151 Comments

1. Catherine:

Roger

I’m curious as to why you term Rosenbaum’s essay a “thumbsucker”?

Haven’t read it yet, but I’ve read a lot of Rosenbaum, and don’t remember him writing thumbsuckers (although anyone who writes frequently has to write them from time to time).

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:31 am 2. Roger:

What I mean is a long article consdiering an issue for several angles. Anyway, that’s my definition. I don’t regard this as good or bad, merely descriptive.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:34 am 3. Catherine:

Well, I’ve just read the first couple of paragraphs and he’s sure saying what I think—and what more than one person has posted here, WEEKS prior to Rosenbaum taking up the theme!

Or should I say meme?

spaced repetition

The healing books:

Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster

The Culture of Defeat : On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Jefferson Chase (Translator)

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:36 am 4. Catherine:

Five or six million dead, and we still donít have a consensus on what went wrong and why.

This sentence is so precise, penetrating, and unsparing in its brevity Terrye could have written it.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:40 am 5. Eric Deamer:

Catherine:

Rosenbaum is a heavy, heavy reader of blogs, so I’m not surprised.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:40 am 6. Catherine:

I immediately switched destinations for the domestic Yale Drama School. I was far too anti-war to consider otherwise. Kerry chose the Navy. Anti-war/pro-war… who knows? We still don’t

I’m going to run this by my husband again.

He has certainly confirmed Roger’s description of the situation then; he says anyone who wanted a deferrment got one, which was not the case later on, when his number was up.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:43 am 7. Catherine:

Eric Deamer

Wow!

Could we have influenced him?

Have other blogs been talking about the need for a consensus on Vietnam? (I assume they have, but haven’t read them—-)

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:52 am 8. Catherine:

Eric

Which blogs does he read?

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:53 am 9. Catherine:

My objection to Mr. McNamaraÔøΩs mea culpa in the film has to do with his silence after he left his Defense Secretary post in 1967, and until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, despite knowing certainly by 1967 that the war could not be wonÔøΩ

This is the problem, right here.

This is why the entire country needs to take one week off and read McMaster’s book.

McNamara and his very small band of colleagues did not intend to win the war from the very beginning.

It’s not that they went into the war in good faith, planning to win; they launched the war with no intention of winning.

And btw, I realize that Eisenhower sent “advisors” to Vietnam.

Nevertheless, it was JFK, working with McNamara, and subsequently LBJ, working with McNamara, who started the war in the sense of committing the lives of American soldiers.

They committed the lives of America soldiers to a war they did not intend to win, and they adopted a strategy the Joint Chiefs advised them could not win.

Worse, they misled the Joint Chiefs about the war’s goal, and the Joint Chiefs acquiesced in being misled.

The discoveries McMaster made in the course of researching his book–new archives had just been opened up–are analogous to the “discovery” that John Kerry opposed the war before he enlisted.

It makes all the difference in the world.

We are not going to have consensus until McMaster’s book has been read and absorbed.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:02 am 10. Catherine:

condemned Mr. McNamara for his silence after 1967, “when he too realized ÔøΩ that the dissidents were right” and that the war was “wasting lives atrociously.”

McMaster shows that McNamara knew that the war was “wasting lives atrociously” from the beginning.

“Wasting” lives was the point.

It showed the world that America could “bleed.”

As early as 1965 (I believe it was–certainly no later than 1966) LBJ’s inner circle of advisors had dropped the goal of protecting South Vietnam from a Communist takeover had been dropped, without telling the Joint Chiefs, without telling the Congress, and without telling the American people.

But I think Mr. Kerry made a calculation that it was more important, that he would save more lives from being wasted, by speaking out against the futility of this war.

I don’t see that in John Kerry, or in his 1971 testimony, which I have watched in full.

I could be wrong.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:12 am 11. PeterArgus:

Catherine:

In addition to the books you recommend I would also add a A Better War by Lewis Sorley. I read Dereliction of Duty upon recommendation of my father who served in Vietnam in 1967 and really found it informative. A Better War takes up where Dereliction left off – the war from Tet 68 on. I am over 1/2 way through and have been absolutely bowled over by it. Sorley states quite bluntly that by 1970 “the war was won” due largely to supply interdiction efforts and a very aggressive pacification program. I must say that before I read this book I discounted the Iraq=Vietnam meme. Now I am not so sure but not for the anti-war crowd’s reasons. There ARE lessons to learn from Vietnam both in terms of failure AND success which are applicable to any war in which “hearts and minds” must be won.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:17 am 12. Catherine:

Roger

What I mean is a long article consdiering an issue for several angles.

Oh!

Just saw this.

You might want to do an “Update” to the original post, because I’m 99% certain that “thumbsucker” means the kind of column people write when they have to meet a deadline and have nothing new to say.

I’m trying to think of some good examples.

Friedman writes a fair number of thumbsuckers, and I hope to heck he doesn’t stumble across this comment, because I do like his work.

Thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .

OK, here’s a good example.

A typical thumbsucker for a twice-weekly political columnist would be a column decrying partisan politics. (Brooks has written some non-thumbsuckers on this subject, pegged to new research on the subject of partisan politics in America. A thumbsucker on partisan politics has nothing new to add, but instead spends 300 words saying: Partisan Politics Bad. Me No Like.)

No one can keep up the pace of two columns a week. I think that’s where the term originates. (Though, as always, I could be wrong . . . )

Assuming I’m right, Rosenbaum’s article is anything but—-!

It’s wonderful; I’m so glad you linked to it.

Terrific.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:22 am 13. jerry:

Catherine:

I think LBJ gets too much blame for what went wrong in Vietnam. The war was not his top priority, Civil Rights, the War on Poverty an the Space Program were. JFKís advisors and policy trapped him in a situation where he felt compelled to continue his martyred processorís policies. He could have changed horses but Johnson was in fact intimidated by the Harvard brainpower. For the life of me I cannot understand why a war that was started by Kennedy became Nixon’s war in the minds of the country.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:29 am 14. Roger:

Okay, Catherine, I changed it to the generic “article,” but fyi the “word spy” (whoever he or she is) says this:

“thumbsucker (THUM.suk.ur; thi as in thin) n. Journalist’s term for a lengthy story or opinion piece based on a vast, complex topic; a journalist who writes such articles.”

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:32 am 15. Catherine:

PeterArgus

Thanks for adding that.

I’ve been “suspecting” that Lewis Sorley should be my next stop.

As well, we should probably all read Eliot Cohen’s review of McMaster (I believe he discusses the “tricky” issue of writing a history of the Vietnam War that ends in 1965).

I have actually undertaken a project of finally deciding where I “am” on Vietnam, lo these many years later.

Although I was “against” the war when I was in high school, I didn’t know what I was talking about, and what’s more I knew I didn’t know what I was talking about.

So my against status never really took.

I ended up being an agnostic on the subject, which I’ve come to realize only recently is a huge emotional and cultural difference between my husband and me. I missed being in the Vietnam generation by as little as one year or perhaps two, but that’s enough.

I started with McMaster, and am now reading Braestrup’s THE BIG STORY which is an account of press reporting on Tet.

It, too, is a terrific book–wonderfully written, with a compelling voice–but I’ve found it a bit slower going than DERELICTION. (This may be due to the fact that I read DERELICTION while on vacation . . . )

In any case, given the “culture wars,” I need a clear account of what actually happened with the press in Vietnam. Everyone–right, left & center–takes it for granted that Walter Cronkite lost the war. (Or some variant thereof.)

No one gives any evidence to prove it.

I must say that before I read this book I discounted the Iraq=Vietnam meme. Now I am not so sure but not for the anti-war crowd’s reasons.

No kidding. McMaster instilled more than a couple of doubts in my own mind, though Bush & co. differ so profoundly from LBJ that I felt reassured to a degree as well.

Cohen’s review is here:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_n51/ai_20633208/print

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:38 am 16. Catherine:

Jerry

I think LBJ gets too much blame for what went wrong in Vietnam. The war was not his top priority, Civil Rights, the War on Poverty an the Space Program were.

Bingo.

That is McMaster’s thesis, almost.

LBJ did not want Vietnam to get in the way of his domestic legislation, so he incrementally increased troops as a way to keep the Joint Chiefs mollified while not drawing fire from Congress or the American people.

The incremental increase, called “graduated pressure,” was exactly what the Joint Chiefs told him not to do; it was a precise formula for ending up where he ended up, in over his head, and out of office.

(The Joint Chiefs advised a “hard knock” instead graduated pressure; they thought the goal was the traditional military goal of “destroying the enemy’s will and capability.”)

You almost have to read the book to believe what went on.

LBJ ramped up a war in a foreign land as a means of keeping the focus on his domestic program.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:45 am 17. WichitaBoy:

I think Rosenbaum is mistaken to believe that Kerry necessarily has a coherent set of thoughts or a coherent conclusion to give us about Vietnam. In all likelihood he has a conflicting set of thoughts and emotions based on a conflicting reality.

Why is everyone so certain that there is a single truth which we can extract from Vietnam and be done with it? Reality is far messier than that.

Speaking for myself, I’m not quite clear from day to day how I feel about my car, my job, or the clothes I wear (among many other things). My thoughts and opinions change daily, based on the weather, based on how much sleep I got, based on other pressures bearing down on me from various places. Things which seemed terribly important one day seem utterly trivial after hearing tales of a certain school in Russia. Isn’t everyone like this? Why should Kerry be any different?

And why should the Vietnam War suddenly settle itself into nice neat platitudes? Let’s just say we were for it before we were against it.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:48 am 18. Catherine:

Roger

Journalist’s term for a lengthy story or opinion piece based on a vast, complex topic; a journalist who writes such articles

Wow!

Interesting.

I’ll have to watch how people use the term in the future . . . (I’ve only seen it used negatively, so I’m glad you changed it for Rosenbaum in any case. Whether his article is technically a thumbsucker or not, it’s definitely worth reading . . . )

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:48 am 19. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Jerry

There is no doubt in my mind that LBJ is more responsible for the loss of that war than anyone else. He was the boss – he could have gotten other advisors. But he played half-heartedly at the war, always too afraid of Chinese intervention. He lied consistently and had his man Westmoreland doing the same thing.

I think it became Nixon’s War because the already rapidly growing anti-war movement had to go after Nixon once LBJ was gone. If one wants to name it by genesis, I think JFK would be the person most responsible, with his increased intervention and his approval of the anti-Diem coup.

A Better War is well worth reading. It shows the radical change in tactics under Creighton Abrams, and how that led to a winnable situation by 1970. However, by 1970 the critical war front was in the US – in the streets and congress. This is one of the reasons that Kerry’s behavior is so wrong – the communists had decided that they could only win by breaking our will, something Kerry was happy to do, and which in fact led to the loss and the deaths of millions.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:48 am 20. John Pearley Huffman:

Imagine a world where John Kerry had just told a story like this from the onset of his public life and stuck to it:

“I opposed the war while an undergraduate at Yale and didn’t want to go to Vietnam. But when I couldn’t secure a deferment, I joined the Navy in hope that I could serve without risking combat — or having to kill another person. But when the swift boats to which I was assigned were moved from the coast to river patrol, I found myself amid some intense action. I’m not glad I went to Vietnam, but I did my duty in the best way I could and take pride in that and the fellowship of the men with whom I served. And I feel I continued to serve this country when I came back and actively opposed the war.”

I think that sounds honorable and has the huge advantage of also sounding honest. But instead Kerry has inflated his exploits, infuriated his comrades in arms and every time he opens his mouth he seems to be squirming around the truth.

Maybe genuine modesty is too much to expect from anyone with the temerity to run for President. But even some false modesty would have worked better for Kerry. It seems like that sure would have made his story a lot easier to believe.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:49 am 21. chuck:

Jerry:

For the life of me I cannot understand why a war that was started by Kennedy became Nixon’s war in the minds of the country.

Yeah, I always thought that was odd too. If I recall, Nixon was elected to *finish* the war. Perhaps it is because that was the time period in which the Democrats took on their pacifist bent, and choose to transfer their “shameful” past onto other shoulders. Sam Nunn was elected in 1972, and the Democratic party was not yet dominated by the leftists, but the party of Roosevelt was on its way out.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:49 am 22. chuck:

John Pearley Huffman :

Beautifully said! If Kerry had taken that approach I think he would have mollified both wings of the party. But then, if Kerry had done that, he would not be Kerry, he would be a real person, not someone groping for definition.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:58 am 23. jerry:

John:

The CINC is always responsible, I understand that but sometimes the CINC is trapped in circumstances beyond his cosmic control. Shakespeare and Tolstoy had a lot to say about that.

I do not hold LBJ blameless, I merely have a great deal sympathy for his dilemma.

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:02 pm 24. Sun-Tzu:

Jerry/Chuck:

According to anti-Vietnam War friends, while they hold LBJ responsible for getting the United States into the war, they hold Nixon responsible for prolonging it.

From their comments, it would seem that their view is as follows:

Everyone knew that the war was going badly by 1968. Nixon defeated Humphrey by claiming he had a “secret plan to end the war.” (I know, and they know, that he said no such thing, but the perception….)

His “secret plan,” in their eyes, was to prolong the war through ‘72, drawing it down but not ending it, costing the US lives in the process. Thus, their sense of betrayal that the US could “end” the war in 1973, AFTER the ‘72 elections, rather than, say, in ‘69, after the ‘68 elections.

Personally, I find this line of argument unpersuasive, but I thought it addressed the question of why Vietnam is considered Nixon’s more than LBJ’s war.

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:16 pm 25. DerekCA:

Roger,

Two things:

1) Rosenbaum needs an editor. In his case a ‘thumbsucker’ takes up too much space. I subscribe to the NYO and used to look forward to his columns. Not any more.

