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Commemorating the 49th Anniversary of the fall of Saigon with the Vietnamese Veterans Association, members of South Australia’s veterans’ community, and the broader Vietnamese community.

In 1975, President Ford was left to manage the difficult ending of the Vietnam War. President Ford went to Congress for a relief package to allow American personnel and our allies to evacuate. However, there was ONE U.S. SENATOR who opposed any such support. The result was the embarrassing and hurried evacuation from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon. This Senator reveled in the embarrassment and did everything he could to leverage it politically against Ford. Despite the efforts of this one U.S. Senator, President Ford managed to rescue 1,500 South Vietnamese allies prior to the country’s falls....

For baby boomers, the minute it became apparent the United States would finally end its military involvement in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban rapidly took over the country, images from the shocking end of the Vietnam War — America’s longest before this one — came flooding back. They were certainly on the mind of the baby-boomer-in-chief when he spoke of the endgame in July: Now that the images and the reality of two bitterly divisive and costly wars ending in the triumph of America’s adversaries are converging so dramatically, those mulling the political impact of the debacle in Kabul should...

Over the past week, as Taliban fighters shattered the brittle façade of Afghanistan’s armed forces, many commentators noted the unnerving similarity to 1975, when television viewers shuddered at images of frantic embassy personnel and their South Vietnamese allies climbing a ladder leading from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon to awaiting helicopters, while in the background, the steady rumble of enemy tanks grew heavier. It was an undignified end to a long and costly war, and it was President Gerald Ford’s poor luck that it happened on his watch. Commenting on the almost simultaneous fall of Cambodia and...

President Donald J. Trump strongly condemned President Joe Biden and the catastrophe unfolding in Kabul, Afghanistan since the weekend, in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity on Tuesday. Trump told "Hannity" that Biden has humiliated the United States more than any other president in history, explicitly eclipsing fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter's Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979. "It is a terrible time for our country. I don't think in all of the years our country has ever been so humiliated. I don't know what you call it – a military defeat or a psychological defeat, there has never been anything...

The rapid US withdrawal from Afghanistan that has left the gate open for the Taliban to surge to power may come as a surprise to some, but President Biden has been in favour of pulling out for years. In 2010, Biden reportedly told Richard Holbrooke, then Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the US had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the cost for the Afghan people. According to Holbrooke, when Biden was asked about America's obligation to maintain their presence in Afghanistan to protect vulnerable civilians, he scornfully replied by referencing the US exit from southeast Asia in...

In all my many years of blogging MSM outbursts against Republican presidents, I've never seen anyone angrier than Richard Engel about Biden's Afghanistan fiasco. Well, there was Keith Olbermann. But for present purposes, let's leave aside the clinically disturbed. In a piece with which Morning Joe opened today's show, Engel absolutely unleashed on the Biden administration. Rolling heartbreaking footage of desperate Afghans clinging to a US military plane as it taxied toward takeoff, Engel quoted a US military official saying the situation is "100-times worse than the humiliating American pullout from Saigon."Get the rest of the story and view the...

First came Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, debuting at the La Scala in Milan in 1904.Set at the beginning of the ever-so-hopeful 20th century it is the operatic story of Cio-Cio-San, a 15 year old geisha known as Madame Butterfly. She is “purchased” along with a lease house overlooking Nagasaki harbor by an American Naval officer, Lieutenant B. J. Pinkerton. He ‘marries’ her, fathers her child, abandons her to return to America and take a proper (white) wife. When he returns years later with the new Mrs. to take his son back to America Cio-Cio-San chooses death over dishonor and commits seppuku.Madame...

Former President Donald Trump sent a statement to his followers calling on President Joe Biden to 'resign in disgrace' on Sunday amid the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of US troops. 'It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the Border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,' Trump said in an email. He continued perpetuating his claim that Biden won the presidency via election fraud, concluding the email: 'It shouldn't be a big deal, because he...

Videos uploaded from Kabul on Sunday showed chaos at the international airport as panicked people rushed to board aircraft ahead of the Taliban’s advance. Gunfire was audible in the distance as refugees packed into transport aircraft. Operations at the airport were reportedly suspended for a time due to shooting nearby.

Last Days in Vietnam: A Moral Obligation With just 24 hours in which to complete an evacuation of Americans still in the embassy in Saigon, Ambassador Martin decides to airlift as many South Vietnamese as possible to safety from the advancing North Vietnamese Army, in this video adapted from American Experience: Last Days in Vietnam.

Biden’s words flood social media over image of helicopter rescuing US embassy personnel a la Saigon President Joe Biden is facing intense criticism from media figures both on TV and online as Taliban forces begin their takeover of Kabul in Afghanistan, an outcome that the president said was “highly unlikely” just last month. As American troops began emergency evacuations of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, CNN’s Jake Tapper said the world was watching “a tragic foreign policy disaster unfold before our eyes.” “That is, of course, a sharp turn-around from six weeks ago when President Biden called it highly unlikely...

The U.S. embassy in Kabul tells Americans to shelter in place and not to come to the embassy or airport amid reports of the airport taking fire. https://twitter.com/alexsalvinews/status/1426925292375973892

🚨#BREAKING: Fmr. President Trump calls on Biden to resign "It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace...it shouldn't be a big deal, because he wasn't elected legitimately in the first place!"

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday defended President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan as Taliban fighters began entering the capital, Kabul. In a series of interviews on Sunday talk shows, Blinken said the US succeeded in its mission of bringing those responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to justice and argued that remaining in the country was not sustainable. “Remaining in Afghanistan for another one, five, 10 years was not in the national interest,” Blinken said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” While many have started comparing Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to...

While Biden Adminstration tries rushes 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan in the hopes of protecting the U.S. Embassy, it is my personal belief that the Embassy is already lost and surrounded! As I told a friend the other day, "The only thing that is factual in Afghanistan is loyalty to one's clan." and with the Taliban less that 50 miles from the capital, "How long do we expect Government Officials and the laughable Afghan Security Forces to hold on to the fantasy that they can stop the Taliban?" With 1,000s of refugees are currently flooding into Kabul daily expect the security...

"After word spread about a renewed push by the Department of Homeland Security to get Vietnam to accept more deportees, some people saw it as a mistake by the Trump administration given the GOP’s fading strength in Orange County and the historical support that the Republican Party has gotten from Vietnamese Americans. But in a community where many older residents oppose undocumented immigration and younger ones tend to lean left politically, the controversy is just the latest to underscore the generational divide among those of Vietnamese descent." "More than 8,000 Vietnamese residents in the U.S. who escaped their homeland but...

Ever since, McCain has added compelling details at key points in his political career. When his stories are placed beside documented evidence from other sources, significant contradictions often emerge. One such case involves McCain’s experience in the devastating fire and explosions that killed 134 sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal during the Vietnam War three months before he was shot down over North Vietnam. McCain has made claims about this accident that differ dramatically from parts of the official Navy report and accounts of reliable eyewitnesses.

After three decades of bloodshed, Vietnam’s civil war abruptly ended 43 years ago today, on April 30, 1975. The events surrounding this date are seared into the minds of every Vietnamese person of a certain age.I was not yet four years old, but these are some of my earliest memories. There was no longer a North and South Vietnam divided at the 17th parallel, only the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Days before, the radio inside our house in Saigon had been ticking off provinces that had fallen into North Vietnamese hands: some of them the hometowns of my relatives. As...