Op-Ed: A Fight for the Soul of Democracy

Comments

1. Ray Otton says

   April 8, 2018 at 11:35 am

   I guess there’s no point going over this opinion article piece by piece, because really, would it matter?

   The thing is, it does demonstrate what we’re up against in today’s political climate.

   See, factually speaking Mr. Trump isn’t any better or worse than any other recent president. He was elected to enact a certain set of policies and that’s what he’s doing. No gay concentration camps, no rounding up of minorities into box cars, no forcing of women back into the kitchen.

   Yet Democrats have been screeching for impeachment since BEFORE he took the oath of office ( Stupid, I know. but….. ) on the simple principle that they don’t like what he’s doing.

   It…….doesn’t……..work…….that…….way.

   You want people to vote for you?

   Stop the nonsense and come up with a coherent set of policies that make sense. So far, it’s been 18 months of “We’re not Trump, you stupid deplorables!!!!”.

   Look, probably 80% of his supporters would have preferred a different candidate but in our political system we have a binary choice and the other choice was………….truly deplorable.

   These supporters are appalled at detractors behavior and that behavior only hardens their resolve. A lot like Lincoln when told of Gen. Grant’s off field antics. He said “I can’t spare the man, he fights”.

   Here’s a challenge.

   Come up with an opinion piece that clearly outlines what Democrats can do for our country without once mentioning Mr. Trump.

   Reply

   • Paul Plante says

     April 8, 2018 at 7:32 pm

     What an excellent piece, Ray Otten.

     Reply

2. Paul Plante says

   April 8, 2018 at 12:07 pm

   “The fight for the soul of Democracy, the heart of America,” Chas Cornweller?

   Get real here, dude!

   Democracy has no soul, Chas Cornweller.

   It is an empty word that has no real concrete meaning.

   And it is hardly the “heart of America!”

   Haven’t you ever bothered to read real American history?

   We have a Republic, not a democracy, and that for sound political reasons.

   In a democracy, six people can easily disenfranchise the other four out of ten.

   In a democracy, 51 people out of a hundred can disenfranchise the other 49, leaving them without a voice at all, or worse.

   And democracies do elect dictators and tyrants, Chas Cornweller.

   Don’t you know your world history?

   Nothing about the word “democracy” precluded having a dictator in power if that is what the people want.

   Russia has a democracy, Chas Cornweller, and that democracy just elected Vladimer Putin.

   Egypt has a democracy and that democracy just elected El Sissy, another dictator.

   Where on earth, Chas Cornweller, did you get this silly concept that democracies and dictators are incompatible?

   To the contrary, dude, the two are so often found as a pair, that to think otherwise is to be uninformed and naïve.

   Consider the ancient Greeks, Chas Cornweller, who gave the world democracy and then used it to destroy themselves.

   Don’t you remember the word “ostracize,” Chas Cornweller?

   That is a distinctly democratic term that came to us from the ancient Greeks, who are a pitiful, bankrupt people living among the ruins of a former great nation destroyed by democracy.

   Ostracize, a gift of the Greeks and democracy that is now employed in this country to our detriment, means to “exclude someone from a society or group.”

   In in ancient Greece, specifically Athens, the birthplace of the democracy that destroyed it, ostracize meant to banish an unpopular or too powerful citizen from a city for five or ten years by popular vote.

   Popular vote, Chas Cornweller, is the heart and soul of democracy.

   So what happened in Athens was that the ignorant people ostracized the leaders, or those capable of leading.

   And that led to their downfall.

   Schoolboy history, Chas Cornweller.

   Why are you unfamiliar with it?

   And don’t you know that the concept of “democracy” in America itself is a joke, rendered so by the two worthless political parties engaged in internecine warfare in this country?

   The Democrats gerrymander (manipulate the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class) the Republicans out, and in turn, the Republicans gerrymander the Democrats out, and the joke continues.

   And you call that joke “democracy,” Chas Cornweller, and expect us to become all passionate and emotional with you in here over the death of democracy in America.

   Good luck with that hope is my thought, anyway, because I am not on board, and won’t be.

   Reply

3. Jane Homeowner says

   April 8, 2018 at 1:04 pm

   Chas, please read Wayne’s piece above “Tough Guys Don’t Dance”.

   Reply

4. M. M. Patterson says

   April 9, 2018 at 1:50 pm

   Chas Cornweller, thanks. But don’t expect any support from the vocal readers here. I am hoping the silent majority, who seldom comment, agree with you.