2) The real reason (IMHO) no one has a clue as to what went on in Vietnam is that our national interest was swayed by communist propaganda relayed through a gullible press. In order to wage a successful war in a media driven world, we need the press on our side. They were not on our side then and they are not on our side now.

As an aside: the downfall of our effort in Vietnam was the result of the first JFK’s mistake: to announce the draw-down of troops, as admitted to by McNamara in Fog Of War, but obscured by JFK’s assasination soon after. We telegraphed our intentions and the military coup which followed was the result. That left south Vietnam with a choice between a Saddam-like military dictatorship and a Stalinist regime selling power to the people.

Now the democrats would have us elect a guy who has already telegraphed his intentions to cut and run in the face of an enemy who expects us to do that very same thing. AaaRRGGGHHH!

And the press in in full-court press to make it happen again!

Derek

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:21 pm 26. Eric Deamer:

Catherine:

I’ve seen him make direct reference to Instapundit, Kausfiles, Buzzmachine (Jeff Jarvis), Andrew Sullivan, and Meryl Yourish, as well as non-political blogs like Gawker and whatevs.org

I’ve said before that I thought Ron Rosenbaum should be a columnist who is heavily embraced by bloggers in the way that say Christopher Hitchens and Mark Steyn are embraced. The title of his column, “The Edgy Enthusiast” sounds like the name of a blog. The graphic at the top of it (only in the dead-tree of NYO) even looks like the banner for a blog. It’s also the most blog-like writing I’ve seen in print, a mixture of politics, culture, and personal diary. He frequently makes reference to internet-only pieces and prints the URL out. In fact, he always gives the URL if something is available on-line at all.

He is very positive about the effect of blogging phenomenon. He wrote a column about a year ago that I thought was a fascinating discussion of how old media should respond to corrections by blogs. The taking off point was the Scott Turow book Irreversible Errors. His idea was essentially that part of the problem with old-line journalists was that there is this huge professional stigma associated with making a mistake. Once a mistake appears in print it’s thought to be in essence an “irreversible” error and a big blot on the journalist’s record. That’s why publications marshall all these defenses of their mistake after the fact. Nowadays, with the speed at which something can be published and/or amended, he thinks they need to drop this mentality and admit their mistakes immediately, more like bloggers. He solicited answers from bloggers on what would be the most intellectually honest way of handling the situation. For instance, should publications put out an entirely new version of the story (which would mean that there are two versions floating around in cyberspace and, in the case of a print publication, that the bad version is already out there) or should they simply correct the original piece at the original URL? In that case, how should they annotate the fact that a mistake was made, if at all? Unfortunately, no bloggers took him up on that dialogue I think.

Re: Thumbsucker

Since, with blogging, we’re all “journalists” now (whatever that means), I’ve noticed more and more people using journalist jargon without really knowing what it means, including myself. I wonder if the goal should be for everyone to figure out the proper way to use these words, or to simply do away with this kind of jargon altogether. I think it starts because a lot of bloggers who started as old media journalists, like Micky Kaus and Jeff Jarvis, use the words. Some of them, I think are complete crap, especially the ones that are phonetic short hands for normal words that came into use for some reason that I’m either to young or too out of the loop to understand, like the odious “lede” for “lead”, and “graf” for “paragraph”. Some of them might be more useful. My understanding of “Thumbsucker” was always closer to Roger’s than yours, but I do think the word contains a hint of derision. If it simply means a long, thoughtful article, than everything Rosenbaum writes for the Observer is a thumbsucker. I think the traditional term for what he does is “literary journalism”, though he prefers “JOI”, for “journalism of ideas”.

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:28 pm 27. jerry:

Derek:

The JFK decision to drawdown troops was not because he thought the war was unwinnable, but because he was told the war was going well. Actually, it looked like we were winning the war in 1963. This part of JFK mythology was created to absolve him from responsiblity for the later decision to escalate. In fact the JFK approved the Coup against Diem because he was told that Diem was messing things up and creating sympathy for the VC. It is very unlikely that had the war followed the same path that Kennedy would have gone through with a withdrawal. If anything he probably would have gone Nixon on North Vietnam.

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:29 pm 28. chuck:

Sun Tzu:

Personally, I find this line of argument unpersuasive, but I thought it addressed the question of why Vietnam is considered Nixon’s more than LBJ’s war.

I too find it unpersuasive. Nixon was despised by Democrats long before 1968, nor was there ever any support for Nixon among the antiwar crowd to be betrayed. I’m of the opinion your friend(s) are just rationalizing an irrational position.

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:32 pm 29. DerekCA:

Jerry,

Thanks for the info. I was basing my perspective soley on the FOG film.

My real point is the role of the media in swaying opinion. Just look at Tet! We won and because a news reader said we lost, we all thought we lost.

Even though it sounds McCarthy about the press, we only need to look at Duranty to know that the propaganda thing is true.

Only now we have entire generation of MSM workers who’ve swallowed the “Amerika Imperialist” trash that Moore/Franken/MoveOn vomits up to enrich themselves.

Derek

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:38 pm 30. syn:

I was twelve in 1971, Kerry has opened the wounds of shame I had hidden away these past thirty years. I realize today that I have never been able to get over the shame I have felt towards the manner in which America treated her returning soldiers. America preferred to follow kerry’s fabricated stories of our American soldiers as war criminals on the level of “Genghis Khan” thus ensuing a hatred upon our soldiers like no other. Our returning soldiers were spat upon, riduculed as baby killers and alone, were left to defend their honor from unwarranted dishonor.

For me, the 1970’s happens to be the worst decade of my life. Kerry is a reminder of my shame and of America’s shame.

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:38 pm 31. Eric Deamer:

Rosenbaum needs an editor. In his case a ‘thumbsucker’ takes up too much space. I subscribe to the NYO and used to look forward to his columns. Not any more.

Them’s fightin’ words goldernit! If you don’t look forward to his columns then why on earth do you subscribe? For Robert Sam Anson’s weekly 5,000-word puff piece on John Kerry? For Phillip Weiss’s latest anti-Israel diatribe? For Joe Conason’s latest recitation of that week’s talking points beamed to him from Moveon.org? For Gail Sheehy’s continuous flogging of outlandish “Bush knew!!!” conspiracy theories through her exploitation of the “4 moms from New Jersey” whom she turned into media darlings and uses routinely as political props?

I mean, I guess you could content yourself with the thought that you get Rick Brookhiser every two weeks, and occasionally Bruce Feirstein says something sensible, and there’s Moira Hodgson’s excellent food writing. Or, maybe you can read

“8-day week” and think about how hot Noelle Hancock is. (I mean, have you seen a picture? yowza!)

And, don’t even get me started on Rex “Yes folks, he’s still alive” Reed.

Rosenbaum is about the only reason to subscribe. (George Gurley’s things are short enough that you can read them on-line at work.)

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:44 pm 32. chuck:

syn,

I really don’t hold Kerry responsible for causing all that. It was around, and Kerry took part, and tried to define himself with it. I think it is part of a pattern in Kerry’s life of seeking approval, without having any real opinions/personality of his own. It’s why he looks so phony, flip-floppish, and yes, pitiable.

By the bye, I also recall that after Nixon abolished the draft, there was a decrease in protests. It made me cynical about the motives of the “antiwar” protesters. Well, that, and spending a drizzly morning outside the Soviet embassy protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia without seeing hardly anybody else. And then there was Pol Pot, and no protest there either.

I don’t think it was ever much about the morality of the war, just that it interfered with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and was the hip thing to do, like wearing bellbottoms, miniskirts, and sandals. Speaking of which, bellbottoms and miniskirts seem to be in an up phase. Who can complain about miniskirts?

Sep 8, 2004 - 12:57 pm 33. DerekCA:

Eric,

I look forward to Brookhiser, enjoy Andrew Sarris’ movie reviews, and live for Simon Doonan.

Also, I marvel at the stupidity of people like Conason.

All in all, one can get the pulse of what NY limosine liberals really think without the faux intellectualism of the NYT.

I still read Rosenbaum, but he needs an editor! Jeesh!

But also, I like knowing the dirt on the publication industry. And, the book reviews are a scream. Recently, a group review (gangbang?)of blow-hard Dylan-ology had me in tears.

Derek

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:04 pm 34. Catherine:

John Moore & everyone

However, by 1970 the critical war front was in the US – in the streets and congress

This is essentially McMaster’s argument (I don’t think I’m misstating).

He doesn’t discuss any events after 1964, and his book is a diplomatic, not a military, history. He doesn’t take a position on whether the war was winnable, or whether it had in fact been won in all but name, in 1970 or any other time.

But he clearly states that by 1968 the political support necessary to fight and win a war had been lost.

For that he blames JFK, LBJ, Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The irony here is that once again John Kerry, simply by virtue of his campaign, is (probably) helping to depress political will.

OTOH, it’s important to point out that McMaster explicitly argues that the war was not lost on the campuses or at the NEW YORK TIMES.

The war was lost in Washington.

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:11 pm 35. Catherine:

WichitaBoy

Why is everyone so certain that there is a single truth which we can extract from Vietnam and be done with it? Reality is far messier than that

Well, maybe so, but McMaster is a guy who has achieved Maximum Clarity.

Isn’t everyone like this?

I don’t think so . . . BUT YOU COULD BE RIGHT!

I’m dogmatic as hell myself, although I do listen to reason (I try) and I fact-check myself a lot, too.

My husband is also dogmatic as hell, so in my world NOBODY THINKS ONE THING TODAY AND ANOTHER THING TOMORROW, EVER.

We occupy a highly conflictual completely and totally non-messy reality around here.

Until your post it hadn’t occurred to me that that probably has its advantages.

In any case, insofar as I understand “cultural history” and “civil religion” and all, countries do need to arrive at a shared narrative of major events like the Vietnam War.

We have a shared narrative concerning the American Revolution (definitely a messy reality there), the Civil War (messier and messier), and World Wars I & II.

We need to create one about Vietnam, too.

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:25 pm 36. Catherine:

Eric Deamer

I love Rosenbaum, and used to subscribe to the OBSERVER almost for him alone. (I canceled my subscription a few days after 9-11, immediately after reading Conason’s bitter denunciation of Bush, Republicans & Star Wars on grounds that missile defense wouldn’t have stopped 9-11. The paper obviously got zillions of complaints, because Conason wrote what was essentially an apology and a retraction in his next column, as I recall.)

I encountered the term “thumbsucker,” which I for one would not want to retire, applied to a TIMES columnist, quite possibly the aforementioned Tom Friedman.

So probably the evolutionary history of the term is long-thought-piece to short-non-thought-piece by ludicrously overexposed NYTIMES columnist.

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:31 pm 37. Birkel:

Let me say this, the North Vietnamese command was within three days of suing for peace just after the Tet Offensive which was a huge military victory for the U.S. It was LBJ that called off the aerial bombing campaign that was unfettered by NVA air or land fire. He deserves a lot of credit for stopping for coffee and a scone while on the way to victory. He was a moron and a boob domestically and overseas.

Otherwise, the hand-wringing over Iraq qua Viet Nam is overborne. The Soviet Union and China were both supplying and financing Vietnamese forces. Although Iran/Syria is certainly performing the same function the financial and military might they can wield in this venture is nowhere near that of USSR/China. Additionally, China and the USSR had many more people to contribute and greater military expertise to volunteer.

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:36 pm 38. Sandy P:

OT but via Lucianne:

President Bush emerged from the Republican National Convention with a surge of support that, if it lasts, would give him a solid win in Arizona, a new Arizona Republic Poll shows. A survey of 600 likely voters found that if the election were held now, Bush would sweep Democratic Sen. John Kerry by 54-38 percent. The 16-point gap was a dramatic shift…

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:36 pm 39. Catherine:

DereckCA

The real reason (IMHO) no one has a clue as to what went on in Vietnam is that our national interest was swayed by communist propaganda relayed through a gullible press

The press was for the war in Vietnam.

They turned against it as they began to realize that, yes, the country had been “misled.”

Here is McMaster:

The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.

Braestrup, in THE BIG STORY, says the same.

He says the press radically blew the Tet story, and his book is a lengthy and detailed examination of how, exactly, that happened.

But the media’s univerally negative and wrong coverage of Tet did not change public support for the war.

Every public opinion poll taken at the time shows public support remaining steady before, during and after Tet.

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:41 pm 40. chuck:

Birkel,

The word moron is getting overused and losing its flavor. Here’s a list of other words that I think we should try in its place to spice up the conversation.

Moron:

ass, fool, idiot, imbecile, jackass, mooncalf, nincompoop, ninny, nitwit, simple, simpleton, softhead, tomfool. Informal : dope, gander, goose. Slang : cretin, ding-dong, dip, goof, jerk, nerd, schmo, schmuck, turkey.

I do think the inclusion of nerd is uncalled for ;-}

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:44 pm 41. Fresh Air:

John Pearley H.–

You left out the part about Kerry bitching and moaning about being sent to do dangerous riverine patrols. The Swiftees talk about that in U for C. He complained so much that his commander transfered him from CosDiv 11 to CosDiv 13 just to get Kerry out of his hair.

Catherine–

I too subscribed to the Observer for years. I canceled it after their disgusting, holier-than-thou editorial screed on the eve of the Iraq war. But Rosenbaum is a real intellectual (and I don’t mean that in a bad way). His column Goodbye to All That, reflecting his disgust with the Left post-9/11 is well-worth reading.

Eric D–

I graduated from J-school in 1987 and I never saw “lead” written as “lede.” Every now and then I did see “graf,” though it was usually “graph.”

