On not voting for Sen. McGovern in '72

In about 1970 or so, my very furious retired Air Force, Republican father wrote the Sioux Falls Argus Leader after it ran a photo during the Vietnam War. Dad cited Senator George McGovern with what he believed was the unforgivable offense of a civilian wearing a USAF flight suit.

The letters in the paper that followed afterwards accused Dad of nitpicking while he got volumes of support in the mail from the likes of the John Birch Society. Dad never forgot it: clearly I haven't either.

The episode eventually led Lawrence the Elder, whose often-close proximity to B-24s saw history's remembrance of George McGovern's military service as fabrication, to support fellow Strategic Air Command alum, Tom Daschle, through his entire career but gave up on voting after his home state turned Senator Daschle out for earth hater, John Thune. I should add that my father thought Bill Janklow was the Second Coming, so there's that....

In '71, after using Mom's Singer to sew an American flag upside-down on the back of a fatigue jacket from Korea that Dad had given me, he threw it into the burn barrel, poured gas on it and set it afire: that he didn't throw me in there too is testimony of his love for my mother. When she goes the rest of you will know why.

1972 was my first time to vote.

I was a stupid punk, had a very high draft number, ignored a Presidential appointment to the United States Air Force Academy (an entitlement for a dependent of CMSgt Lawrence E. Kurtz, USAF (Ret)) because Richard Fucking Nixon was the Commander-in-Chief; and, my glasses prevented me from being a pilot. Filling in the oval for Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate, was a protest to somebody else's failed democratic adolescence.

In other news: Fidel Castro and Russell Means not dead.

Update, 0800 MDT, 22 October: Tom Lawrence's piece at the Mitchell Daily Republic's blog and a post duly amended. AP story here.