Free Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins Page A

door and he looks like a dog and has hair down to here, you send them to another unit. When some trash bag came in the door, there were ways around these things without breaking any rules.” They took only nice, clean-cut boys with connections, like Quayle.
    When the long, miserable folly of Vietnam finally ended, I thought America would never do anything that wrong again. But we managed one more piece of cruelty and stupidity with regard to that war—we failed to honor and in some cases mistreated our own men who had fought it. Ten years later, Vietnam veterans gave themselves a homecoming parade. I don’t know how many of you were there; the crowds were thin. There were no socko military bands because the government didn’t spend a nickel on it. It was the weekend The Wall was dedicated that the vets held their own homecoming. The only member of the government who came was that fool John Warner from Virginia, may it not be forgotten. Do you remember how they looked, the Vietnam vets, rolling down the avenue in wheelchairs, straggling along in no formation? Almost all of them had hair down to here: Many wore bandanas around their foreheads. They must have looked like trash bags to Colonel Fischer. I don’t think more than 1 percent of them could have gotten into the Indiana National Guard even at that late date.
    After all that long history of unfairness and insanity, I did believe no more indignities could be heaped on that particular pile. Wrong again. Now, for political purposes, lies are being told once more. Quayle, who supported the war and took an easy out, now claims to be “proud” he “served,” while Clinton was leading “anti-American” demonstrations in England. Not anti-American, Mr. Quayle, anti-war. Bush says Clinton called the entire American military “immoral.” He didn’t: He called the war immoral. It was.
    No one who loved someone who was killed in Vietnam, and Bill Clinton did, ever confused being anti-war with being against those who served there. Many of us who love this country hated that war and still believe the highest patriotism was to oppose it. Mr. Bush now implies that someone who has not served in a war is unfit to be president, might be too easily inclined to risk American lives. I believe the opposite, although you could cite Ronald Reagan as evidence of Bush’s thesis.
    Clinton worked against the war in Vietnam; Al Gore served in it: I believe they each represent the best of our generation. One thing all of us of the Vietnam generation know for certain is that we cannot prop up a government that does not have the support of its own people. But the price of that lesson was too high.
     
    September 1992

 
    The Year of the Woman
     

     
    N EW YORK — The most conspicuous contradiction of the convention is the contrast between the Democrats’ “Year of the Woman” emphasis and the punishment tour Hillary Clinton is on. Here are the Democrats featuring one woman candidate after another—bragging about their Senate candidates, massing their House candidates for photo ops, Ann Richards chairing the convention, Barbara Jordan keynoting, all hands being pro-choice out the wazoo—and poor Hillary is assigned to the Cookie Wars.
    Family Circle
magazine started the cookie fight by distributing the chocolate chip cookie recipes of both Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton and asking people to vote on them. Sample batches of the cookies are being distributed, and partisan Democrats vote for Hillary’s chocolate chips without even tasting Mrs. Bush’s. Hillary Clinton, who is under orders from her husband’s handlers not to say anything controversial or even substantive, has taken on the cookie project with characteristic zeal and intensity. This woman now knows enough about the making and distribution of chocolate chip cookies to become the next Famous Amos. If Clinton loses in November, she can make her cookie business into a Fortune 500 corporation.
    But precisely because she