   Reply

   • Mike Kuzma, Jr. says

     April 9, 2018 at 4:06 pm

     Yes, the leftist silent majority said nothing when Habeus Corpus was shredded by Roosevelt, and then again by Kennedy.
     They said nothing when the Clintons sold our secrets to the Chinese(Loral Aero etccc)
     They said nothing when Obama shredded the Constitution with his executive orders, used the IRS against American citizens, coopted the FBI to destroy a candidate and had a press that REFUSED to report on his calumnies, treasons and other crimes.

     Yup, the ‘silent majority’ of people who know NOTHING of America or why it exists.

     Reply

   • Paul Plante says

     April 9, 2018 at 6:29 pm

     We all support our dear friend and fellow American patriot Chas Cornweller, M.M. Patterson.

     Very much so.

     Look at how people literally flock in droves to a thread started by our protagonist in this drama, our own Chas Cornweller, as if he were a rock star of the internet.

     If people didn’t support him, M.M. Patterson, nobody would bother to come to the show.

     But they do, in droves, for the chance to enter into debate with a world-class debater of the stature of our very own Chas Cornweller, a modern-day Hortensius who graces us with his presence in this forum known as the Cape Charles Mirror.

     If that is not a show of support, then I don’t know what possibly could be.

     Reply

     • Chas Cornweller says

       April 11, 2018 at 4:12 pm

       Paul, once again, you are too kind. And the comparison to Hortensius (Quintus), really is beyond the pale of truth. That I wish I had the skill of debate of this early Roman Optimate, I might be able to mop the floor with some of the Mirror’s most ardent commenters. Perhaps the editor himself! But, alas, the truth is, I am just a man. Fortunate to have lived in this most lively of times. Educated with the best teachers offered during my generation, schooled in a way of living through love, nurturing, security and a childhood as idyllic as they come. I never joined the military (my choice (fortunately) and for reasons too lengthy to explain to the hawks here) and therefore have only known peace. Again, my choice. From this existence comes a great sense of multiple accomplishments, I have loved many, have been blessed just as often and have seen and experienced wonders during this lifetime beyond which many will never understand. And I still process to this day.

       And no, I am no Rock Star of the internet. I am, like you, a lover of debate. And debate is nothing more than an exchange of ideas. It matters not that we agree or disagree. What matters is shedding light on the darkness, exemplifying that which remains noble to one’s individualism. I believe it is still covered by the First Amendment. Yes, freedom isn’t free, but it is liberating.

       And lastly, I thank Wayne for being so kind as to publish my articles and I also thank those that read and respond in kind. I am well aware my ideas are not for everyone and that does not bother me. I have good cause to feel that way. In kind, I give you this quote from one Mr. Twain “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” And this one from the Master; Luke 6, 25-27. You see, my upbringing included a strong background in the studies of Christianity. And having learned my lessons well, I intend to use this lifetime to the best of my abilities to shine that light of mine. It’s rather simple actually. And I was blessed with the gift of gab. You have a great day, now…Paul. And, thanks again for the kind words.

       Reply

5. Paul Plante says

   April 11, 2018 at 5:17 pm

   You’re very welcome, Chas Cornweller!

   Reply

6. Paul Plante says

   April 14, 2018 at 11:07 pm

   Chas Cornweller, you say, “The fight for the soul of Democracy, the heart of America, has come to this…the normalization of President Trump his methods by which he has come to try and win the hearts and minds of the citizens of America.”

   My response is that this supposed “fight for the soul of Democracy, the heart of America” is a figment of your fertile imagination, no offense intended, of course.

   You say, “This clash of wills is NOT between the ideals of the Left and the ideas of the Far Right, this battle is for the soul of middle America, the hard working, blue collared, down in the trenches, working pay check to pay check American who pay their taxes and tithes and have a true stake in the positioning of the United States today.”

   Where on earth do you get these zany ideas from, Chas Cornweller, and perhaps more to the point, why do you think things today are any different than they have been since the 1800’s in this country?

   Were you actually born yesterday, or don’t you know this nation’s actual political history?

   You say, “Unfortunately, the weapons being used are so foreign to the ideals and thinking of the average American, they are unrecognizable as being a form of weaponization in the first place, by that I mean, most Americans are blind to the fact that they are being manipulated by the very battle that rages daily from our media sources.”

   Americans, Chas Cornweller, are manipulated every day because they are so easy to manipulate, and I challenge you to show me a time in this nation’s history when they weren’t manipulated.

   Consider this from “This Kind of War” by T.R. FEHRENBACH @ p.p. 58-59:

   In using whatever means to stem the attack against South Korea, the government of Harry Truman unquestionably acted in the best interests of the United States and of the world.

