Posted on 05/03/2012 9:50:55 PM PDT by neverdem
The major Demo tactical effort against Mitt Romney is based on portraying him as a robotic, out-of-touch figure not much like other Americans -- at least not Americans of the 21st century. Romney is a creature of the 1950s, raised and indoctrinated within a Mormon cocoon, a man effectively living in a time warp. He uses words like "zany." His hair looks funny. He's been married to the same woman for nearly half a century. What kind of post-'60s American is this?
The key element here, repeated in piece after piece, is that Romney was "untouched by the '60s." Liberals tend to take this "touch" carried out by a decade -- a strange concept in and of itself -- in much the way in which fundamentalists take adult baptism: as a rite necessary to achieve salvation. Those who have not been "touched" are fringe figures, not at all part of the mainstream as defined in Ann Arbor, San Francisco, and the Upper East Side.
This thesis contains a number of assumptions, chief among them the idea that the '60s were a universal phenomenon, a decade that altered everyone who lived through it (except for the Mormons, presumably, protected by the desert on one side and the Great Salt Lake on the other), and all of them in the same way. That one-sided transformation involves a sharp shift to the left politically and to the flamboyant morally. Films telling of stiff, uptight, and uncool types who suddenly loosen up when exposed to "alternative lifestyles" (and become better persons for it!) have been a staple of Hollywood almost as far back as the decade itself. Despite the fact that nobody actually knows anyone who went through this process, it has become one of the chief myths of millennial America...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
“And then, after the war had shifted to more or less conventional warfare and was won and the South Vietnamese were promised continued U.S. support, Democrats used the cover of Watergate to screw them all over, leading to the current situation. “
Yes, you’re quite right.
By 1972 the majority of US combat troops had left South Vietnam, and the ARVN had been trained well enough to take over the fighting.
But they had been trained to fight like we do, meaning a lot of firepower.
When the 1974 ‘Watergate’ Congress took over the Democratic majority was for the first time dominated by the hard Left and they cut off all aid to South Vietnam. No ammunition, no gasoline, no American air support.
It didn’t take Communist General Giap long to size up his opportunity; hell, be probably got a green light from some of the traitors in American politics letting him know that South Vietnam was going to be betrayed.
So Giap didn’t bother with insurgency. He simply mounted a full scale armored invasion of the South. There was a traffic jam on Highway 1 from all the equipment heading South.
Some American military begged President Ford to let them bomb the highway. The North’s invasion force would have been sitting ducks. It would have been a Highway of Death and the entire invasion could have been wiped out.
But no. Ford wouldn’t go along. So two years after American combat troops left Saigon fell. And it could have been saved at little cost. The Watergate Congress has a lot of blood on its hands, but it never has had to take the blame.
“but LBJ only compounded the problem”
Absolutely. In no way did I mean to excuse LBJ. My only intention was to point out Kennedy’s often overlooked role in the Vietnam debacle, the assassination of Diem that he set in motion.
Regarding LBJ, it was his decision to control the war from the White House, to restrict bombing in a fashion that benfited North Vietnam, to fight a strictly defensive campaign that never threatened North Vietnam with conquest.
The combination of LBJ and Robert MacNamara guaranteed thousands of American combat deaths and no chance of ending the war with a victory of any sort.
The Big (ger) Vietnam Disaster(s) did indeed happen on LBJ's watch. However, it was JFK who initially began the War in Vietnam as an American Armed Forces Show, by replacing Dulles' and Eisenhower's "unarmed" and un-uniformed Advisory Group with at first, The First Marine Division.
He did this in the face of stern warnings from Eisenhower ... and MacArthur(!) JFK, a fervent supporter of McCarthy, simply bdid not wish to be identified with the loss of territory to the Communists ... and thus "weak on Communism," which was the Democrat Party's rap after the loss of China and Korea. It is also true that he sought a way to back off from this ill-considered commitment to "boots on the ground," but then he was murdered in office and LBJ manufactured the "Tonkin Gulf Incident" to drastically increase the commitment of more and more men ... eventually reaching the more than half=-million-man total ... before Nixon began the face-saving "Vietnam-ization process that led to withdrawal and a perceived defeat.
Remember, this war draqged on from 1961 to the beginning of 1975! JFK was actually a Foreign Policy disaster. His legacy is the belief held by Democrat Presidents Clinton and Obama that running the US Executive Branch can be handled in 2-3 hours per day or less, with the real work done by delegation to increasingly socialistic advisors, cabinet members, and "czars."
The philosophy apparently is: "Whatever is going to happen, will. The important thing is to control the "spin," the perception of the public after what is going to happen anyway, actually happens."
Working for them rather well, all things considered.
“Remember, this war draqged on from 1961 to the beginning of 1975! “
It probably goes back a even few years before 1961; I have a copy of Bruce Palmer’s ‘The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam’ around here somewhere; Palmer was one of Westmoreland’s deputies.
When I was an Army brat kindergartner back around ‘56 my teacher’s husband was a Captain just back from a tour in Vietnam. He was in a Staff and Command class with my dad, and I think it was the first he became aware our role in Vietnam. In ‘61 dad’s Pentagon office partner, an Army small arms expert, did a tour in Vietnam; his comment when he returned was “they may not be calling it a war but they’re sure using ammunition like it’s one”. In ‘62 dad went to Vietnam for a year, part of MACV if I recall correctly. There were about 15,000 Americans there at the time.
The difference was that during that era, i.e., up until the UN Brokered division into North and South in '54, we were in supply and back-up to the French. The Frogs faced a strong anti-war movement at home sponsored by the Euro-Commies, and tried to fight the war with the Foreign Legion, as well as backing it up with a draft, only to lose it all after Dienbienphu.
When North Vietnam essentially broke the agreement and increasingly fomented the VietCong insurgency in the South, we increased our support to the new South Vietnamese government, with which we actually had a treaty. From '54-'60, we sent increasingly active advisors and supplied the South Vietnamese with American weapons.
The difference is that JFK committed uniformed troops with a direct front line role against the VietCong. When the ragtag VietCong was on the ropes, the North Vietnamese re-committed their organized troops, and the rest of the COMBLOC redoubled their material support.
So yeah, you're absolutely right, we had an increasingly complex role in VietNam from pre-1950 onward.
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