Bob Dole, former Republican presidential candidate, showed moral fortitude in opposing genocide

Editor:

In the fall of 1995, it was clear Mr. Clinton would be running for re-election. (That was before I realized what a creep he was.) I decided to change my registration to Republican in order to be able to vote for Kansas Republican Senator Bob Dole in the 1996 New York primary. I saw Dole as similar to John McCain, even though – per Mr. Trump – McCain was “only a hero because he was captured”.

As I recall, Dole had pressed Mr. Clinton to oppose the genocide being perpetrated against Muslims by Roman Catholic Croats and Eastern Orthodox Catholic Serbs in Bosnia. As I understood things, The Dayton Accords and subsequent War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague were as much a credit to Dole as they were to Clinton.

In the past month, people like Ratko Mladic, Slobodan Milosevic, and their crowd of vicious, racist, thugs and hypocrites, masquerading as Christians, have been facing the dirge “music”.  One of the more self-righteous poisoned himself in front of the War Crimes Tribunal.  Another insisted he shouldn’t face life in prison apparently because he had only given the orders and hadn’t actually pulled the triggers that killed prisoners (whose crime was being Muslim) with single shots in the backs of their heads.

Atrocities committed against Bosnian Muslims, and reported in The Christian Science Monitor in the mid-1990’s, would defy the imaginations of the most twisted minds among us. Without honest journalism and politicians such as Bob Dole, incredible inhumanity might have been ignored because so many victims were Muslims.

As an aside, had Alabama Senate candidate Doug Jones not successfully prosecuted the supposedly “Christian” extremist Klansmen who killed Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins and two other Black teens in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham years ago, another hate crime might have gone unpunished.

When the Republican primary took place in 1996, you bet I voted for Bob Dole, not simply because he was a great American leader and a war hero, but because the alternative was borderline whack job Pat Buchanan. Had he won the Republican nomination, he might have brought us something like today’s very scary reality twenty years ago. I was against rolling the dice.

And, yes, each of us has only one vote, in spite of what some would have you believe.

Sincerely yours,

Gary Kent

Albion