   But characteristically, that government took action in a manner that could only make later trouble.

   As with every major policy decision that Administration had made, it was announced to the public only after the decision as irrevocable.

   In effect, Truman had engaged the nation in war by executive action,

   In the afternoon, President Truman issued a terse statement to the press, terming the Korean venture a “police action.”

   Something new had happened.

   The American people had entered a war, not by the roaring demand of Congress – which alone could constitutionally declare a state of war – or the public, but by executive action, at the urging of an American proconsul across the sea, to maintain the balance of power across the sea.

   end quotes

   That Korea was a “police action” was pure unadulterated Democrat horse****, but the pliable press ate it up, anyway, and then fed the meal to the gullible American people who are so easy to manipulate.

   And then there is this from p.p. 311,312 of “Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, AND THE LIES THAT LED TO VIET NAM” by H.R. McMaster, to wit:

   JULY 1965

   With the (Democratic) administration deceiving the people and Congress about the depth of American military commitment in Vietnam, the Chiefs (Joint Chiefs of Staff) were in a quandary.

   Although the Constitution designated the president as commander-in chief of the military, each member of the JCS was sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

   The Constitution charged Congress, as representatives of the People, with the responsibility to decide whether to declare war.

   The American people, through their representatives in Congress, were to determine whether South Vietnam’s “freedom and independence” was worth the costs and risks.

   With the exception of (Marine General) Greene (and then only in private to a staff member), the Chiefs had decided to support their Commander in Chief by misrepresenting their own estimates of the situation in Vietnam.

   end quotes

   FAKE NEWS, Chas Cornweller, staring you right in the face, both times from the Democrats, who tried to force a pathological liar on us last year as their candidate for president.

   So, in reality, Chas Cornwller, those same “weapons” you decry today go all the way back to when Tommy Jefferson was running against John Adams for president.

   And nothing has changed since then.

   So why do you try and make us think otherwise?

   Are you conducting some kind of poly sci test in here to see just how stupid the American people really are?

   And then you say, “That moment our leader or any leader for that matter disparages the very sources the American public relies on for its information, and its security and justice, then we have arrived at the slippery slope and the beginning of a downward fall.”

   OMG, people, run, run, run for your lives because the sky itself is falling!

   If the American people are really stupid enough to believe the press prints the “truth,” then our so-called democracy has already failed, because newspapers do not print the truth, Chas Cornweller, and have not since the beginning of our nation’s history.

   Henry Robinson Luce, an American magazine magnate who was called “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day,” the dude who launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines, including Time and Life, that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans, was famous for printing false news stories about Chiang Kai Shek in China.

   And as far back as 1934, a book titled “Modern News Reporting” by Carl Warren, the Broadcast Editor of the New York Daily News at that time and a former Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who was also an instructor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, had a chapter, Chapter XXII, at pp.268-270, entitled “Slanting The Policy Story,” where “slanting” means to distort information by rendering it unfaithfully or incompletely, especially in order to reflect a particular viewpoint, which is what Henry Luse was doing, along with the New York Times, which read as follows:

   THE QUESTION OF ETHICS

   Perhaps the most mooted question in the field of journalistic practice today – an issue often debated, never settled – is this one of policy in the news.

   Some argue that an impassive, strictly neutral recording of the news is the paper’s chief obligation to the public, a function betrayed by any reporter who colors or trims the facts.

   Policy writing is regarded by this group as something reprehensible, deceptive and insidious.

   Taking an opposite point of view, others contend that the public demands of the newspaper intelligent interpretation as well as trustworthy assembling of facts.

   They hold that mere parrot-like transmission of the day’s events to busy, apathetic readers makes the newspaper a negative spectator rather than a vigorous leader in community life.

   *******

   So far as the reporter is concerned, these problems of policy need not bother him greatly.

   He has little voice in the matter for, like any other employee, he is a salaried craftsman, receiving orders and not giving them.

   Seldom, if ever, will he be asked to forfeit his self-respect.

   If his paper is strong on policies he should try to conform to them, regardless of his own personal views.

   He writes what his superiors instruct him to write, in the way they want it written.

   If he is unwilling to do so, his only alternative is to look for another job.

   end quotes

   1934 is before you were born, Chas Cornweller, and already by then, that slanting of the news was a long established practice.

   Then you say, “Our president began the alienation of the press (fake news/lying reporters) long ago.”

   Good for Trump, although like Tommy Jefferson, Trump puts out his own false news on a daily basis using mindless TWITTER, because so many people in America now have such small minds that they can’t assimilate more than 180-characters at a time, and many are unable to read, a habit once prevalent in America that was destroyed overnight by the television.

