation.

How someone, supposedly educated, could fall for the 'I'm doing my part' drivel when it was so obvious a phony situation, is beyond me. A great hero? No, a dupe. And as for reading all that religious s..., well, that may be the trouble.

I have read several religious texts as a part of my understanding of world culture, does that make me a dupe too?

Perhaps it would benefit you greatly to not make such broad, sweeping generalizations...?

Except for left-wing propaganda that is. Aything else would be a crime against the ideological purity specialists operating on this board.

Remember the main rule:

#1- Anyone who doesn't agree with you is an idiot.

Tillman volunteered to go to Afghanistan when 90% of the country supported Bush and we were still reeling from 9/11 - and it was known that bin Laden was there. I didn't know a lot of what went on behind the scenes until O'Reilly's lawsuit against Franken caused me to pick up 'Lying Liars..." and I did a lot more research after that.

It's a big difference from Iraq, where there was never whole-hearted support for the venture. While Howard Dean was against Iraq, he supported the war in Afghanistan, and the 'war' there had a lot more international support than Iraq.

John Kerry went to Vietnam, and I'm guessing that LBJ never had 90% approval at the time.

The Taliban and their sponsors were/are a threat to us, to their neighbors and to their own population. Feminists were calling for action against them while Bush was sponsoring their US tour while trying to set up a pipeline deal in early 2001.

Iraq, while headed by abrutaldictatorsaddam (yep, one word now, was not an immediate threat to anybody but himself it now seems.

The previous administration, who can be blamed for everything from 9/11 to Pearl Harbor to the atrocities committed during the Crusades, was in the process of isolating the Taliban through diplomacy & sanctions. Bush gave them $43 million very quickly - I wonder how much of that went to pay for pilot training & plane tickets?

After 9/11 (which did happen, last I checked) he signed up to serve in the military. Are there interviews out there where he ascribes vengeful motives to his service rather than patriotic ones? Did he sign up specifically to go to Afghanistan? I see a lot of people claiming to be in this guys head or have proof that he was some kind of lunkhead, but beyond an assault charge at age 17 I don't see much evidence of that.

I'm not sayig he was a saint, but still.