Sep 8, 2004 - 1:52 pm 42. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

DeBorchgrave describes how the press blew the Tet story, Chronkite’s critical and dishonest part of it, and how easy it would have been for them to fact check.

When Cronkite called it a victory, Johnson decided he was lost and decided to pull out. That’s pretty direct cause and effect between MSM and the loss.

When the enemy saw the response, they scrubbed their plan to sue for peace, and instead adopted a strategy of breaking America’s will.

As I remember it, America still had a lot of support for the war when the Democrats captured congress and forced the cut-off of aid to the South, and forced the prohibition of US military support.

The anti-war movement was complex. It ranged from dedicated radicals of various ideological stripes (the Maoists seemed the most idiotic to me) to useful idiots – college kids who feld pacifistic. Some of the movements became violent – the most infamous was the Weatherman faction of the SDS. Others were violent only in demonstrations or not violent at all. I watched the violent sects drive away (by threat of force) the peace and love and flowers organizers of a 300,000 person demonstration that ended at the San Francisco polo grounds. Since most of the demonstrators were more into peace and love and flowers (especially certain kinds), the demonstration fell apart.

Once the draft was ended, the anti-war movement collapsed. The more radical went on to become very violent – bank robberies, murders, bombings – while I everyone else moved on to the next phase of their careers or the hippie culture or whatever.

I had a college roommate who was a member of YSA. Downstairs was a drug dealer saving up to buy a bookstore (which he later did). Across the street was surveillance of some sort – we never figured out if it was FBI or narcs. In any case, I held a SECRET clearance at the time. This wasn’t in Berkeley, it was Lawrence, KS.

The culture wandered into some strange directions in those years.

People were still fighting in Vietnam then.

One thing to remember as we contemplate Vietnam, is the fate of the Vietnamese and what we did to them. The anti-war folks are remembering various numbers of Vietnamese civilians killed. They need to remember those killed after the communists won. They need to understand that most South Vietnamese were anti-communist, having seen the consequences of the communist takeover of the north in 1956. They need to remember that this was not an anti-colonial war or a civil war, it was a communist war of domination. After the takeover, the few VC in the South, and the members of the PRG, found that they were not given any power, and some went to ‘re-education’ camps.

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:00 pm 43. Cecil Turner:

From a military perspective, Vietnam was a difficult problem. The indigenous population is surprisingly large (over 40 million then, nearly 80 million now), the enemy was organized and experienced, with significant popular support, and the terrain favored insurgents. In addition, having to avoid approaching the Chinese border (since nobody wanted a repeat of 1950) hampered operations in the North. But most importantly, their seasoned propaganda corps played our media like a Stradivarius.

Johnson took a bad situation and made the worst of it. His telegraphed punches and graduated bombing campaign allowed the North to disperse strategic assets and convinced them we lacked the will to pursue the war effectively. McNamara’s half-hearted incompetence provided proof. Worst of all, they dragged it out and gave the propaganda attack time to ripen.

If by “winnable” we mean a unified free Vietnam, it may not have been possible. But a military stalemate similar to Korea almost certainly was. In any event, the war wasn’t lost until Congress cut off funding, ammunition, and the promise of air support in 1975.

To hear McNamara admit he wasn’t fighting to win 30 years on was infuriating. Obviously he considered his political fortunes more important than the lives of men he sent in harm’s way . . . truly despicable. Kerry and Jane Fonda vacillated between “useful idiots” and “traitors.” It’s a great pity the Constitution makes treason so difficult to prove. IMHO we ought to’ve had the trial anyway.

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:24 pm 44. Buddy Larsen:

Quickie back to the top, if you had a high (or was it low?) selective service lottery number, you were going to be “called up” and if you passed the physical and qualified for no deferments (the student deferment was genesis of “blue-collar combat”) you were drafted and the Army put you where it needed you. Didn’t mean Vietnam automatically (there was Germany, Japan, U.S.), but infantry & Vietnam was the way to bet, late 60s/early 70s. So, if you were going to be drafted, and had another preference besides jungle combat, you volunteered, and thereby earned the right to pick your branch, along with all the choice available. So, young John Kerry was going in, whether he volunteered or not. Incidentally, Chuck is right, only a small part of the antiwar movement was “political”, it was much more a fashion statement, wrapped up with dope, Beatles, jargon, and hair. I speak with UT/Austin, late 60s/early 70s, verisimilitude. By and large, 60s/70s Kerry ought to get a pass, as less spineless than most of his demographic in those days of thinking you were Che’ by just avoiding getting a job.

The real Kerry problem is that he is repeating the sort of cavalier attitude about America and the future that so m,any of us had back in the previous era. That would be fine if we hadn’t been proven–that’s proven–wrong, and people-got-killed wrong, the first time. Now we have a peace party again, which after you cut through all the fog is a de-facto ally of the baby-bayoneters of the little red schoolhouse. And why would millions of decent Americans align that way? Because a fairly small cadre of professional politicians want to be in higher office, and are using, like con artists do, the best qualities of trust and enthusiasm and generosity of those who listen to them, in order to get what it is they want. All I can say is, if you believe what these pols are saying, then you either have no knowledge of recent history, or you’re in one way or another self-dealing–which’d get you fired or ostracized anywhere but in politics.

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:35 pm 45. Catherine:

The issue of the press is another reason why we need to arrive at some kind of consensus or shared narrative concerning Vietnam.

As a “newbie” I’ve been struck by the “fear and loathing” conservatives almost universally feel for the press.

I can understand the loathing, to a degree. I get mad myself.

But over the past couple of years I’ve become puzzled by the fear.

From my perspective, conservatives sometimes speak and write almost as if they were living in Orwell’s 1984; in a society where the truth of matters is daily and even hourly erased by a Big Brother MSM.

I don’t say this to be insulting, and I hope no one here will feel insulted.

If you look back at our commenters’ reactions to the first Swift Boat ad, I think you’ll see what I mean. Almost across the board, commenters here assumed the MSM had the power simply to banish the Swifties to the dustheap of history, alongside Alexandra Polier.

Kerry and his staff assumed the same thing!

But that’s not what happened.

The reason it didn’t happen is that the press does not have the power over perception conservatives & liberals alike believe that it does.

Only recently has it dawned on me that one reason conservatives fear the MSM as much as they seem to is that they believe the press can get us all killed by lying about the WOT & the threat from Islamic terror.

Whether we live or die is up to the MSM.

Braestrup talks about this belief in THE BIG STORY. He writes that both the right and the left drew the same lesson from the Vietnam War: Walter Cronkite can lose a war in a single broadcast.

Of course, that’s what I’d always believed, too, up until the moment I read McMaster and, now, Braestrup.

Both men say the press didn’t lose the war.

And both man have the facts to back this up.

I don’t know what the relationship between the press and people’s “construction of reality” is, though if anyone knows of good sources I’d appreciate knowing what they are. (I know for a fact, because I write journalism myself, that journalists spend a lot of time writing what the audience already believes, not trying to persuade the audience to believe something else. In my working life, journalism has mostly reflected the audience rather than the other way around. Journalism is a business. You aim to please.)

Now I see that the press doesn’t have anywhere near the power I assumed that it did.

I’ve seen this from both sides of the political divide.

From the conservative side, it is a simple fact that a good half of the country continues to support George Bush, continues to believe there were (and probably still are) WMD whether we’ve found them or not, continues to think the War in Iraq is part of the War on Terror.

A good half of the country continues to think these things despite the best efforts of the MSM to persuade them otherwise.

And yet conservatives take it as a given that the MSM has the power to banish the Swifties from view.

I see the mirror-image of this belief among liberals, many of whom also believe in the power of the press in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

The ultimate example is Evan Thomas casually observing that the MSM can guarantee John Kerry 15 points in the election.

Fifteen points!

That is nonsense on stilts.

If the press could guarantee 15 points to a candidate as weak as John Kerry, there wouldn’t even be a Republican Party by now. All you conservatives would have seen the light.

My sense, without knowing the history of the media prior to the Vietnam War, is that in the case of the press our country has arrived at a shared narrative that needs to be abandoned, or at a minimum extensively revised, and the sooner the better.

Come to think of it, I have an addendum.

Evan Thomas may think NEWSWEEK can give John Kerry 15 points, but obviously many, many liberals do not.

These are the “What Liberal Media?” folks.

The “What Liberal Media?” camp agrees with conservatives, and with Evan Thomas, that the MSM can create and manage public perception of reality.

Then, when they see that large numbers of Americans continue to believe in nutty ideas like Saddam-had-WMD, or Saddam-was-a-threat-to-America, or even Saddam-had-ties-to-Al-Qaeda, they conclude that the press has clearly failed in its obligation to straighten us out.

Ergo: What liberal media?

If the media were really liberal, all the rest of us would be liberal, too.

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:42 pm 46. Terrye:

Catherine:

Am I brief or blunt?

In truth when I hear discussion as to whether Kerry volunteered for Viet Nam I wonder if people think the military is like a travel angency. You just go in and tell them where you want to go and they give you your boarding pass.

I have read that Kerry tried and failed for the deferment and then signed up for the Naval Reserve. The reserve is a lot like the infamous National Guard where all the party animals went to dodge the draft.

Today the Boston Globe did a story which starts the whole National Guard and Bush thing over again.

Gale was in the National Gaurd. He signed up at 15. He was in from the time he fisnished high school until he was about 30 years old. It was not fun and games. And his family are not rich oil people. This is the problem that the press faces, there are people reading this stuff that know more aobut the subject than they do.

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:47 pm 47. Catherine:

John Moore

Time to read THE BIG STORY, instead of de Borchgrave’s article about THE BIG STORY (which I have also read).

Braestrup directly states that Walter Cronkite did not lose Tet or the War or anything else.

Public opinion in favor of the war did not change after Cronkite’s stand-up. It held. That’s a fact; you can look it up.

What changed was LBJ, who said, reportedly, “If I’ve lost Cronkite I’ve lost America.” Or words to that effect.

LBJ lost his nerve, not that he had much to begin with, and subsequently the American public lost trust in its political leadership.

The American public will not follow a leader who has lost his nerve.

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:48 pm 48. Catherine:

Fresh Air

I loved GOODBYE TO ALL THAT!

I’ve read it many times.

Terrye

Am I brief or am I blunt?

Well, I think the real word is “brilliant”—–except that “brilliant” conjures up images of Long Flights of Prose & whatnot.

I’ve actually thought about this quite a bit, because of Temple.

I don’t think we have a word for “what you are.”

It’s some kind of ability to get to the absolute heart of the matter, and it’s extremely rare, and extremely difficult to do, at least for most of us.

But I don’t have a word for it!

I think I did mention on another thread, though, that I recently met a media consultant who coaches people for appearances on TV. She said that finding the “perfect one line” that captures your message is unbelievably difficult.

She spends hours working with her clients to do this.

I wonder if you’d be good at writing titles?

Writing titles is SERIOUSLY hard to do.

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:56 pm 49. WichitaBoy:

Catherine: The American public will not follow a leader who has lost his nerve.

The question before the house now is: Will they elect one?

Sep 8, 2004 - 2:59 pm 50. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Catherine

When Walter Cronkite was able to cause LBJ to decide note to run again, which is what I have read, that is too much power.

The swifties were swept under the rug in their first appearance (May 5). When the ad hit, the big news outlets said nothing for days, and then came out with pieces which were biased in their supposed debunking of the claims. When a press figure tells John O’Neill (highly regarded big time litigator) that his evidence isn’t even half up to journalistic standards, it’s time for a horses laugh at a horses ass.

The press in fact has vast power. Conservatives have learned to deal with this handicap. I believe there would be quite a few more conservative legislators without the left-wing press.

As a conservative, an engineer, and someone with a pretty good amount of general knowledge, I watch the press bias its coverage to the left all the time…. well, not as often since I stopped watching the evening network news.

Tonite 60 minutes is going after Bush with a hit piece. Nothing like it was ever used against Kerry by the MSM. It’s about a subject never before covered (not) – supposed favoritism for Bush getting into the TANG. Never mind that the guy making the charges wasn’t in office at the time, and has a sleazy reputation and is currently a big money political fixer… he’ll make some assertions. The piece is cut to make the Bush family look as bad as possible. But hey, it’s just objective news. Timing? A coincidence.

On Sunday, a whole bunch of Vietnam Veterans including yours truly will hold a rally in Washington, DC – an anti-Kerry lie. How much you want to bet that the MSM doesn’t cover it at all.

It’s really simple. The MSM have a lot of left wing liars. They are not observers, they are filters and participants. They are proud of this. They are taught in leftist colleges that advancing the leftist cause is good. The idea of attempted objectivity is almost dead.

Our only hope is that the internet will provide alternate sources of information, and this will result in pressure on the MSM to get its act together.

Sep 8, 2004 - 3:05 pm 51. blogaddict:

A few points–

Buddy Larson: Kerry graduated and enlisted in’66, I believe. The lottery wasn’t instituted till several years later; ‘69, I believe. So the lottery was not a factor at all for Kerry.

However–

Catherine: You could NOT simply get a deferment when you wanted one, by going to school, especially once you graduated from college. In college, yes, you did get a deferment, as long as you maintained a good GPR. But if you flunked out, you were going to be drafted, unless you came up with another college to go to, pronto. And as far as the grad school issue goes (which is the issue Kerry faced in 1966, when he graduated from Yale and was subject to the pre-lottery draft)–it depended on your community draft board.

Each draft board was local to its own community, and how it operated depended on the demographics of the community. I forget whether there were actual quotas for each draft board (I think there were). But the point is that if you were in a community where there were a lot of kids who didn’t go to college, the draft board tended to have enough people to choose from, and could afford to be more lenient with the deferments for things like grad school, which were discretionary (unless you were training for some sort of defense industry-type profession, I think). I’m not sure how the number of voluntary enlistments was factored into the draft boards’ quota, either, but it might have been a factor, also.

