Reading proofs, I run across a letter from a retired Army colonel who support Hillary Clinton — reason enough to buy Saturday’s paper right there.
The colonel mentions that Sen. Clinton was named an "unsung hero" of the 108th Congress by the American Legion for her support of veterans and military personnel. Indeed, she has worked across party lines — including with our own Lindsey Graham, on expanding health care for the National Guard and reservists — in behalf of veterans throughout her Senate tenure.
But how often do you hear that? Maybe she should tout that a little more. Maybe she would if she ever made it to a general election campaign, but that seems increasingly doubtful. While you can find a mention of the "unsung hero" honor at the bottom of a Clinton press release, you have to actively seek it out. If you just browse for it at her site, such things are tough to find. In fact, if you go to the pull-down menu on "Issues," only two headings seem to touch on military affairs directly or indirectly — "Ending the War in Iraq" and "Restoring America’s Standing in the World" (and the latter one doesn’t involve the military, beyond a vague promise to be "tough and smart in combating terrorism").
Perhaps it’s just the nature of seeking the Democratic nomination. Party loyalists aren’t actively hostile to the military the way the left was during Vietnam. In fact, today’s antiwar left goes out of its way to express approval for such "soft support" as health care and benefits, so these are safe and even laudable qualities to have. They’re just not front of mind, the way "ending the war" is.
The instances are quantitatively, and perhaps even qualitatively, different, but I’m reminded of something historian Stephen Ambrose once told his friend George McGovern:
…damn it, you were so busy trying to stop the Vietnam war that you never let the country know that you were a decorated combat pilot in World War II. If I had been running the campaign, I’d have made sure that every voter in the country knew you were a war hero while Nixon was a clerk far from any battle.
As I say, things are different today. If Sen. Clinton had a military record, she’d use it, not run from it.
But this train of thought, faulty though it may be, leads me to the great irony of the Clinton candidacy. She’s spent the last few years seizing opportunities to carve out centrist positions, working well across party lines to do so. A constant theme of her tenure in office has been Don’t be scared of me; I can play well with others.
And yet she finds herself in the position of being the last remaining option for the wing of her party that is least interested in accommodating Republicans on anything, while Obama scoops up the support of the kinds of centrist she’s been chasing all these years.
How did this happen? I don’t know, but it did. By the time the two Democratic front-runners arrived in South Carolina for the primary homestretch, the pattern was set — Obama was all about rising above party, while she was left with the most bitterly partisan portion of her party, and reduced to talking about "hope" as though it were a bad thing.
This is most assuredly not where she meant to end up. And yet here she is…
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The debacle of nominating George McGovern split the Democratic Party. The Vietnam War was started by Democrats, and many of them remained firm supporters of a victory there, especially the Southern Democrats. These, and the social moderates, refused to back McGovern.
That created an administrative vacuum which was filled by leftist radicals like Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham, John Kerry, Leon Paneta, etc, as a vehicle for their ambition. They know McGovern would lose and carry down lots of incumbents with him, which would be the start of their political careers.
Make no mistake. These people are still socialist radicals, still think America needs the UN bit in its mouth, and still have blind ambition and lust of personal power.
But the Republicans all poop rainbows, I suppose? Socialism, socialism, yadda yadda, but the rightwing model is akin to fascism. Look at the collusion between the GOP controlled government of the last 30 years and the disparity between increases in corporate profits versus growth of real wages for working people, the death of American manufacturing through outsourcing, corporations being allowed to shirk tax responsibilities through offshore shelters, and so on and so on.
And as for Vietnam, don’t forget (or maybe you should learn) that there was mucho futzing around with Vietnam during the Eisenhower administration–but to be fair, the problems went back to the Allies supporting Ho Chi Minh as a wedge against the Japaneses (shades of Saddam and Iran), the desire for the French to maintain their status as the colonial power in the region, and then later, for the military industrial complex to have a profit-making rubric in the absence of an actual shooting war. President Eisenhower warned us that such a fascistic plot was in the works, but nobody listened.
Fascism is a form of socialism, which grew out of an alliance with post-WWI liberals and socialists who rejected the international, one world socialism of Lenin and Trotsky.
Vietnam became a place for the USSR, Red China, and the USA to fight in a small theather, off their own soil. Then, as now, we had to show strength in order to avoid a larger scale agression. Then, as now, we had a fifth column at home who wanted us to not win a decisive victory, and many of them were financed by the KGB, as British historians have documented since the collapse of the USSR in 1990.
Where is that fifth column now that we need it? Losing in Vietnam was the best thing that has happened to this country in 50 years.
And yet she finds herself in the position of being the last remaining option for the wing of her party that is least interested in accommodating Republicans on anything, while Obama scoops up the support of the kinds of centrist she’s been chasing all these years.
How did this happen? I don’t know, but it did.
-Brad
It’s the dumbass press in conjunction with the vast right-wing conspiracy that painted her that way. Isn’t that obvious? Jeez Brad, use your brain for something other than a hat rack for a change.
Thanks for providing us with the “logical” explanation there, bud.
Personally, I’m still pondering the glorious benefits of “the best thing that has happened to this country in 50 years.”
Thank you for your frankness on that. I had INFERRED that you would believe that, but I would not have said so, because of my oft-stated belief that in this forum we should take each other at our respective words and not claim special knowledge of each others’ thought patterns.
