LI helps out the poor Dems...

LI is reviewing a bio of LBJ. So, doing some research, we rented the film Hearts and Minds, a documentary about Vietnam that made a big splash in the in the seventies. Well. We heard a few things in that documentary that made us think about the Democrats.

The Democrats apparently have a problem with their message. Now, that’s a shame. That’s a doggone shame. It makes LI weep, sometimes. So, out of our infinite compassion for our Democratic brothers and sisters, we copied down those things so that the Dems could use them.

One was said by a past Democratic presidential candidate about the Vietnam war – Eugene McCarthy – and we think it is still such a sturdy, succinct, and generally correct phrase that we’d recommend it for Iraq: “It is unwise, immoral and not in the national interest of this country, and that therefore it must be brought to an end.” Except, of course, that it has to be brought to an end now. Withdrawal in the next, oh, three months.

And here’s a remark from Senator Fullbright. He was speaking to a question about Johnson’s speech on the Gulf of Tonkin that began the official U.S. military intervention in Vietnam:

“We always hesitate in public to use the dirty word lie but a lie’s a lite, it’s a misrepresentation of fact and it is supposed to be a criminal act if it’s done under oath. Mr. Johnson didn’t say it under oath. We don’t usually have the president under oath.”

Short and sweet and from a Senator, no less.

And then there was a comment from a former Oklahoma bomber pilot – the most impressive American in the documentary, including the Kennedys, Johnson, Daniel Ellsburg, Nixon and Bob Hope. The guy’s name was Randy Floyd.

Q: Do you think we’ve learned anything from this.
A: “I think we are trying not to… I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and policy makers have exhibited.”

One of the things about Vietnam that the film doesn’t show, but that I am beginning to see, reading around, is that Vietnam was not lost after the Tet offensive. Vietnam was lost in late 1963-1964. That was when Diem was assassinated, and the next government tried, and failed, due to American obstruction, to create a neutralist state. That this would eventually lead to the re-unification of Vietnam was obvious. That Vietnam would be Communist dominated was obvious. That American could do nothing about that was also obvious. The French floated the neutralist balloon. The Americans shot it down. 750,000 casualties later, Vietnam was a communist state. And twenty some years after Hearts and Minds was made – with certain sections devoted to the big fat Vietnamese capitalist pigs that the filmmakers saw as American puppets – the united communist nation was speaking exactly that big fat capitalist tongue. In fact, the businessman they interviewed made chamber of commerce statements about South Vietnam (which, in the commentary, the filmmaker points out with some disdain) that are now state doctrine – the pablum official line. The war was not only pointless strategically, it was even pointless ideologically. Just as the Americans were bound to lose the war, American ideology was bound to win it.

The Americans “lost” in Iraq in 2004 – whatever they were trying to do. The post Iraq syndrome is already in – Richard Perle, who is so odious that he is a bit unbelievable, like a comic book villain, is still smart enough to know that the reactionary line is, Bush is losing Iran. Because Bush is. Because nobody is going to keep paying for America’s stinkin’ wars. Bush is both a parody of LBJ and a parody of detentish Richard Nixon. Who knew that one frat boy had it in him?