My point is that whether you got a deferment for grad school varied from draft board to draft board, and was never totally predictable.

I was (and am!!) a woman, class of ‘69, so I wasn’t subject to the draft myself. But I had plenty of friends, relatives, boyfriends, who were, and my information here is based on my memory of the situation they faced. My boyfriend was drafted after his junior year of college, when he flunked out of school, and he ended up in heavy combat in Vietnam. I never really understood why he didn’t try to enlist, especially in something like the Navy (which was known to be safer, statistically speaking), but his reason (at least the one he told me) was that he didn’t want to face the much longer tour of duty involved in enlisting in any of the armed forces, as compared to the shorter tour of the draftee. The draft, by the way, only referred to the army–there was never any draft for any other branch of the services during the Vietnam war.

Sep 8, 2004 - 3:06 pm 52. blogaddict:

I’m no expert on the subject of Lyndon Johnson–but I remember when his tapes came out they were a revelation to me, especially on the subject of his attitude towards Vietnam. I have not listened to or read transcripts of all of them, by any means, but I seem to recall that, early on, he felt Vietnam to be an albatross around his neck, hung by the previous admininstration.

Johnson wasn’t really a foreign policy guy at all–Kennedy was much more into that. Johnson’s thing was domestic policy, and he had great plans for a “great society”–all having to do with domestic issues. He saw Vietnam as a terrible, inherited, and unwanted intrusion on what he wanted to do and what sort of legacy he wanted to leave. He didn’t want to cut and run, because that would be perceived as failure, but from the start he had no stomach for the war. So his attitude towards the war was half-assed, always.

Johnson of course took over the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, and only ran on his own in 1964. But I seem to recollect, also, that he came very very close to not running in 1964, and it was because of Vietnam. I seem to recall reading that Ladybird, his wife, talked him out of a fairly deep depression about it, and talked him into running in ‘64.

But all of this background, I think, indicates why he was so ready, after Tet and Cronkite in ‘68, to give up. It’s what he really wanted to do, anyway.

I agree, though, that the press is biased and way too powerful. But I don’t think Cronkite could have possibly swayed Johnson, if Johnson hadn’t been edging very strongly that way already.

Sep 8, 2004 - 3:17 pm 53. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Regarding the Navy Reserve – an enlistment there was much different from most Guard enlistments (although closer to Bush’s extended active duty situation).

The reason is that you had a significant (at least 2 years) active duty requirement. That meant participation in a normal active duty organization (in Kerry’s case, the Gridley). A friend and I signed up together, both as enlisted (I think I avoided the officer route for time requirements, but not sure). He spent 2 years on the deck of the Ticonderoga in the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club. He worked 16 hours a day on the very dangerous deck of that carrier, and even once took a flight over North Vietnam just for fun.

I was assigned to an anti-submarine squadron – land based. I spent my (almost) 2 years flying as a radio operator / onboard tech / observer on the P-3 Orion, including flying at Cam Rahn Bay.

Kerry volunteered for Swift Boats. At the time, they were doing a relatively safe mission on the coast of Vietnam, although they had some serious combat. Two weeks after joing the swifties, the mission changed to the highly dangerous riverine operation. Kerry complained a lot that “this is not what I signed up for” – which means he never understood the military. When you are in the military, you do what they want. As you say, not a travel agency.

Sep 8, 2004 - 3:22 pm 54. jerry:

Terrye:

Unless I misunderstand your reference to Kerry joining the Naval Reserve I believe you do not understand how Naval Commissions worked at the time. The only people who got regular navy commissions in 1966 were Naval Academy Graduates. Everybody else got a Reserve Commission with a 6 year committment. That means NROTC, OCS, AVROC etc were all reserve commissions. If you wished to stay then you had to apply for augmentation to regular status.

Sep 8, 2004 - 3:22 pm 55. chuck:

OT, Belmontclub has a post up on Rogers post, Naming Names – Part 705

Sep 8, 2004 - 3:32 pm 56. Kevin P:

Roger:

One of the negative aspects of the SBV story is that it has given Kerry cover for his constantly being wrong about major foreign policy issues. His prediction of only 5 to 8 thousand victims in South Vietnam of communist reprisals was off by a half million or so. He was wrong about the sandinistas being a new kind of communist state and not a satellite of Cuba and the old Soviet Union. He chose the nuclear freeze idea and fought against the succesfull Reagan agressive stance that eventually brought the end of the Soviet Union. He was wrong about Gulf War I and if he didn’t have 7 or 8 different stances on the current Iraq war I could say that he was wrong on this one too. His Senate record in regard to foreign policy is littered with one massive mistake after another. If the country had followed Kerry’s lead, the Soviet Union would still hold millions of people in slavery all over the earth, Ortega would still be taking orders from Castro instead of losing free elections and Saddam would control Kuwait and 35% of the worlds oil output. Is this the man we want controlling the future of our country?

Sep 8, 2004 - 3:52 pm 57. chuck:

Uh-Oh, the Democrats expose their MF’ng totalitarian fantasies:

The subject of Hertzberg’s prepared remarks was the conservative bias in the United States Constitution. Instead of one government, we have three: House, Senate and presidency. Things only get done when all of them agree. That is why, Hertzberg said, we don’t have national healthcare even though most people want it and every other modern democracy has it.

Courtesy Oxblog

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:06 pm 58. Catherine:

Fresh Air

I loved GOODBYE TO ALL THAT!

I’ve read it many times.

Terrye

Am I brief or am I blunt?

Well, I think the real word is “brilliant”—–except that “brilliant” conjures up images of Long Flights of Prose & whatnot.

I’ve actually thought about this quite a bit, because of Temple.

I don’t think we have a word for “what you are.”

It’s some kind of ability to get to the absolute heart of the matter, and it’s extremely rare, and extremely difficult to do, at least for most of us.

But I don’t have a word for it!

I think I did mention on another thread, though, that I recently met a media consultant who coaches people for appearances on TV. She said that finding the “perfect one line” that captures your message is unbelievably difficult.

She spends hours working with her clients to do this.

I wonder if you’d be good at writing titles?

Writing titles is SERIOUSLY hard to do.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:07 pm 59. Catherine:

John Moore

When Walter Cronkite was able to cause LBJ to decide note to run again, which is what I have read, that is too much power

OK, John!

I’m going to ask you to Close Your Eyes and Envision a Counterfactual.

Say it’s George Bush in charge of the Vietnam War.

He intends to win, he has a plan to win (let’s hope), and he is not lying to the public or to the Congress.

Walter Cronkite goes on TV and says the war is lost.

What happens?

A) George Bush panics, tells Dick Cheney, “If I’ve lost Cronkite I’ve lost the American people,” then goes on television to announce he will not run for re-election.

B) Every conservative pundit in the country panics while George Bush keeps his counsel, or, alternatively, goes on MEET THE PRESS, sticks out his jaw, and says, “I don’t intend to lose.”

I believe the answer is clear.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:14 pm 60. Catherine:

WichitaBoy

The question before the house now is: Will they elect one?

OK, now you’re giving Terrye a run for her money!

Yes, that is the question.

My answer is: a simple yes.

Maybe we’ll smoke Samuel out on this one. (Sending secret bat cave signal–)

My own thoughts on this subject come almost entirely from Samuel, who has said, several times, that the American people reliably elect the candidate they perceive to be the stronger leader.

I’m sure he’s right, or, at least, I’m sure the Bushies hold the same view.

That’s why their elect-Bush theme is “strong leadership in a time of challenge,” and that’s why their don’t-elect-Kerry theme is “Senator Flip Flop.”

And here’s Clinton:

When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have somebody who’s strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:19 pm 61. lindenen:

Wow. I just read that Hertzberg post from Oxblog. The man sounds completely out of touch with reality.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:31 pm 62. Terrye:

jerry and John:

I am afraid I did not make myself clear. I meant to say that when Kerry joined the Naval Reserve, which of course has its own requirements, he could not have known where he would be sent. The military is not a democracy.

I also meant that each branch has its own rules. In other words, Kerry wanted in the Navy, he did not want to be a pilot and he did want to be an officer. The Naval Reserve may have active duty requirements, but mobilization in the Air Guard did occur. Kerry has tried to convey that Bush was hiding while he himself took a risk few men took.

Catherine:

I am blushing but I think the above makes it plain that from time to time I just blow off.

In regards to medai bias, I think it is very telling that the Today show is going to have Kitty Kelly on three days running. Obviously some members of the press are quite partisan.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:51 pm 63. Catherine:

John Moore

The press in fact has vast power.

This may be true.

But it may not.

Is the press creating reality, or is it reflecting the views of its own “base.”

I’ve become interested in the nature of media power, when it works, when it fails to work, why & how.

For instance, I’ve begun wondering whether the press has the most “power” when it is portraying something people don’t care about that much.

The MSM could bury the intern story because people don’t care about intern stories. On the whole.

The MSM couldn’t bury the Swifties, even though the MSM sure as hell wanted to bury the Swifties, because people do care about Vietnam.

Our only hope is that the internet will provide alternate sources of information

This is what I’m talking about!

“Our only hope”!

The conservative ship is sinking fast!

It’s impossible to square sentiments like “only hope” with the plain fact that conservatives are winning.

Ask anyone on the left.

And I mean anyone.

People who are on the left believe that this country has been growing steadily more and more conservative for the last–what?

Twenty years? Thirty? Forty?

My sense is that they’re right.

Conservatives have learned to deal with this handicap

THAT’S A GOOD THING.

The entire Mickey Kaus argument concerning the “liberal bubble,” an argument Samuel has made a number of times as well, is that Democrats routinely fail to grasp the nature of what they’re up against, and thus create and follow strategies that fail & fail dramatically.

Meanwhile conservatives, who almost can’t not know what they’re up against, spend their time figuring out how to deal with it.

I read a fascinating article today . . . in WAPO.

It was typical Liberal Bubble fare, so typical that I wrote a letter protesting it to WAPO’s ombudsman.

Hmm. Don’t see it right now, so I’ll finish up here & then go find it.

What was fascinating was that the article drew a connection among 3 political ads, each of which had vast & disproportionate power to change a presidential election:

LBJ’s daisy ad

the Willie Horton ad

the Swift boat ad

The reporter interviewed some professors who study the media, all presumably liberal, and each one of them said that the power of these ads was impossible to predict; the ads just Came Out of the Blue and Destroyed Entire Campaigns; no one could have guessed they’d have the effect they did, etc.

They were unanimous on this point.

Meanwhile I’m sitting there going, “An ad about nuclear holocaust couldn’t have been expected to make a splash?”

“An ad about black murderer rapists being furloughed from prison by a Massachusetts liberal couldn’t be predicted to be just a tad Attention Grabbing?”

“An ad in which actual, real live Vietnam veterans using their own names look at the camera and say John Kerry is unfit for the presidency can’t be predicted to have just slightly more impact than an ad complaining that George Bush has presided over the greatest loss of jobs since Herbert Hoover?”

This is the Liberal Bubble.

The professors interviewed in the article are utterly clueless about what makes half of America tick.

Even Kaus has liberal blind spots.

He had no idea the Swifties would matter.

When the storm finally broke he wrote that he “hadn’t been paying much attention to the Swift Boaters” (paraphrasing).

And I remember his writing, way back when, a post that assumed Kerry would automatically get the military vote because he was a veteran.

He knew about the Swifties, but it hadn’t occurred to him they would make a difference, probably because they didn’t make a difference to him.

That’s the liberal bubble, and even Mickey Kaus is in it.

How much you want to bet that the MSM doesn’t cover it at all.

They will certainly prefer not to cover it, and unfortunately I don’t know the in’s and out’s of assignment desks well enough to be able to predict whether they will cover it or won’t.

My guess is cable news has to cover it, because cable is cable. CNN, FOX, MSNBC; they’ll cover it.

Once they cover it, the bloggers will begin bit**** & moaning about how the MSM didn’t cover it, and then Team Kerry will screw up and refer to the demonstration a zillion times on the stump, and then . . . it will be covered.

Or maybe the MSM will just throw in the towel and cover it the day it happens.

Anything is possible.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:54 pm 64. Catherine:

blogaddict

So his attitude towards the war was half-assed, always

Absolutely.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:56 pm 65. Catherine:

blogaddict

AND the American people will not support a half-assed war.

At least, that’s one of the lessons I take away from Vietnam.

Sep 8, 2004 - 4:57 pm 66. Fresh Air:

OT, the Washington Times is reporting France was selling Iraq weapons right up until the beginning of the war.

Sep 8, 2004 - 5:09 pm 67. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Catherine

It was a half-assed war when it was supported. It was a much better war later and I don’t know how well it was supported, but I know the press was playing it as a quagmire by then.

In other words, the people supported a half assed war.

Sep 8, 2004 - 5:11 pm 68. Charlie (Colorado):

Never mind that the guy making the charges wasn’t in office at the time, and has a sleazy reputation and is currently a big money political fixer… he’ll make some assertions.

Don’t forget repudiating a sworn affidavit.

Sep 8, 2004 - 5:34 pm 69. Old Dad:

We’re many years from finally winning the peace in Viet Nam. Long after the last yippie lies mouldering in his grave, history will elucidate the winners and the losers.

Let’s start with the losers:

1. The millions of butchered Viet Namese, and Cambodians, and the millions more forced to live in slavery.

2. The political left.

3. Old media.

The winners:

1. The American Soldier!

2. Free market capitalism, the United States of America, and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

3. Freedom

Communism is dead; the left is dying; freedom is on the ascendance. The horrors of Islamofascism pale in comparison to the brilliance of a free human being and what he can achieve. The President of the United States of America is right. The 21st Century is the Century of liberty. The cost is much more blood and treasure. Will we pay? Most certainly. Freedom always wins.