   And then, Chas Cornweller, OMG, “And he has disparaged our military (I know more than our generals/I know better than they on how to defeat ISIS) and our justice system (Corrupt FBI/Disparaged CIA and the Attorney General and by proxy, the Justice Department).”

   A lot of our generals are as dumb as a box of rocks, and deserve to be called out as such, and our so-called “justice” system is corrupt, and the attorney general is a political hack, and yes, the CIA lies to us, Chas Cornweller.

   Consider this from pp.100-102 of “A BETTER WAR, The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam” by Lewis Sorley, a third-generation graduate of West Point holding a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University with two decades of service in the U.S. Army including command of tank and armored cavalry units, teaching at West Point and the Army War College, and Pentagon staff duty who was later a senior civilian official of the Central Intelligence Agency:

   While the Ho Chi Minh Trail was under fierce and continuous air attack, access to the South Vietnamese coast from the sea had since mid-1966 been effectively sealed off through intensive patrolling by South Vietnamese and U.S. ships.

   But there was a flood of supplies coming into the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville and then through Cambodia into III and IV Corps of South Vietnam and even up to the southern portions of II Corps.

   By January 1969 it was clear to MACV analysts that Sihanoukville was “the primary point of entry for supplies, especially arms and ammunition, destined for enemy forces in southern South Vietnam.”

   **************

   The distribution system was well organized and efficient.

   After leaving Sihanoukville, the munitions were transported to an arms depot at Kampong Speu, about twenty-five miles southwest of Phnom Penh, or to warehouses in the capital city.

   From there they were distributed to enemy base areas in the border region, and eventually to troop units in South Vietnam.

   At CIA this picture of the enemy supply system had for a long time been vigorously disputed.

   There the “intelligence analysts at the Washington level” really came down to one man, a veteran CIA officer named James Graham.

   The lead analyst on the problem, he stubbornly refused, year after year, to be convinced that any significant amount of military wherewithal was reaching the enemy through the port of Sihanoukville.

   Within MACV, the “Graham Report” staking out that position became infamous.

   MACV was incensed by its obtuseness, as they saw it, or worse.

   Later (General) Davidson, who had struggled with this problem when he was MACV J-2, recalled that Graham once said to him, “Sometimes you’ve got to find what you’ve got to find.”

   end quotes

   The CIA was notorious, Chas Cornweller, for distorting what was going on in Viet Nam from the time Kennedy was in power, with Diem as president of South Viet Nam.

   You say, “The very moment the president relays his lack of faith in the system to his public, that system is set up to fail,” but our system has been failed for a long time now, certainly long before Trump came along.

   Proof of that failure can be found in the New York Times story “As Clinton Camp Denied Reports of Criminal Inquiry, F.B.I. Was Investigating, Comey Says” by Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear on 14 April 2018, as follows:

   WASHINGTON — James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, confirms in his new book that the bureau had already begun a criminal investigation focused on Hillary Clinton’s handling of her email in 2015 when her campaign and its allies excoriated journalists for reporting that such an inquiry was being contemplated.

   The New York Times reported in July 2015 that two inspectors general had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department recommending an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton had mishandled sensitive information by using a private email server as secretary of state.

   Mrs. Clinton’s campaign complained vigorously to The Times, resulting in two corrections to the article.

   The corrections said that the inspectors general had made a “security referral” rather than a “criminal referral” and that the referral did not request that Mrs. Clinton specifically be investigated.

   Mrs. Clinton’s campaign called the article an “erroneous story” with “egregious” errors that misled voters into thinking that she was at risk of being investigated by the F.B.I. for possible criminal violations when the referral was a more routine security matter not focused on her in particular.

   But in “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” his memoir that is scheduled for release next week, Mr. Comey said the word-parsing by Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Justice Department was actually misleading because the F.B.I. was already conducting a criminal investigation focused on Mrs. Clinton by that point.

   Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. did not contradict the Clinton campaign at the time because it was not yet appropriate to publicly confirm an investigation.

   For the Clinton campaign, minimizing the significance of the inquiry was important to prevent it from becoming a bigger political liability as she headed into the Democratic primary season.

   Indeed, when Mr. Comey was ready in October 2015 to publicly confirm the investigation, Loretta E. Lynch, President Barack Obama’s attorney general, instructed him to call it a “matter” instead.

   Ms. Lynch, he wrote, “seemed to be directing me to align with that Clinton campaign strategy.”

   end quotes

   Fake news, Chas Cornweller.

   It is as American as apple pie.

   Ask Hillary Clinton.

