Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2005 23:30:54 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: The end of a Washington mystery
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 09:09 PM 6/2/05 -0400, Ted White wrote:
>From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
>> At 06:30 PM 6/2/05 -0400, Ted White wrote:
>> >From: "Mike B." <yahoo at omniphile.com>

>> So what?  You think ending a war that way happens quickly?  It took the
>> Democrats (mostly) over a decade to dig us that hole...climbing out wasn't
>> going to happen overnight...unless we decided we actually wanted to win it
>> and acted accordingly (I'm talking about the Congress, White House and
>> Pentagon, not the guys actually doing the fighting here).
>
>Your chronology is messed up.  "Over a decade"?  The Democrats were in
>power from 1961 to 1969 -- eight years.  Eisenhower made the first moves
>that put us in Vietnam, and Kennedy followed up on them, but it was in 1964
>that we began seriously commiting our armed forces to that war.   So it
>took us only four years to "dig in."

My chronology is fine.  We started getting involved during the Truman
administration.  See:

http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=23346

"The first United States involvement in Vietnam began in the late 1940's,
long before it escalated to include the United States Military. Because of
the basic terms or the Truman Doctrine, the United States was drawn in the
Vietnam conflict."

Eisenhower was the one who sent "advisors" and the CIA (and the reason I
said "Democrats (mostly)".  That was in the late 50s.  Kennedy continued
the practice and Johnson did the "escalation" thing that got us in
seriously as a primary fighting force, but we were starting to get in there
in person in the late 50s, with the policy roots of that being a decade
earlier.  Nixon came in in '68 right?  Do the math: 1968 - "late 40s" =
"over a decade".  It's at least a decade even if you start with Eisenhower.

>We could have pulled out at any time after Nixon was elected, if he'd had
>any actual interest in ending the war.  He did not.  He *never* ended that
>war.  Gerald Ford pulled us out unceremoniously and pretty much overnight.

With some pretty sad consequences for our allies there...Killing Fields
anyone?  Kinda like the Bay of Pigs thing with Kennedy, or the Kurds after
the Gulf War. Is it any wonder the Kurds were hessitant to trust us as
allies in Dessert Storm?  We have a lousy history as allies since WWII.

>From what I've read (remember, I was 12 in '68) Nixon was trying to get us
out a bit more gracefully.  He was trying to get the North Vietnamese to
talk seriously in Paris.  Things like mining Haiphong Harbor (which the
military had been asking to do since Johnson was in office), and bombing
Hanoi (a major supply storage and distribution area that was off-limits to
attack under Johnson) were having a big effect...big enough that it was a
primary requirement of the North for any peace treaty that we remove the
harbor mines (which we did).

>> Well, since I was 12 when he got elected the first time, I wasn't
>following
>> things all that carefully, but did he say his "secret plan" would be done
>> in his first term?
>
>I don't recall the timetable, but he *ran* on ending the war.  It was his
>principal campaign promise.  And the first that he broke.

And probably why all the anti-war people hate him so much.  Watergate is
just an excuse...they hated him already.  Right?

>> Got proof?  I can show you claims of crimes for Clinton that make
>break-ins
>> look trivial (dozens and dozens of them).  Things like murder for
>instance.
>>  Claims are easy to come up with.
>
>And in Clinton's case they've been discredited.  Whitewater represented
>Starr's failure to find any truth in the original charges against Clinton.

I wasn't referring to those claims...though a bunch of the Clinton's
friends seem to have been plenty guilty in some of the schemes they were
part of.  Enough to get jail time anyway.  I was talking about some of the
claims made on the net or elsewhere about things like a bunch of folks near
him ending up dead from various causes (something like 50 of them,
including the state trooper who supposedly escorted women to his room, some
of his body guards, etc.).  So far as I know, they weren't really taken
seriously enough to investigate, and most or all are probably bogus, but
the claims were made in public.

>> >There is no comparison between the many criminal acts of Nixon and his
crew
>> >and Clinton getting a blowjob from an intern.  None.
>>
>> Wrong.  There is a comparison, and I made it.  Since you seem to have
>> missed it, I'll do it again (but just this once, ok?)  Both are illegal
>> acts under the law.  Both are abuses of power when you use your position as
>> President to try to avoid the consequences of your actions.  Both are
>> hypocritical when the government branch you head put *other* people on
>> trial for the same crimes, but did anything you could, no matter how much
>> damage it did to the country, to avoid it yourself.  See?  Lots of
>> similarities.
>
>One is a mountain and the other is an ant-hill.  There are many
>similarities, all of them superficial and obfuscating.

In your opinion.  In mine, any misfeasance or malfeasance in the highest
office in the land is serious.  I don't excuse any of them.  You can rate
severity if you like, and let those you like get away with crimes, while
crying for blood in other cases, but I'm not going to be joining you.  The
president has a duty to keep the highest standards, and breaking federal
laws, such as perjury, is not in keeping with any standards at all, except
maybe the lowest.

The President and Congress have sworn an oath to uphold and defend the
Constitution, and Clinton (both of them) trample it frequently...along with
most or all of the members of both houses of Congress, as if it were more
of an inconvenience than the document that grants them their authority.
The only difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is which
parts they stomp on most frequently.

In the case of Clinton they did it again, if you ask me, as a Felony is
certainly in the "high crimes and misdemeanors" category, yet they failed
to impeach him for it.

>If "perjury" was the crime you claim it to be in this political context,
>why hasn't Bush been impeached for the lies he's told which put us in Iraq?

When did Bush testify under oath about anything that turned out to be known
to him at the time to be other than as he testified?  I must have missed
the Grand Jury testimony reports where this occurred.

What "lies" are you talking about?  The ones that were being told by every
major government on the planet at the time about WMD?  There wasn't anyone
who seriously doubted that Sadam had them or was trying hard to get
them...not even Germany and France.  Since he's actually *used* them, we
know for a fact that he had some at one time.  The only question was did he
still have them, and was he trying to get more.  Sadam was working really
hard for 12 years to convince the world of that, and he succeeded.  If he
wasn't, why didn't he let the UN inspectors prove that and save himself an
invasion and a life in prison?  "He's crazy" might explain it I guess...

>Why isn't every single member of congress on trial?  The obvious answer is
>that most people have a better sense of proportion than you reveal here.

No, most people figure that corrupt people in power is a given, and as long
as they aren't goring their personal ox at the moment, they aren't going to
worry about it.   Most people aren't familiar enough with the Constriction
to even know what it is, let alone to care about its slow destruction by
indifference and expedience.

-- Mike B.
--
"To stay young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn
old falsehoods." -- Lazarus Long