Sep 8, 2004 - 5:38 pm 70. Pat Curley:

I don’t think you can ever reach closure on Vietnam; according to historians the only way the passions stirred by the Civil War ended was for all the people involved to die off.

I still can’t figure out how I feel about Vietnam; I was like Roger, vehemently antiwar back in those days, and volunteered (at a very low level) on the McCarthy and McGovern campaigns.

I abandoned the notion that the communists were the good guys eventually, which makes it harder to be antiwar, and I fully support Iraq as a humanitarian cause, so it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t have been in Vietnam considering the humanitarian tragedy that came after we left.

Sep 8, 2004 - 5:44 pm 71. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

I find it hard to say that the American Soldier was a winner. Vietnam Vets were run out of VFW’s and American Legion events as cowards and losers. Vietnam Vets were denied jobs because of Kerry’s charges that we were psychologically damaged – all of us. This, of course, created a great opportunity for people to claim PTSD and live off the government. Many do that to this day, further tarnishing our image.

Remember all the Hollywood productions with wacko Vietnam Vets as either heroes (Rambo) or villains – many cop shows and others. Thanks, Hollywood and John Kerry, for that stereotype.

And then there’s the feeling of having been futile in one’s effort because the enemy won.

I found Vietnam Vets in my world strictly by accident. Nobody mentioned it, but sometimes we would discover it.

The American Soldier did not win in that war. I’m going to a rally in DC this weekend (notice how the press suppressed it? check national review online for the only article. We have a bunch of good speakers. Maybe it will help.

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:01 pm 72. ambisinistral:

Everyone–right, left & center–takes it for granted that Walter Cronkite lost the war. (Or some variant thereof.)

Catherine,

I’m responding to this as I read down through the thread, so I don’t know which way this conversations turns. I’m responding now just to say everybody but at least one person believes that — I surely don’t.

Just as there are liberal myths about Vietnam, so also are there conservative myths. The US military, ever since the U.S. loss in Vietnam, has been spinning away the notion that they scored a smashing success which the media and lilly-livered civilians stole away from them.

I believe the loss was partly the result of mismanagement by the civilian government, but it was also partly the result of some mighty poor military tactics and strategies. If you doubt this, consider the volumes of military writings dissecting the military failures in Vietnam and the subsequent reorganization of the US military and its tactics and theories as a result of those studies.

Our grandchildren will make sense of Vietnam, we, regarless of our political orientation, will all cling to our seperate myths.

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:03 pm 73. Rick Ballard:

“Communism is dead; the left is dying; freedom is on the ascendance.”

I’d like to agree, old dad, but I’ve seen too many of today’s textbooks. We’ve miles and miles to go. Want to bet that one of next weeks lesson plans is “Understanding Islam”? Want to bet that any kid referring to “muslim savages in Beslan” winds up in the dean’s office?

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:06 pm 74. DennisThePeasant:

Mustn’t…post…about…Viet…Nam…

Promised…self…not…to…

Must…maintain…composure…

aaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhh….

Mustn’t…post…about…boomers…

aaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhh….

Gonna…be…long…night…

Must…maintain…composure…

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:26 pm 75. Catherine:

Here’s the WAPO article on the 3 ads.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1151-2004Sep6?language=printer

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:28 pm 76. Charlie (Colorado):

I just know we’re going to need these links:

American Daily article on “Bush AWOL”

Chicago Sun-Times

George Magazine article: The Real Military Record of George W. Bush: Not Heroic, but Not AWOL, Either. (George Magazine, famous right wing mag published by famous right-winger John Kennedy Jr.)

FactCheck.org

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:31 pm 77. Charlie (Colorado):

Oh, here’s another one: The Hill.

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:34 pm 78. Catherine:

John Moore

In other words, the people supported a half assed war.

That’s true!

I couldn’t put DERELICTION OF DUTY down, for reasons like the irony you’ve just named.

I was staying up half the night, every night, reading, reading, reading, then getting in fights with my husband in the car the next morning as I compulsively recited what I’d just spent half the night reading.

So Picture It:

3 kids

rental car

no sleep

autistic son number 2 screaming bloody murder every morning at 5 am & hitting in the car

Mom picking fights with Dad over Vietnam

Makin’ those family memories!

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:34 pm 79. Catherine:

John Moore

In other words, the people supported a half assed war.

That’s true!

I couldn’t put DERELICTION OF DUTY down, for reasons like the irony you’ve just named.

I was staying up half the night, every night, reading, reading, reading, then getting in fights with my husband in the car the next morning as I compulsively recited what I’d just spent half the night reading.

So Picture It:

3 kids

rental car

no sleep

autistic son number 2 screaming bloody murder every morning at 5 am & hitting in the car

Mom picking fights with Dad over Vietnam

Makin’ those family memories!

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:35 pm 80. Rick Ballard:

Charlie (C),

Good list. Add this one by Byron York which gives a very concise synopsis of W’s service.

Mr. Peasant,

If you launch another topic (STEAL THIS THREAD) I will try and be of some aid.

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:41 pm 81. chuck:

DtP:

Hey man, you’re practically a boomer yourself. Far out. Just missed by a year or few. Wow, it’s karma man. It’s your fate. Want to be an honorary boomer?

Charlie:

Instapundit has the links also. Don’t know who to argue with around here. I do work among educated people, though. Bound to be a few who are misinformed.

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:48 pm 82. Catherine:

John Moore

Vietnam Vets were denied jobs because of Kerry’s charges that we were psychologically damaged – all of us.

Yeah, well, that’s one of the things the Gone But Not Forgotten Liberal in me says: reparations should be paid.

That brings up something that struck me the other day:

Projection.

It suddenly came to me that the crazy-Vietnam-vet image may have been a projection of anti-war protesters onto men who served.

This is out of my depth, but there’s a semi-psychoanalytic school of thought concerning revolutions.

In a revolution the people kill the “father,” i.e. the king.

That’s an extremely bad thing to do, whether or not he had it coming. The historian Lynn (sp?) Hunt has a book everyone thinks is terrific on this subject. I believe she argues that the American revolution was and is a “good revolution,” because we didn’t have to “kill the father”; we had a father, George Washington, here in America. (The French revolution was a bad and traumatic revolution, because the French did have to kill their king in order to have a revolution.)

The American revolution was not soaked in patricide & patricidal guilt.

I’m probably making this sound foolish, so I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt here.

Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me that refusing to serve in a war to defend your country has got to be analogous, in some way, to “killing the father” . . . I mean, America is your country; your president is telling you you’re needed to defend your home and its people, and you refuse, march in the streets, carry signs, smoke dope, decide free love is a good thing—–has it ever struck you that all the stuff that surrounded saying “Hell no we won’t go” isn’t obviously related, logically, I mean, to dodging the draft?

Why does dodging the draft also mean dodging marriage, dodging career, dodging this, dodging that?

It struck me that the people who really did go crazy from the whole thing may have been (some of) the people who didn’t go.

Not the people who did.

Haven’t gotten any further than this, but I think some of it is right.

The ferocity of the stereotyping of the veterans–where did that come from?

I had no idea the veterans’ groups were involved, though.

DtP

Mustn’t…post…about…Viet…Nam…

Um . . . Dennis?

It sounds like you’ve got the right idea there.

I’m just saying.

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:57 pm 83. Catherine:

DtP

Mustn’t…post…about…boomers…

OK, that’s definitely the right idea.

Sep 8, 2004 - 6:58 pm 84. Goof®:

Charlie

I’ve been trying to implement your suggestion, but I get a validation error. So far, nobody seems to know why.

Dennis

I feel your pain.

Catherine, et al

1. Dereliction Of Duty is something of an inside baseball account of a couple of crucial(?) years in the Vietnam War. It’s interesting in that sense, but a lot of earlier books and documentaries told the same basic story regarding what happened at the highest levels of government.

2. Cronkite did not say the war was lost. He said it was going to end in a stalemate (like Korea) and he urged the powers that be to try negotiating with the North.

3. All in all we might have been better off if we’d not thrown in with Diem in the ’50s. Then again, we might not. It happened. It’s over. The Cold War was won.

55 days to go.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:00 pm 85. Catherine:

Listen to Big Dad!

OK, I’m supposed to be Getting My Rest.

However, I will REPEAT that I for one am hap-hap-happy we’re launched on another examination of our president’s AWOL-ness.

Didn’t John Kerry give a Major Policy Address today?

Anyone hear anything about it?

Anyone think they will hear anything about it?

I didn’t think so.

Keep it coming, folks!

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:02 pm 86. chuck:

GoofA:

That’s 1516 days I believe. Hope you’ve got some good books.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:04 pm 87. richard mcenroe:

Kerry had Paris for his attempted deferment

Kerry had Paris for his sooper seekrit private peace talks with the North Vietnamese

Kerry has Paris for his secret best buddy foreign leaders who want him elected.

He’ll always have Paris.

Let’s face it, we were wrong; Prince John Lackpair isn’t Lurch… he’s Bogart.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:11 pm 88. Terrye:

richard:

I wonder what Kerry has promised Chirac.

I wonder if he has said ‘Just keep up the good work stiff arming Bush and when I get in…’

Is it money, a trade deal, what?

Kerry seems to have a habit of making deals with foreign leaders behind the back of the folks in charge. Is that a crime?

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:27 pm 89. Rick Ballard:

Richard M.,

In the mist covered regions that make up the intangible, unknowable border between fantasy and reality in the junior senators mind I sense an inability to choose between Robespierre and Napoleon as appropriate models. There are some days when I am positive that he awakes as Marat or, worse yet, Danton, with a lust to see the sun glinting off the falling blade. I just don’t think Bogart rises quite to his level of personal expectations. He’s really fairly complext for someone of his limitations.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:33 pm 90. Catherine:

OK, it’s over

A more whimsical poll taken in late August for the American Kennel Club found that people would trust Bush more than Kerry to walk their dogs, by 51 percent to 37 percent.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/9597802.htm

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:37 pm 91. TmjUtah:

The problem with winning in Vietnam was political.

LBJ was brought on the JFK ticket to bring the southern Democrats to the election, and for his in-the-trenches mastery of parliamentary seal-clubbing. Period.

Johnson and his advisors found themselves responsible for leading a democratic republic in a war that was never intended to be won. They panicked. The cabinet idealogues sought to hide behind process and let the years roll by while the top-tier of the uniformed military recoiled from the prospect of political activism and instead just soldiered. The latter was ulitmately a good thing, in my opinion; we may have bad administrations – even bad generations – but we don’t ever want or need the professional military leading palace revolts.

We always had the tools to win if you define a South Vietnam secure behind the DMZ. That war was for all intents and purposes won with Tet. If you look at the conduct of the war under Creighton Abrams you see a complete departure from the endless war paradigm he inherited from Westmoreland. Nixon got credit for drawing down theater strength – but Abrams did that by kicking out the REMF’s and lowering the ratio of support troops to shooters.. Abrams fought to kill the enemy with the intention of driving him from the field. All the diplomatic dancing around the Paris Peace Talks ended only when Nixon bombed the North – and it ended in literally days. By the time we got around to conducting a war like we meant to win it, the popular support was gone for good.

Abrams will be my next biographical adventure; gotta love a guy said “They’ve got us surrounded again, the poor bastards”.

We are not yet engaged as a nation in this war we face. No, I don’t say that as an indictment of Bush’s competency or leadership. I believe he has walked a fine line between the barely possible and the essential in making a good start but given our political/philosophical environment I am hard pressed to think of anything he could have done markedly different.

As long as a non-entity like Kerry can last this long as a presidential candidate the enemy can fairly conclude we aren’t ready to do the real heavy lifting to oppose them. Four more years of Bush – especially a Bush free of having to face reelection – has to give them serious pause. A determined man can do a lot with the full force and fury of the U.S. military in that time, especially if he is determined to fix the intelligence and diplomatic beauracracies that have been the traditional weaknesses our enemies exploit.

We must defeat the enemy where they live. Whatever countries, whatever regions, whereever they are identified. And most importantly in whatever numbers it takes. There can be no Bunker America; it wouldn’t work regardless of how repressive or coercive security protocols and organs became…and the attempt would cost us the very freedoms we were trying to preserve in the first place.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:40 pm 92. richard mcenroe:

Catherine ó Yeah, but you gotta break the polling down further. Kerry has the poodle vote nailed.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:43 pm 93. M. Simon:

Why did John Kerry meet with the representatives of the Viet Cong and Communist North Vietnam on his honeymoon?

I guess selling out his home country was more exciting than his new wife.

New Soldier html

What is the War Hero Afraid of?

Form 180. Release ALL the records

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:46 pm 94. ambisinistral:

Behind the DMZ? That was one of the momunmental military screwups. As long as the Cambodian border areas couldn’t be secured the DMZ was tactically and strategically meaningless.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:53 pm 95. mudmarine:

Ambisinistral

“partly the result of some mighty poor military tactics and strategies.”

As one who participated, that has long been a part of my thinking. Apoligize for the personal viewpoint but, after all, the third time you take a strategic hill, with casualties each time, you begin to wonder, if it is this important, why aren’t we staying here? I always wanted to go to autonomous 25 man units, fight as they fought.

In regards to the original topic, what I’m about to say is absolutely insane, but, anyway.. when I read Roger’s post the first thing that popped into my head was, just what, exactly, was JF’nK going to study in Paris? It was a center/hotbed of leftists/communists at that time, perhaps some in depth study of tactics and techniques…then when that didn’t work out…maybe you can be more valuable on the inside…

What do we know about the history of his visits to Paris and meetings with the NVN emissaries? Could just anyone do that? Was it as a representative of VVAW? Just curious.

