Another rerun. This one was from May of last year. I was getting about five readers a day.
My sister has been on my case that I haven't written a screed lately. Actually,she doesn't really like my screeds. She prefers it when I make fun of Molly Ivins. Funny, in today's Atlanta Urinal and Constipation there was a letter to the editor from Dave Thomason of Smyrna Georgia and here is an excerpt:
The @issue pages are for constructive and intelligent discussions regarding the
important issues of the day from the full spectrum of political views. I must take
exception with the continued printing of Molly Ivins' column. This woman has a
personal vendetta against President Bush.
Well, yeah, Dave, but you got to realize that Molly is a humor writer. Ya know, something like Dave Barry, just not as funny. Anyone who takes Molly seriously is the type of person who would vote for Cynthia McKinney or think that Michael Bellesiles is a serious scholar.
I'm not gonna write about Molly Ivins or even Helen Thomas, who wrote a column about how we need universal health care. Yeah and we need world peace and one world government and peace on earth and good will toward men. So Helen, what model should we use? Well first that would require socialism, which has never worked anywhere it has been tried. I know, Hillary Clinton hasn't been running it, but no one else has been able to make it work either. Sweden? Their economy is imploding. England? The National Health Service? Give me a break. Canada? Yeah, how about Canada? They keep coming to the United States to get good medical care. I know. How about Cuba? The workers' paradise. They have free medical care, but remember, you get what you pay for. Helen really needs to find somewhere where they have a good treatment for Alzheimer's Disease, 'cause I think she's just about there.
No, I want to write about a really good movie I saw on HBO Saturday night. It was called Path To War and it covered the period between Lyndon Johnson's inauguration in 1965 to his announcement that he would not seek reelection in 1968. I did not really like the actor who portrayed LBJ, but the movie was well done otherwise.
In my opinion, the biggest BEM (booger eatin' moh-ron) responsible for the debacle known as the Viet Nam war (wait a minute...it wasn't really a war...if it were a real war, we could have tried Jane Fonda for treason and shot her worthless ass. I have not paid to see a Jane Fonda movie since Barbarella, which was probably her only good movie. Lord knows, she ain't much of an actress. Klute...never saw it. On Golden Pond...never saw it. 9 to 5..saw it..didn't pay for it..got side tracked gotta return to the original thought), was Robert McNamara. And whom do you think was the actor who played him? In a remarkable stroke of incredible typecasting they cast one of the most wothless BEM's of an actor they could find: Alec Baldwin. Wait a minute. Wasn't he supposed to leave the country after Bush won? Alec, Delta is ready when you are.
Somewhere near the end of the movie Johnson was ranting about how he should have replaced half the cabinet when he took over. For sure he should have replaced McNamara. George W. Bush take a lesson here. Get rid of Clinton holdovers, especially Tenet at CIA.
I was in the Navy from 1965 to 1969. From October 1966 to October 1969 I served on amphibious ships in support of operations in Viet Nam. I lived through that incompetently managed war. There were times I felt it was one big circle jerk and I was in the middle.
All right Sherry, here I go.
I just saw the director's cut of Apocalypse Now and there were some glaring mistakes. First of all, we did not call the Vietnamese slopes, slants, dinks, or chinks, all terms I heard In Apocalypse Now. They were fucking gooks! John McCain had it right. And another thing, every place name had fucking in the middle. e.g Viet Fucking Nam, Da Fucking Nang, Vung Fucking Tao. That was apropriate because it was the most fucked up war we ever fought!
You almost have to feel sorry for LBJ, because he had to follow the saintly JFK. Yeah all those Kennedy's are real saints aren't they? I remember a few years ago, I think it was at the Clarence Thomas lynching, uh, I mean, hearings, that Ted Kennedy said he was morally outraged about something. That was quite a feat since to be morally outraged one has to first have morals. Remember it was JFK who betrayed all the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. He's probably lucky he got shot as his presidency would have been mediocre otherwise. In all fairness, he didn't start the Viet Nam mess, Eisenhower was the one who sent in the first advisors. But he appointed McNamara who kept getting us in deeper. Like I said, Johnson should have canned McNamara. He finally canned him and got him a postion at the World Bank where McNamara continued his uncanny knack of fucking up everything he touched.
I first hit Viet Fucking Nam in October of 1966 and could see right away that we were not fighting a war. Look, when you fight a war you fight for one reason and one reason only: To win! As Patton said, 'You don't win wars dying for your country. You make the other sorry sonuvabitch die for his country.' We were fighting this war all wrong. We were trying to hurt the gooks enough to make them want to negotiate a peace. This sounds something like we want to have Israel do with the Palestinians. Colin Powell, fer chrissakes, don't you remember Viet Fucking Nam?
During this war we kept trying to be the good guys. Here's the deal: the people who win the war get to write the history. If we would have gone in with the appropriate force in the first place and fought an offensive war instead of a defensive war we might have won. By the time the people in charge realized that, public opinion had turned against the war and we had lost. All of us grunts and squids in Viet Fucking Nam knew that. The Cong killers wanted the people in charge to unleash them so they could do the job they were trained to do.
In January of 1968, I was transferred to an LST, an amphibious ship that went right up to the beach to load and unload supplies. I was in country during Tet. I was also in country when LBJ made his speech that he would not seek reelection. All the Cong killers were ecstatic. Not just the Cong killers but all of us were. We figgered that since LBJ wasn't running for reelection he would release us from our silly rules of engagement and let us finally fight to win this crappy war. No such luck.
And the war kept dragging on and on until we finally negotiated 'peace with honor', tucked our tails between out legs, and left Viet Fucking Nam. Now if that wasn't a big load of bullshit. And then those poor oppressed Vietnamese created the killing fields in Cambodia. Would you believe there was at least one peacenik with integrity? After the mess in Cambodia, Joan Baez, admitted that maybe we were doing the right thing in Viet Nam after all. She called Jane Fonda, who couldn't be bothered as she had other interests by then.
Do I have bad feelings about Viet Nam? You bet your ass I do. I am pissed off that we elected a draft dodger as president. Someone went in the place of that sorry ass and probably got killed. And Michael Moore has the balls to say that about George Bush? At least Bush went in the military, if only the reserves. I don't remember Michael Moore saying anything about that from 1992 to 1998, that fat bastard. Even Gore went in the military and actually went to Viet Nam. But, the normal tour was one year and he was only there for four months and had a bodyguard, but at least he went.
But as bad as the Viet Nam war was, and God knows it was bad, it could have been much worse.
Jimmy Carter could have been President.
Posted by denny at August 30, 2003 06:24 PM