In 2004, as Iraq was mutating from desert to quicksand, George W. Bush flatly rejected the Vietnam analogy. Yesterday he went over the top to seize it, to claim it as his own.
The pundits are stumped. What could Bush be thinking? Why this Vietnam-analogy argument, now? Why the 180? What's the sense of it all?
Well, as one is so justifiably inclined to do with this endlessly scheming White House, I smell a rat. A big, ugly one.
It's probably more like a chimp shittin' its britches out of fear and desperation, but do go on:
But, of course, nothing went according to plan. So now, the Bush administration has made the conscious and calculated decision to refight Vietnam at home as well -- partially as an arm-twisting tactic against a disgruntled Congress, but principally as a political strategy that goes far beyond that.
Which is to say, the administration may be hoping to violently divide this nation at large -- much as Vietnam violently divided us -- and, above all, put that violence and divide on the streets. It seeks to reawaken Nixon's hardhats-and-veterans crowd as its visible cadre. It longs for a reissuance of right-wing "America: Love it or leave it" sloganeering in action.
The nation is not nearly as divided over the iraq clusterfuck as it was, or as much as Bush would like it to be. He's pissin' up the wrong rope if he thinks we're going to refight Vietnam in Iraq and have it come out any different. We sorta already are, and the outcome is going to be the same.
If he wants to refight Vietnam and have us win, it gets done every night in VFW and American Legion halls all over the country. We kick ass over there particularly well on 'cheap beer nite'.
Just as an aside, back in the late '60s, I drove a pickup because I a) had to haul my motorcycle to the desert every weekend, and b) I like pickups. I was a Veteran, and worked in an oil refinery, so I had (still have) a hard-hat. I also smoked a lot of weed in those days, which was a felony back then. I kept my hair pretty short, and had a rifle rack and an "America: Love it or leave it" sticker in the rear window as protective coloration. I never got stopped. I was as anti-war as anybody, but I wasn't a hippie. A clean-cut all-American boy is what I was then and am now, albeit a might superannuated. OK, a clean-cut all-American hard-hat gun-totin' Veteran and pissed-off Olde Farte (lctp).
In short, the administration's seemingly bizarre reversal on the Vietnam analogy might very well come down to nothing more than a sociopolitical do-over at home. In seeking that bloody division of old -- which the political right then cynically cast as the dividing line between the patriotic and unpatriotic, the American and unAmerican -- it can at least buy some time, if not remake America, at long last, in its right-wing image.
That might be what Bush is trying to do, but his last-ditch attempts are going to fail miserably, like everything else he's ever done.
I liked some of carpenter's 'comments' as well:
This is like Germany claiming they would have won WWII, if only Hitler hadn't given up.
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