P.S.

TmjUtah

What you said..

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:56 pm 96. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Catherine,

I have a strong… ahem… resistance to the use of psychoanalytic theory for anything at all. You might as well use fairy tales. Psychoanalytic theory is utter bunk.

A friend’s father was a Viennese psychiatrist. When he came to the US he couldn’t pass the test – too much Freudian nonsense in it – the Viennese had long ago tossed out that nonsense.

With a daughter who is a neuroscientist, and some other reasons to consider psychoanalytic theory to be a fable, if I find a history based on some silly theory like killing the father, I’m not going to read it. Such theories are idiotic and are likely to be tied to other idiocy. Only the use of psychoanalytic items as analogies is likely to mean a darn thing.

The Vietnam war lasted a long time. The later phase was fought most intelligently (Abrams) and had every chance of succeeding.

By the time idiots like Kerry were complaining about the tactics, the tactics had all changed and the war was effectively won.

Unfortunately, it was too late by then. Kerry poisoned the view of the nation. Congress stripped Nixon of the power to wage war, and then Watergate happened. Cronkite really did cause Johnson to step down, which is indicative of the mental state of Johnson (severe depression).

The enemy really did plan to negotiate after Tet, and then changed their tactic when they discovered how the press reported (misreported) Tet.

Sep 8, 2004 - 7:57 pm 97. ambisinistral:

mudmarine,

From what I understand, they started out doing pretty much that. Using SF to counter the Vietcong. Then the big ground army types like Westmoreland and Abrams came in and started punching at air.

I think the present deployment of SF in Afgahnistan and to a lesser exent Iraq are a direct consequence of the lessons absorbed during the military’s study of mistakes made in Vietnam.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:05 pm 98. M. Simon:

ambisinistral,

For me the war was lost with Kerry’s testimony. I lost heart after that. When Congress pulled the plug on aid to the South I was happy because I believed Kerry in ‘71.

Jeffin’ K was material in my attitude to the war.

I’m going to do every thing in my power to see that he takes the onus for his lies. Let him be shunned from here after. 2 Million in Cambodia. More in Vietnam. The Boat People. All the deaths at sea. John and I have a lot to answer for.

–==–

Why did John Kerry meet with the representatives of the Viet Cong and Communist North Vietnam on his honeymoon in Paris?

I guess selling out his home country was more exciting than his new wife.

New Soldier html

What is the War Hero Afraid of?

Form 180. Release ALL the records

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:13 pm 99. Charlie (Colorado):

Goof®:

I’ve been trying to implement your suggestion, but I get a validation error. So far, nobody seems to know why.

Uh, which suggestion?

I’ve got a public e-mail address in my typepad page — drop me a note.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:14 pm 100. Charlie (Colorado):

Felt like a little Kipling tonight, and saw this:

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:

Therefore I lied to please the mob.

Now all my lies are proved untrue

and I must face the men I slew.

What tale should serve me here among

Mine angry and defrauded young?

Made me think of someone.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:18 pm 101. Sandy P:

–I don’t think you can ever reach closure on Vietnam; according to historians the only way the passions stirred by the Civil War ended was for all the people involved to die off.–

Now, Pat, you know the South will rise again.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:18 pm 102. Sandy P:

–Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me that refusing to serve in a war to defend your country has got to be analogous, in some way, to “killing the father” . . –

Makes perfect sense, Catherine. W/in the past 2ish years, a sociologist(?) theorized that since the boomers couldn’t live up to their greatest generation parents, they tore down everything their parents created.

Because, you see, they hated their fathers. And possibly their mothers.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:27 pm 103. TmjUtah:

ambisinistral -

You missed the point I was trying to make. MudMarine got it. If the proper groundrules had been established from the beginning – “you will NOT interfere in the governance of the Republic of South Vietnam” – and the appropriate force had been applied where and when the enemy operated, we would have had a short war and a much smaller national scar.

The attempt to fight the war covertly was ultimately counterproductive, ambi. If you want to look at a lesson learned, then please look at the right one. It doesn’t matter how many ‘villes have CAP platoons, how many immunization clinics are running, or what election turnout was for local elections if you permit the enemy bases or sanctuaries to operate from. MudMarine points out that the men doing the fighting on the ground know that the strategy is wrong when they bleed for the same grid coordinate every few months.

War is about winning. Not about killing. Not about controlling. If you fight, you fight to win. Garrisoning or forting up in war for any other motive besides establishing a base for offensive operations, secure training, logistical buildup, or lack of resources/last defense is defacto LOSING…and an enemy with clear objectives and the capability to operate will profit from your inactivity.

Special operations troops in Vietnam evolved out of the need to field units that were nimble enough to make contact with the enemy, smart enough to operate among the indigenous people, and lethal enough to survive. The point you may be missing is that they fought purely tactical encounters. They were there to deal with the direct results of the failure of political leadership to coerce North Vietnam to stay within its borders. Without we directly confront the enemy’s known movement, supply, and command to destroy it, we abandon the dicta of fight to win and start the clock on the (justifiable)public rejection of the struggle. It’s a free country. And that’s how I want it to stay.

Make no mistake – we are in the prelude to the real struggle. I’m saddened to think of what the real starting gun is going to be – the act or acts that will make the disloyal opposition put away their agenda for the time it takes us to eliminate the threat of Islamist terror – but we haven’t taken the hit yet that will bring forth one country to the fight.

The Bush Doctrine states that identified targets will be hunted down and captured or killed, be they individual Islamofascists or terror-supporting regimes. No sanctuary. There is plenty of room for debate on why some places like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia aren’t on the public list of Axis of Evil members…but I stand by my opinion that the current Doctrine, and execution thereof, falls neatly if not perfectly between the possible and the ideal. It’s not a perfect world.

2005 is going to be a busy year.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:29 pm 104. Charlie (Colorado):

Okay, it’s 2130 MDT, so Sixty Minutes II must be over …

TradeSports Bush’04 contract last traded at 61.2 around 2038 MDT (0338 BST), up 1.2 since yesterday. IEM has it 56/44, and just a couple points shy of an all-time high.

The futures markets aren’t impressed so far.

I’m going out on a limb here:

Popular Vote: Bush 57+/-2 percent (exactly in line with FairModel).

Electoral vote: Bush > 300.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:37 pm 105. Charlie (Colorado):

I stand by my opinion that the current Doctrine, and execution thereof, falls neatly if not perfectly between the possible and the ideal. It’s not a perfect world.

I’ve been of the same opinion. Glad to see someone else agree.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:40 pm 106. vnjagvet:

The linked article and comments reminded me of my Vietnam briefing in my Armor Officer Basic course at Fort Knox in February, 1966.

The briefing was in two parts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The morning session was conducted by a Major, Infantry who had just returned from duty as an advisor to an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) battalion. His chain of command was through MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) the advisory command headquartered in Saigon. The afternoon session was conducted by a Captain who had piloted helicopters supporting airmobile troops fighting the NVA and VC in their area. His chain of command was through USARV (United States Army, Vietnam), the combat command also headquartered in Saigon.

We were instructed to take notes and were informed we would be tested on the dayís program. One of the main points of instruction was the warís ìobjectiveî. The Major stated that the MACV objective in the war was ìto win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese Peopleî. I wrote that down. The Captain stated that the USARV objective was ìto kill as many f****** g***** as possibleî. I wrote that down, too.

That evening, a few of us got in an intense discussion about the dayís program. We decided that the objectives were totally inconsistent, and wondered how these instructors could be serving in the same army in the same war.

Later when I was in country (May, 1967-May, 1968), I saw only hints of how the dissimilar objectives of MACV and USARV affected operations. When I saw the wall in 1982, the impact of the foolishness was almost too much to bear. Reading reviews of the McNamara book only made me angry and sad, because they revealed that the leadership of the country was aware of the problems and went ahead anyway. Even so, as John Moore points out, the guys on the ground almost figured out a way to win, and would have (as TET showed) but for political problems at home.

I will be joining John on Sunday. My goal is to do my part to assure that we do not make the same mistake our parentís generation did. Hitler made his intentions known in the 20s in his magnum opus Mein Kampf. Few in the world (including most of the ìgreatest generationî) appreciated the full implications of his clearly stated objectives until the horrors of the death camps made the newsreels of 1945.

I believe our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq understand the enemy. I believe our current administration does as well. I do not think that many who support Mr. Kerry see the full implications of the clearly stated objectives of Islamic Jihadists who, after all, have been as clear as Hitler in stating their objectives. And the horrors of their vision were experienced by us in September, 2001, and by our Russian brothers and sisters in September, 2004.

Their must be no ambiguity in the objectives of our armed forces. We must close with and defeat this enemy as quickly as possible. That is the lesson of Vietnam.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:44 pm 107. Rick Ballard:

vnjagvet,

My compliments on an excellent post.

Sep 8, 2004 - 8:59 pm 108. Jamie Irons:

Catherine

I love reading your posts, but this really touched me. I found it heartbreaking, to be honest:

So Picture It:

3 kids

rental car

no sleep

autistic son number 2 screaming bloody murder every morning at 5 am & hitting in the car

Mom picking fights with Dad over Vietnam

Makin’ those family memories!

And I completely agree with your assessment of the remarkable Terrye.

Her analyses remind me of the criterion of truth that mathematicians admire and seek so fervently, and recognize in a proof when they declare it to be “beautiful.”

Jamie Irons

Sep 8, 2004 - 9:04 pm 109. RogerA:

vnjagvet; tmjUtah, mudmarine, and many others–I have seldom commented on tactics and strategies in Viet Nam–I got there in the 1969 and served with an armor battalion in the 4th ID–It became clear to me as a captain/company commander that the NVA/VC owned the night–so I started, with my Battalion commander’s permission, to operate at night–My company was very successful in operations because the “bad guys” had gotten used to operating at night–One day, after a week of successive night operations, the deputy division commander, who had been the deputy commandant at West Point while I was a cadet and knew me, helicoptered in and chewed my butt because my people were sleeping during the day–I tried to explain that I had reversed night and day–but that didnt compute with his model of a peacetime army–soldiers just didnt sleep during the day irrespective of what they were doing at night-

This particular vignette showed me the Colonel Blimp trap that many in the military fall into–they fight the last war–Gen Abrams did not (in addition how could you not like a 4 star general who smoked cigars and loved opera).

Re the JCS and McNamara–I personally regard the JCS and senior military leadership as lacking courage–Adm Moorer spent many years before his death justifying his chairmanship of the JCS because he opposed the war long after it was over–It is the role of senior military leadership to follow the Billy Mitchell model–if you disagree with the policy, at least have the courage of conviction to resign and then go public. Alas, that model has not been followed much. I fault the senior leadership of the military as much as I do McNamara and LBJ.

Sep 8, 2004 - 9:07 pm 110. TmjUtah:

ambi-

Abrams was the Grant replacing the Meade/MacClelland Westmoreland. He redefined the objectives away from bodycounts and back to locating, closing with, and destroying the enemy and then holding the ground. Like I said, there’s a reason they named the best tank in the arsenal after him.

Tactics don’t win wars, though…nor do theater strategies. It dies or flies from the very top. Bush gets it. His commanders trust him and more importantly enough of the troops will do their duty based on trust, too. Bless them. Bless them all. BTW, we lost two Marines from here today…heard about it at least. I am trying to find where the services are to pay my respects.

vnjagvet -

Amen, your last paragraph.

Charlie(C) -

I’ve mentioned it before, but for the benefit of those who’ve not heard the Corollary, here it is:

The Bush Doctrine is aimed at people who intend to or are killing Americans. It is not aimed at how people THINK. It is not aimed at how they WORSHIP. It is not aimed at a CULTURE, an ETHNICITY, or NATIONAL IDENTITY. It is not a hate crimes statute.

That’s real cowboy stuff, isn’t it? The enemy will be deterred or punished for attempting murder. The corollary is simple: live and let live.

I am beyond wondering how long the “stupid Bush” story has left to run. He may not be a Reagan or a Lincoln but as a war president I think he and his cabinet are right there with FDR. I believe that history will treat him pretty well; for the last four years, at least. Who knows what the future holds? He’s a good man. If he leads, I’ll follow. I can’t ask for much more than that.

In regards to the last fifty days or whatever a go go – watching the rollout of Kitty Kelly’s book, the recycled ANG screeches, and the former Texas Lt. Gov who wasn’t in office when he claimes to have Dutch Uncled GWB into the Guard – all of it brings to mind the climax of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Seriously. For real, man…!

The only difference is that Butch and Sundance come charging out of the stable carrying rubber chickens instead of guns. Embarassing stuff to be a Kerry staffer about now, I would think. Has anyone heard of administrative departures yet? Campaigns are dead long before the headliners shuffle off – it’s the people answering phones and canvassing crews that melt away first.

Sep 8, 2004 - 9:18 pm 111. Molon Labe:

Do note that Kerry volunteered for the Naval Reserve, not the Navy. Sorta like, say, joining an Air National Guard unit but having the misfortune of being called up.

Sep 8, 2004 - 9:26 pm 112. mudmarine:

TmjUtah

“the possible and the ideal”

Not to detract from your good writing, but I have read other writings in the past few days pointing out how masterfully and pragmatic GWB has been in doing what he can with the cards he has been dealt. I think the “poker player” meme is a good one. At first, after 9/11, I supported him for the reason that he, finally after all our years of doing nothing, did something. After all, there is wisdom in the old dictum of “do something, even if it’s wrong.” And I’m not saying he did anything wrong. I am guilty of wanting more at times; I wish we were clearing out Najaf, Fallluja (sp) and Sadr. But I know there are other issues at play and I must be patient.