A related point, bud: Do you also believe that losing in Iraq is a consummation to be wished for or welcomed — a “good thing” for the country?
The same bunch of 60s radicals who believed the Viet Cong were their team, are applying the same template to Iraq. A lot of it is just a continuation of their lifelong rationalization of their being wrong about Vietnam and every other communist thug they supported for the last 40 years.
And basically, I’m trying not to do what Lee just did, a form of accusatory assertion that I do all I can to discourage here — the proverbial “the same people who say X also think Y, and therefore that’s what YOU really think, no matter what you say.”
That’s why I’m asking bud what he actually thinks in this regard.
I already named some of those same 60s radicals who were financed by the KGB: Bill Clinton
Hillary Rodham
John F. Kerry
Leon Paneta
Ira Magaziner
Jerry Rubin
There are lots more, famous Democrats now, and unknown Democrats now. I raised an honest point that is not an assertion, but a proven fact, proven by written records and interviews with KGB agents who handled the various anti-war groups in America.
When I see someone mouthing the same slogans that came from the USSR, I ask if they know the source of their opinions.
By losing in Vietnam it should have been clear to all concerned that these types of wars do not result in horrible consequences if they are lost. World War I represents the opposite side of that coin. The allies won that war but really didn’t benefit because of it. In a sense it was a good lesson to learn that losing doesn’t equate to disaster and that lesson was a good thing. Now that we know that losing is not the calamity that pro-war folks would have us believe we can seek a reasonable end to the occupation of Iraq without focusing on the irrelevant notion of winning.
The capture of Vietnam and Cambodia by communism resulted in the murder of more than 6,000,000 men, women and children in an ideological cleansing. While that might not be horrible to a white liberal watching MTV, it was horrible to the victims and their families.
Tell you what, Bud. If losing is an acceptable outcome, my golf game has been quite acceptable lately.
I’ll support Bud here but by offering a different way of phrasing it. I’ve always thought it’s inaccurate to say America “lost” the Vietnam War. We could have raised the stakes more and more, sent more troops in, bombed more and more, and ultimately gone nuclear. The point is we as a nation reached a national consensus where it was clear to a majority of people that the cost to our nation was not worth the “benefit,” that in fact the very premise of being there in the first place was in severe doubt.
In that sense, the political awakening that took place in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s that led to our withdrawal from Vietnam was part-and-parcel of the same political wave that resulted in immense progress for our nation in the realm of civil rights and women’s rights (witness for example Dr. King’s growing transformation from civil rights leader to outspoken antiwar activist).
In that sense, I think of those political movements as some of America’s finest hours. So I agree with Bud. The movement that led to our leaving Vietnam was one of the best things that happened to America in the post WWII era.
My guess is that Phillip and bud weren’t even born during the 1960s, and only know the myths fed to them by the radicals who found employment as permanent students of the education system.
There was almost no opposition to the Vietnam War among young people until President Johnson ended draft deferments for graduate school, and started calling up every undergraduate who dropped out or flunked out. Suddenly, the grad students and professors were all concerned about themselves, but talked a good game about a sudden awareness of others. They ginned up all kinds of lies about how “poor whites and blacks were doing the fighting”, and that the communists were innocent people trying to reclaim their homelands, etc, ad nauseum.
My guess is that Phillip and bud weren’t even born during the 1960s, and only know the myths fed to them by the radicals who found employment as permanent students of the education system.
-Lee
And as usual Lee you are wrong. I lived through the 60s. The pro-war hawks of that era, many of whom were Democrats, kept feeding us a bunch of baloney about falling dominoes and a world takeover by the Communists. Of course none of it happened. The situation with Iraq today is the same. Everyone talks of gloom and doom if we leave Iraq. I didn’t buy it in 1969 and I don’t buy it now. It’s nothing but a bunch of scare tactics that has no basis in fact. There is simply no reason to believe any of the crap we keep hearing from the pro-war chickenhawks.
You were wrong then, and wrong now.
The dominos did fall after the Democrats promised aid military to South Vietnam and then double-crossed them.
South Vietnam fell under control of North Vietnam and Red China, and they murdered more people than were killed during the 20 years of war.
Cambodia fell under control of communists in the Khmer Rouge, who murdered millions of civilians.
Emboldened communists from Cuba set up communist dictators in Nicaragua, and sent troops to help communists in Angola, the Congo, South Africa and Rhodesia topple those governments, killing millions of Africans. The murders and starvations continue today.
Most white liberals only cared about getting back to grad school, rock concerts, bars, and Yuppie materialism.
Oil tops $104 for the first time
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Oil prices topped $104 a barrel Wednesday for the first time ever after a government report said supplies of crude fell significantly last week, instead of rising as expected.
U.S. light crude for April delivery reached $104.56, beating the previous the all-time intraday high of $103.95 set Monday. It eased slightly to $104.40, up $4.88 on the session.
-The Oildrum
While we continue to dither over trivial stuff like “Hillary’s McGovern problem” the world keeps right on spinning. We’re going to be in for one helluva summer if oil prices continue to rise. Why is nobody discussing this? At least on this issue the two parties are equally guilty.
Hillary and Obama aren’t discussing oil prices because they cannot do anything about it, except to drill more and build more refineries.