Through The Looking Glass--Darkly

Hey, mashing up Alice and St. Paul is no more weird than what Dubya said last week while he was in Vietnam (38 years late [thank you, Jay Leno--Ed.]).

He had the gall/temerity/stupidity to announce that "the lesson" of the Vietnam War was that America will win as long as America doesn't give up. Excuse me, but we did give up--what the heck did Dubya think that exodus by helicopter from the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975 was, a sightseeing tour? And remember, we didn't do that until we'd poured hundreds of thousands of young American lives down the drain in a cause the public had turned against at least 7 years before. We "lost" Vietnam in 1968 after the Tet Offensive changed the American general populace's mind that we were winning. This despite the fact that as a purely military matter, we "won" the Tet Offensive. That wasn't the way it was perceived at home. Perception became fact, despite the facts.

So much for Dubya responding to the "thumpin'" he admitted the GOP took in the recent election. He's already backtracking on his pledge to chart a new course in Iraq. If that statement he made in Vietnam wasn't a new incarnation of "stay the course," I'd like to sell you several bridges in New York City.

We all know Dubya isn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer . . . and that he wasn't exactly a serious student while in college . . . but his 180° wrong interpretation of America's Vietnam experience goes beyond reconfirming either or both of those observations. His ignorance of history is willful, thus dangerous. Of course, several of us were out crying in the wilderness about this before he dragged us into Iraq to avenge Saddam Hussein's dissing his daddy, but no one paid attention then.

The real resulting horror is that more young Americans are dying every day the Iraq debacle continues. Oh, but not his kids, or the kids of anyone else in his circle. Just as during Vietnam, not him nor any of his fellow rich young men. too bad that in the furor over Dan Rather's getting suckered into using faked documents to establish that Dubya had help avoiding the normal consequences of his National Guard "service," everyone seems to have forgotten that the woman who confirmed the documents were fake also confirmed that what those documents said was in fact true.

And what those documents said was that Dubya wasn't where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there, and that strings had been pulled and influence exerted to protect Dubya not just from having to go to Vietnam (on time [thank you again, Jay Leno--Ed.]), but from the usual consequences of not going.

I know this is not a unique question on my part, but I have to ask it anyway: why is it that the chicken hawks are the loudest war mongers? My answer: to cover up their own inadequacies. They think that if they bray loud and long enough, no one will notice that they didn't really serve when they had the chance. How wrong they are!

Yet the horror and the slaughter go on.