I, like Roger, have issues with GW’s domestic policies, but they matter not. Not now, at least. We are in a struggle for the very life of our culture, freedom and democracy. Every day that goes by I am gaining more respect for GWB, as a leader, as a thinker and as a statesmen. Though, oddly, I’m still surprising myself with those words.

Sep 8, 2004 - 9:29 pm 113. Fresh Air:

Campaigns are dead long before the headliners shuffle off – it’s the people answering phones and canvassing crews that melt away first.

TMJ–

Just a data point, but the DNC staffer collecting names for Kerry on Michigan Avenue today seemed positively downcast. Two weeks ago the clipboard-toters were obnoxiously giddy, as I’m sure the other folks in Chicago and those in New York can attest…

Sep 8, 2004 - 9:43 pm 114. Katherine:

TMJ ñ ìI am beyond wondering how long the “stupid Bush” story has left to run.î

It gets better.

I have just received my copy of The Atlantic Monthly. On the page 14 in a letter to the editor Joseph M. Price, MD, from Carsonville, Michigan, diagnoses the Prez with ìpresenile dementiaî (type of early Alzheimerís) and advises him to get professional diagnosis and start immediate treatment. This letter comments on Mr Fallows article about debating skills of both presidential candidates in which Bushís is described as being less and less articulate as the time goes by ñ or at least as compared to the time when he was running for the office of governor of Texas.

Of course, there is no difference in the stress level between being a governor of a state and a president of the country in the time of war, so nobody should even entertain simple explanation that maybe the Man ìmangles Englishî now because he is stressed and exhausted beyond endurance (personally, if I miss a good nightís sleep I become incoherent in my first and second language); nope, the only possible explanation is that Bush is getting senile, all right. Let me give you a quote: ìPresident Bushís ìmangledî words are a demonstration of what physicians call ìconfabulationsî, and are almost specific to the diagnosis of a true dementia.î

So there you have it: Bush suffers from presenile dementia, Alzheimerís, confabulations. Isnít it nice how neatly it fits into the image of ìmoron-chimp-Cheney/neocon-puppetî?

And isnít it wonderful how easy it is to give a diagnosis at a distance? Why do we need doctors at all is beyond me ñ one of those software med-bots should have replaced them all by now!

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:23 pm 115. Rick Ballard:

FA,

Try and catch at least a glimpse of Kerry each day. Or at least a cut from a speech. As I’ve said before, he either needs a complete transfusion or new batteries. He’s not exactly projecting confidence. I wonder if they’ve started faking internal poll results for him yet.

Very brittle.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:33 pm 116. Fresh Air:

Rick B.–

Future joke from 2005:

What did John Kerry and Saddam Hussein have in common?

Answer: They both were told by their advisers they were beating George Bush.

When you hear James Carville announce they are “grilling the Republicans’ bellies in hell,” you’ll know the fat lady is about to come on.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:42 pm 117. chuck:

Katherine,

I think it is wonderful how fraudulent educated folks can become when they have a point to push. Of course, it never occurs to them that they are complete ninnys and fools to desire. No, no, only stupid other folk are heir to such disorders. There is a conspicuous lack of self knowledge.

For DtP, let me bring in Viet Nam again. I knew many who claimed to be pacifists, but I never believed it. They didn’t have the religious convictions of the Seventh Day Adventists, had never been tested, nor imagined what they would do in the historical situations available to any who cared to look. Jeff Jarvis falls in this category, and has now discovered that, in truth, he is not a pacifist. I would say he never was, that he had merely failed to treat the question seriously. Now Jarvis is no dummy, but his brains and education served not at all to prepare him morally for 9/11.

I don’t know how to identify it with a name, but there is something beyond mere intelligence or training that is needed to justly deal with the world.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:48 pm 118. Rick Ballard:

FA,

I’d like to hear what Clinton’s people say between themselves when they cash Kerry campaign checks. You know that every one of them has gone to bed in “Hil in ‘08″ pajamas every night since Jan. 20, 2000. If anyone needed additional evidence of just how dumb Kerry is, hiring Clinton’s advisors is Exhibit 6502.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:55 pm 119. Syl:

Catherine

“I know for a fact, because I write journalism myself, that journalists spend a lot of time writing what the audience already believes, not trying to persuade the audience to believe something else.”

and

“Is the press creating reality, or is it reflecting the views of its own “base.”

These two statements together confirm the bubble. The views of its base are what journalists think everyone already believes so they simply confirm it.

Until last year EVERYTHING I knew about social issues, politics, the economy, education, environmental issues, how government should work, EVERYTHING, I learned from the MSM. From the ACLU as God’s gift to humanity to Clarence Thomas is a dunce and Giuliani is a thug who only reduced crime because he fudged the statistics to only Democrats can run our economy yada yada yada.

Yet…

“If the media were really liberal, all the rest of us would be liberal, too.”

I disagree. The media doesn’t persuade those who have another worldview already, it embraces those who don’t or who already share their own.

If other people are like me they can only move away from the MSM groupthink by an act of will.

And I think that is happening more frequently now that alternatives to the MSM are becoming easier to find.

Sep 8, 2004 - 10:59 pm 120. Syl:

FreshAir

“They both were told by their advisers they were beating George Bush.”

LOLOL!

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:03 pm 121. Katherine:

Chuck,

Perhaps what is missing is courage. Courage to see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, courage to deal with all aspects of life, the beautiful and the brutal.

Chekhov wrote: ìMan will become better when you show him what he is likeî. 20th century saw massive sociological experiments in which humans were to be remade into the New Man according to philosopherís specifications. The only problem was that the engineers of souls did not wanted to see the man ìas he wasî. Man was supposed to be a tabula rasa, raw material ready for molding in clever hands. We all know how all those experiments ended – last count of dead is something like 100 million. Unfortunately, we are still infested with social theories which deny human nature and whose adherents are entirely unwilling to see the real man, see the real world. Hiding in their comfortable cocoons of conformity, they do not even realize that losing the courage to face the world is the same as losing will to live.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:26 pm 122. Katherine:

OT:

Bomb blast outside Australian embassy in Jakarta; at least 5 dead and 99 wounded. Tim Blair has details and updates. http://www.timblair.org/

This is getting old fast, friends. I am moving closer and closer toward embracing Rickís ìthree ponds of glassî option. And not only theoretically.

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:39 pm 123. zeppenwolf:

Catherine:

You seem to have a strong desire in disbelieving that the LM has a strong liberal bias; I didn’t catch why you seem committed to that, but may I suggest that the net, (and the blogosphere in particular), is replete with chronicles of evidence.

I might assume you feel also that the liberal stranglehold in education is also a myth? For now, I would like to respond to a couple of your points:

“We have a shared narrative concerning …World Wars I & II.”

Perhaps in my generation, yes. I hope someone else here can point us to the very recent study of high school grads in… NY? by the Washington Post? which found that regarding WWII, though they couldn’t name a single general, nor a single battle, nor much of anything meaningful, they knew ALL about three things:

1) Rosie the Riveter (uber women! yay!)

2) Segregation of blacks (America’s shame! Shame!!)

3) Internment of Japanese (More racism! More shame!!)

“The reason it didn’t happen [the SBVT was not suppressed] is that the press does not have the power over perception conservatives & liberals alike believe that it does.”

False. Believe Mr Moore– after the first press conference, I waited next day for that pin to drop– it didn’t. I heard only one mention, where someone said something like, “Oh, it’s so sad, these Republican-funded attack groups…” They didn’t even explain that these guys *served right next to Kerry*.

YES, they DID try to suppress it, and it was the BLOGOSPHERE, (yay!), and talk-radio which ultimately forced Kerry to start spewing out lawsuits, etc. THAT is what brought the story to a place where the LM could no longer ignore it, and *that* is the first “victory” of this new media, to bring a story to light which they wanted to suppress.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want those elitist turkeys picking the next president for us.

And I don’t need to tell you that the blogosphere is a very new thing…

“If the press could guarantee 15 points to a candidate as weak as John Kerry, there wouldn’t even be a Republican Party by now.”

I question your logic– to me, the fact that Kerry, who I think many would agree is one of the absolute most unelectable candidates this country has ever seen, the fact that he was pulling equal numbers to Bush for a long time tells me that the LM is *indeed* extremely powerful.

The press is the unelected fourth branch of government, answereable to no one but themselves, and there is no question that it is overwhelmingly liberal– once you begin looking for the clues, you cannot fail to see it, imho, let alone objective facts like the overwhelming majority of reporters registering Democrat…

Sep 8, 2004 - 11:50 pm 124. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

vnjagvet

Good to hear you are going to make it. It looks like it will be a good event. We have a bunch of good speakers.

Others….

The take this hill and take it again was a Westmoreland thing. His basic strategy was attrition, an idiotic idea when the enemy can breed generations of soldiers on command and your society cares about every casualty.

Abrahms approach was to pacify the land in South Vietnam through various approaches. He also worked hard at supply interdiction (a fundamental problem throughout the war).

Someone brought up liberal schools. Not exactly on topic but very real. There are many parts of society that have become “liberal” in the sense of becoming stupid and dangerous. That includes humanities departments at universities, school teachers, “helping professions,” many charities, certain kinds of government departments.

The common history (which is part of culture) which makes us Americans has been under unrelenting and vicious attack now for years, to the point where assuming that a younger person has any knowledge of history that matches yours is perilous. Too many will have absorbed the history of blame, the history of multiculturalists (i.e. no white person did anything worthwhile), the history of socialism, the history of feminism. In other words, they won’t have a clue about what used to be our common heritage. They will quote the names of Indian Chiefs but not know who Abraham Lincoln was (I’m not kidding). Their history of Vietnam will be that colonialists and big business in the US tried to take over Vietnam to pillage it, but the brave people there stopped us.

We talk about the poison of terrorism, and indeed it is horrible.

This poison of leftism is not as horrible, but it is very corrosive and divisive. It is especially common at Universities, where conservatives are routinely urged not to do graduate work in history, as one example. And the poison of leftism acts as an internal enemy. It attacks our will. It seeks to blame any military action we take on us. It teaches our people to think of us as a bad nation (fortunately few fall for that one). It counsels stupid strategies (one of the characteristics of leftism is that it manages to have smart people say and defend stupid ideas, all the time). Because it destroys the understanding of people, it leads to absurd recommendations. Because at its core is the belief that we are at fault, it would have us kiss Bin Laden’s rear end, in the hopes of appeasing him and showing our guilt.

Sep 9, 2004 - 1:03 am 125. jerry:

I have a confession to make. I am tired of Vietnam era veterans who refuse to move on. On a political level I am referring to people like Kerry, Webb and McCain. I don’t buy the argument that we can’t get over this because we did not win the war and there has been no resolution of the issues among the boomers. Folks, Korea was considered a losing effort. The Korean War generation of veterans lived in the shadow of both WWII and WWI. Wars that were unambiguous victories. If you read about the Korean War you will see that the soldiers and the nation felt pretty much the same way about Korea as Vietnam. James Mitchnerís ìThe Bridges at Toko Riî is a story about one such mobilized reservist. If you havenít read the book please do and if you havenít the time rent the movie. It gives a good flavor of the attitude of the men who fought the war. The only difference was that the war took place during the McCarthy era and the communists, like Sidney Lens who organized the original mobilization against the war, were running scared and could not instigate an effect anti-war movement.

The reason we continue to argue this ad infinitum is the self-absorption of the boomer generation. Vietnam and Korea were not individual wars. They were campaigns in a larger struggle with communism. Korea was a stalemate and Vietnam was a defeat. We had many campaigns like Korea/Vietnam-like outcomes during WWII. The overall result was that the axis was defeated…and so was communism. We won the Cold War; the outcome of any individual campaign is irrelevant.

A note on naval reserve commissions:

When you signed up for one of the many officer candidate programs you incurred at least a four-year active duty commitment. If you took any additional training you incurred an additional obligation. Hence, if you went to Submarine school you were going to spend at least another year on active duty (in theory). Many people were released from their commitment early because of the post-Vietnam drawdown. This was particularly true if there was a surplus of officers in the community. Your commitment was for 12 years…4 years active, 2 years ready reserve (drilling or individual) and 6 years inactive. That is why Kerry did not receive his discharge until 1978. I hope this clears up any confusion on a Naval Reserve officer obligation.

Sep 9, 2004 - 4:43 am 126. Charlie (Colorado):

Do note that Kerry volunteered for the Naval Reserve, not the Navy. Sorta like, say, joining an Air National Guard unit but having the misfortune of being called up.

No, though it pains me to defend Kerry at this point, when you enter the Navy (or any other service) to be an officer through OCS — rather than attending a service academy — you always go in as a Reserve officer.

Sep 9, 2004 - 4:51 am 127. DennisThePeasant:

So now I’m an ‘honorary boomer’?

This is the reward I get for not repeating my patented “F**k Viet Nam and F**k the Boomers” screed (posted at this very site more than once, as many well remember)?

An honorary boomer?

Such hurtfulness.

Sep 9, 2004 - 5:20 am 128. DennisThePeasant:

O.K., I’m over the hurt. Let’s talk about Viet Nam and the Boomers.

Rosenbaum can be good at times, but in this case I have to step back and admire his ability to get it completely wrong.

When Kerry reported for duty and O’Neill reported for battle here in 2004, any possibility of Viet Nam being discussed in rational terms during the lifetime of the Boomer Generation came to an end. It will now have to wait until that generation has passed from the scene.

