On Aug 1, 12:36*pm, wrote:
On Sat, 1 Aug 2009 09:09:50 -0700 (PDT), george9219
wrote:



On Jul 31, 11:12*pm, pittendrigh wrote:
Saw the Jane Fonda/Donald Sutherland FTA movie tonight,
about the forgotten and covered-up enlisted man's protest against the
war
in the early 70s.....about soldiers refusing to fight, fragging
superior officers, etc.

I never knew that happened. I was living in the sticks in Colorado in
the 70s, without
electricity and with little contact to outside world. *Pretty
interesting stuff (the movie, not me).

Made me think of Dave. So I logged in here for the first time in a
half a year.
Reminded me how the right-wingers told us we had to fight the Viet Nam
war, else all hell would break loose.
And then we lost and retreated in disgrace. And as it turned out, we
were right. Viet Nam didn't matter at all.
Here we are 40 years later and Viet Nam means nothing to nobody. *And
all those right wing
morons who made us fight that stupid war were never made to pay the
price they should have paid.
You should watch it Dave. I recommend it.

Grasshopper fishing is getting good too, by the way.
Might be the best hopper fishing since way back then: rivers are high
fast clear and cold.
And it's August. *Amazing.

Minor correction. LBJ of the "great society" was the major architect
of the war. It ended under the ultra conservative Richard Nixon.

Er, no. *Kennedy and his crew really ramped it up after guys like the Dulles'
talked Eisenhower into buying the war from the French (after Roosevelt and
Truman sorta rented it...)...and guys like the recently-departed Bob McNamara
and Westmoreland were more of architects than LBJ, and "liberal" and
"conservative" as an overall philosophy had little to do with much of it, and Rs
and Ds were equally involved. *They were anti-communists first and foremost
insofar as Vietnam was concerned. *Of the period Presidents, Kennedy was the
only POTUS who whole-heartedly supported a US involvement in Vietnam, and LBJ
was probably the POTUS who least supported it (personally).

TC,
R

Well, Kennedy really didn't live long enough to have a major effect on
the war. He seemed to have kind of a "cowboy" mentality about it, and
seemed quite excited about the involvement of "advisors", both
civilian and military in the war. Would he have escalated it to the
level that followed his death? No one really knows, but the fact
remains that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and all that followed,
happened under Johnson. MacNamara eventually backed out when he
realized his mistake. Westmoreland simply reported what Johnson wanted
to hear. In the end, Johnson too realized the enormity of his
decisions, and it ruined what was left of his life.