What I am struck by, once again, is how little anyone in that whole blighted generation actually discusses the War in Viet Nam when they discuss the War in Viet Nam. One can’t really accuse either Kerry or O’Neill of discussing Viet Nam or its’ own sake…nor anyone else that I can think of. Would Rosenbaum thought of revisiting Viet Nam at this time had it not been made a central issue in the campaign?

What Rosenbaum either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to admit is that back in the ’60s, being anti-war or pro-war for a whole lot of people had very little to do with the war. It is the ultimate “dirty little secret” of Roger’s generation. Until that is understood and dealt with, openly, ‘revisiting’ Viet Nam by Boomers remains, for the most part, self-indulgent navel gazing.

I have no hope that the Boomers can or will do this. Hence, my contempt for those Boomers who attempt ‘open and honest’ discussion without addressing (as Roger often has) the more personal, and often less admirable, motivations and issues involved.

Sorry, Ron. You just don’t get it.

Sep 9, 2004 - 5:44 am 129. Jamie Irons:

Katherine (with a “K”!):

And isnÔøΩt it wonderful how easy it is to give a diagnosis at a distance? Why do we need doctors at all is beyond me ÔøΩ one of those software med-bots should have replaced them all by now!

As a physician, I greatly resemble that remark!

But more seriously, the Dr. Price your post quotes doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about:

ÔøΩPresident BushÔøΩs ÔøΩmangledÔøΩ words are a demonstration of what physicians call ÔøΩconfabulationsÔøΩ, and are almost specific to the diagnosis of a true dementia.ÔøΩ

President Bush’s “mangled words,” whatever they are a sign of, are not “confabulations,” which are “a filling in of gaps in memory by free fabrication,” seen, as every third-year med student knows, in Korsakoff’s syndrome, for example.

Now, the LLL freely accuses Bush of “lying,” but I don’t think even they have accused him (yet!) of “confabulation.”

BTW, a highly amusing example, really an endearing example, of the kind of syntactical challenges Bush struggles with was noted the other day by Jim Gerghty on NRO’s “Kerry Spot:”

“Too many

OB-GYNs are unable to practice their love with women all across this country.”

I think what the president was thinking was “All across this country, too many OB-GYNs are unable to practice the medicine they love, and women suffer for it,” (or something like that).

It could have been worse. He could have said: “Too many OB-GYNs are unable to pracice their love all across this country with women.”

Damn you, John Edwards!

Anyway, what Bush actually said about the allegedly philandering OB-GYNs is quite typical of the kind of syntactical mangling he is “guilty” of. But this is in no way an example of a “confabulation,” nor is it evidence of a progressive dementia, like primary degenerative dementia (Alzheimer’s).

Jamie Irons

Sep 9, 2004 - 5:56 am 130. Jamie Irons:

Damn TypeCast! What diabolical “intelligence” brought you into being?

Talk about “mangled!”

I don’t know what causes it to distort the quotes in my post above. Sorry.

And DtP

I really think calling the whole “Boomer” generation “blighted” is out of line.

Jamie Irons

Sep 9, 2004 - 6:02 am 131. chuck:

I really think calling the whole “Boomer” generation “blighted” is out of line.

It’s a Dennis thing. We all know and love him for it.

Sep 9, 2004 - 6:27 am 132. Charlie (Colorado):

I don’t know what causes it to distort the quotes in my post above. Sorry.

I do.

I should just stop there, but I can’t get the beat right to make it funny. Jamie, you’re cut&pasting from something that uses real quotation marks — there’s a left-curly kind and a right-curly kind. Much as what happens with Goof’s ®, Roger’s site is trying to use the Unicode values for that … but they code for something else in Roger’s chosen font.

If you care, replace them with regular “quotation marks”, or with “accent-graves and apostrophes”.

Sep 9, 2004 - 6:43 am 133. Jamie Irons:

Charlie

Thanks, I do care!

Ah, l’accent grave! Je voudrais l’accent aigu, mais…

Jamie Irons

Sep 9, 2004 - 7:00 am 134. Rick Ballard:

Charlie (C),

Are you still thinking of reopening (or opening) your blog? If so, a tip on the URL would be appreciated.

Sep 9, 2004 - 7:07 am 135. Sandy P:

–And DtP

I really think calling the whole “Boomer” generation “blighted” is out of line.–

I do, too, since I resemble that remark. 1960.

Don’t blame them on me!

Sep 9, 2004 - 8:08 am 136. Sandy P:

Via Bill Hobbs:

Roger Abramson thinks the Tennessee wing of John Kerry’s campaign is out-of-touch with voters on what’s important:

A campaign flyer published by the Kerry-Edwards 2004 Tennessee campaign office headquarters lists nine things that John Kerry and John Edwards will focus on if they are elected: 1) education, 2) Social Security and Medicare, 3) job growth, 4) health care, 5) safe communities, 6) civil rights, 7) rural issues, veterans’ issues and 9) environmental issues.

All of these things are swell, and certainly domestic issues are the Democratic Party’s strong suit, but did it ever occur to anyone that mentioning “terrorism” and “Iraq” somewhere – you know, the two issues that according to last weekend’s Gallup Poll are the most salient of this election for a majority of Americans – might be a good idea?

It ain’t 1992 anymore, guys.

Sep 9, 2004 - 8:11 am 137. Knucklehead:

What to make of this?

The Boston Globe has this article about “new” memos regarding Bush’s TANG service. The Globe’s story, by and large, reports on and references CBS’s 60 Minutes show.

Which links to these documents from “personal files of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian”:

Memorandum, May 4, 1972

Memo to File, May 19, 1972

Memorandum For Record, Aug. 1, 1972

Memo to File, Aug. 18, 1973

After reading these articles and the looking at the documents that CBS “obtained”, this discussion at Powerline seems intriguing to say the least. WTF is CBS/60 Minutes doing? Have they been victimized by a hoax or are they perpetrating one?

Sep 9, 2004 - 9:25 am 138. Charlie (Colorado):

Rick, I’m still thinking about it. I may put something there today to keep all the links I’ve been accumulating, but I’m picky enough that I won’t start seriously blogging until I get a nice site design etc.

Knuck, I just looked at those docs myself, and it’s getting verr-ry interesting. Beyond the suspicious font and the superscript “th”, there’s another point there … John Moore, Jerry, check me on this, but have you EVER seen an official doc abbreviate “first lieutenant” as “1st Lt”? When I was clerk-typist in my CAP squadron, I was strictly instructed to use 1LT.

Similarly, looking at Bush’s docs from the period at USA TODAY, I find this pdf of his Form 77, under Killian’s signature, typed on a conventional AF typewriter.

I mean, I know you guys are Navy, but you did occasionaly see stuff from the military services, didn’t you?

Sep 9, 2004 - 10:00 am 139. Knucklehead:

Charlie,

It is fascinating. I served in a combat MOS while overseas and basically never go near no stinking military typewriter. But when I came back stateside I tried to weasel out of mud and dust and downrange and spent some time “at battalion” where I saw plenty of typewriters and even pretended I could use them. Then I decided to learn to type and took a US Army typing course for a couple weeks and finished out my service in ‘80 in a job where I got to shoot plenty of typewriters for a few weeks. None of them did variable space fonts

Then, after Pell Grants and GI Bill, I started working in the computer industry on the document publishing side. We used line printers (carrier and other fixed space fonts) for the longest time. It was well into the ’80’s before word-processing and printer technology reached the masses. I’d bet my next quarter’s worth of mortgage payments that Lt. Col. Killian of the Alabama NG in ‘72/’73 did NOT have access to anything that typed anything but fixed space fonts and did NOT do super- or sub-scripts and, as you mentioned, referred to First and Second Lt’s as 1LT and 2LT.

CBS was had. And the Boston Globe went right with them.

Sep 9, 2004 - 10:18 am 140. jerry:

Charlie:

Each service uses different abbreviation forms. The Army, Marines and the Navy use all CAPS. The AF uses a mixture of caps and lower case.. An O-2 in the navy is LT(jg) and the USMC and USA an 0-2 as 1LT. I suppose the USAF would use 1Lt for on O-2.

Sep 9, 2004 - 10:19 am 141. Knucklehead:

Ooops, of course, I meant to type LTC rather than Lt. Col.

Sep 9, 2004 - 10:21 am 142. jerry:

Charlie:

In that case LTC is USA/USMC and Lt Col is USAF

Sep 9, 2004 - 10:48 am 143. Rick Ballard:

Surely Killian must have kept other records from the same period. A simple comparison to other docs might prove dispositive. There must be boxes of them available, right? And the top notch “journalists” involved in the matter did perform that simple check, didn’t they? I mean, they are trained “professionals”.

Sep 9, 2004 - 10:51 am 144. Charlie (Colorado):

Rick, some of Bush’s service records are over Killian’s signature, at least. Cf. the 30 Apr 72 FITREP. (PDF doc from USA Today)

Looks like the standard issue IBM … with which I’m infinitely familiar, since I was one of the few people in my ROTC battalion who could actually type.

Sep 9, 2004 - 11:46 am 145. Charlie (Colorado):

Ah, hell, I already linked that. Sorry.

Sep 9, 2004 - 11:47 am 146. Knucklehead:

The Powerline thread on this “are they or are they not forgeries” is, IMHO, a darned good example of why blogs are better than “traditional media” even in the case of unbiased “traditional media” (is there still any example of such a beast).

The running updates are fascinating – we get to watch point-counterpoint in something approaching real-time.

The question remains, however – why doesn’t the MSM go through this sort of vetting of the information they put out?

I’ll wager on forged plants at this point. The only “wait a sec” type counter so far is that someone who was in the military around that time worked for the PR office somewhere and says they had plenty of access to variable font typewriters but also states that nobody liked using them. Somehow it doesn’t seem plausible to me that a type of typewriter available to the PR people that even they didn’t like to use would be the commander’s “memo to file” machine.

A couple interesting things (OK, interesting to me but I’m a whackjob)…

The Whitehouse apparently “released” copies of these documents – the copies that had been faxed to them by CBS! Does this suggest that they don’t know, or don’t particularly care much, what the full ANG files might contain? (I suspect that is true – Bush would have no way of knowing if some commander was typing up Memos to Self for File or if some base brass was discussing any “pressure” they were feeling.)

Sep 9, 2004 - 11:54 am 147. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Excuse me, Charlie, but the Navy is a military service and I had a combat MOS (P-3 aircrew). Had your mud sprouted bad guys, we could put 20,000 lbs of various kinds of ordinance on them, although that wasn’t even our tertiary job. The aircraft is being used today by SOF (probably SEALs) as flying artillery, with a detachment stationed in Kandahar, and another in Africa that recently took out 100 Al Qaeda in the Sahel in one air strike. I’m guessing that they added JDAM capability to the gravity bomb capability. I know they now have maverick missiles. Maybe Jerry knows.

Regarding military reports, I have to remember my CAP records. It’s 1LT.

The Navy doesn’t have such a rank, of course – it’s JG and then LT. My father was a JG at the end of WW-II. Ironically he was in a seaplane tender, which meant he was in the VP navy just like me. He did know how to drive the ship, while I have never in my life been on an active Navy ship.

My take on the National Guard stuff is its nonsense, but a coordinated smear by the MSM that will never admit it (for a laugh, read the BGlobe’s statement that they just happened to make their way through the data in time for this week).

The National Guard service shows one thing most people won’t think of: Bush was brave. Those aircraft were very dangerous and the ejection seat didn’t work near the ground. Bush flew night intercepts (an easy way to lose orientation) over the gulf – not a good chance of survival on bail-out.

From a standpoint of evaluating him, it’s a waste of time. What question is of relevance today? We know he became a drunken flake, and then solved that.

Any other questions from the ’70s?

Sep 9, 2004 - 12:18 pm 148. Knucklehead:

Any other questions from the ’70s?

Well, now that you mentioned it…

- how many times did John Kerry meet with officials of the North Vietnamese government? What was discussed? What actions did John Kerry take on behalf of the North Vietnamese government and how was he compensated?

- Did John Kerry’s VVAW pressure families of POWs to testify, falsely or otherwise, in return for mail access to their POW family member?

I could think of a few more, but those will do for starters.

Sep 9, 2004 - 12:40 pm 149. jerry:

John:

I don’t think they are letting VP aircraft fly ground strike missions even with JDAM. For one thing the fast movers don’t like a glorified airliner doing their job. It might imply something about their manhood. I could see them using SLAM/SLAM-ER (land attack Harpoon variant) for some special targets but I doubt the powers that be would approve of that.

During GWI, the Harpoon equipped P-3s were not allowed to engage the enemy because of the “risk” to the AC. They were really saying that if a P-3 could do maritime strike in coastal waters why would you need to spend big money on dedicated strike AC. However, maritime strike is one of primary missions for the P-3 since harpoon was introduced.

Sep 9, 2004 - 12:50 pm 150. raf:

DtP: back in the ’60s, being anti-war or pro-war for a whole lot of people had very little to do with the war.

Exactly correct. The whole dance of choosing sides had a lot of undercurrents, but anything actually connected to the actual war was only coincidental.

Of course, as a leading edge boomer, my memory is no doubt tainted by the same process.

Sep 9, 2004 - 1:00 pm 151. DennisThePeasant:

Jamie Irons & Sandy P-

Blighted, to no small degree, by hypersensitivity to R.R.E. (Republican Rhetorical Excess). Sorry, but you’re gonna have to learn to deal with it… I was born with Dick Nixon’s grace and good humor, not Ronald Reagan’s.

And as neither of you were around for my original rant of about 8 months ago (I’m still amazed I didn’t get banned on the spot), you haven’t the slightest idea of what constitutes “out of line” comments about Boomers.

Sep 9, 2004 - 2:49 pm

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