   She knows the truth of that assertion, if anyone does.

   An d dear friend Chas Cornweller, a grateful nation thanks you for your patriotism by giving us this prime opportunity in the Cape Charles Mirror to get these truths out.

   It is appreciated.

   Reply

7. Paul Plante says

   April 15, 2018 at 7:49 pm

   Corrupt justice, dear friend Chas Cornweller.

   Yes, it is.

   Check out the CNN story “ABC: Comey says his belief Clinton would win 2016 election ‘was a factor’ in email inquiry” by Clare Foran on 15 April 2018, as follows:

   Former FBI director James Comey says his belief that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election played a role in the way he handled the investigation into her use of a private email sever as secretary of state.

   end quote

   Who you are in America makes all the difference, does it not?

   Comey was a big man with a small set.

   He didn’t go after Hillary Clinton because he knew she would retaliate.

   He was scared of her.

   He gave her a pass and let her slide, because she is so special.

   That is crooked justice, Chas Cornweller, plain and simple, and crooked justice is a concomitant of your beloved democracy in America.

   In a clip released Saturday by ABC News, George Stephanopoulos asks Comey about his motivations in revealing that information to Congress.

   “Wasn’t the decision to reveal influenced by your assumption that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and your concern that, she wins, this comes out several weeks later and then that’s taken by her opponents as a sign that she’s an illegitimate president?,” Stephanopoulos asks.

   “It must have been,” Comey responds, adding, “I don’t remember consciously thinking about that, but it must have been.”

   “I was operating in a world where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump.”

   “I’m sure that it was a factor.”

   “I don’t remember spelling it out, but it had to have been.”

   “That she’s going to be elected president, and if I hide this from the American people, she’ll be illegitimate the moment she’s elected, the moment this comes out.”

   end quotes

   What a load of horse****, Chas Cornweller!

   He didn’t know what he was thinking when he took an action affecting our nation’s future as head of the FBI?

   How can that be, Chas Cornweller?

   The dude is making critical decisions, and he didn’t know where his mind was?

   Come on!

   That’s pig **** on a hard roll, Chas Cornweller, and it don’t buy the bulldog, if you know what I am saying.

   “I was operating in a world where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump,” said Comey, and so he walked on egg shells around her.

   And so she got to skate – Hillary is never held to account for anything, because as I say, she is special.

   Some more conservative Americans than you are find that offensive, and even I who am far more liberal than you find it offensive, as well.

   And while I think Trump is by and large an ignoramus and blowhard and moron, I find no fault with him telling us what we have known for some time now, without the need for any input from him – what you get for justice in the country is totally dependent on who you are, not the law, which is worthless mush.

   That is a point, as you will remember, Chas Cornweller, that was made in spades by Democrat Sonia Sotomayor in 2005, long before there was a Trump around to complain about corrupt justice, and she was put on the United States Supreme Court by Barack Obama as her political reward for confirming that fact.

   As to generals and fake news and manipulation of the extremely gullible American people, Chas Cornweller, and yes, I must admit that I once was one of them, let’s take a short trip to p.179 of David Halberstam’s “The Best and The Brightest,” where we find as follows:

   (General Paul Donal) Harkins (head of Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, “MACV,” based in Saigon) began by corrupting the intelligence reports coming in.

   Up until 1961, they had been reasonably accurate, clear, unclouded by bureaucratic ambition; they had reflected the ambivalence of the American commitment to Diem, and the Diem flaws had been apparent both in CIA and, to a slightly lesser degree, in State reporting.

   (U.S. Ambassador) Nolting would change State’s reporting and to that would now be added the military reporting, forceful, detailed and highly erroneous, representing the new commander’s (Harkins) belief that his orders were to make sure things looked well on the surface.

   In turn the Kennedy Administration would waste precious energies debating whether or not the war was being won, wasting time trying to determine the factual basis on which the decisions were being made, because in effect the Administration had created a situation where it lied to itself.

   end quotes

   And in turn, dear friend Chas Cornweller, it lied to us, through its teeth, and a lot of good Americans died for those lies.

   I happen to know some of them and was there when they died for those lies.

   And those were Democrat lies, Chas Cornweller.

   And I will remember those lies for the rest of my life, Chas Cornweller.

   Are Democrat lies all that much better to die for than Republican lies, do you think?

   As to General Paul Donal Harkins, head of MACV in Vietnam, at p.183 of “The Best and The Brightest” author Halberstam gives us this background information on him as follows:

   General Paul Donal Harkins, fifty-seven, was a man of compelling mediocrity.

   end quotes

   Before I continue, does that characterization of Harkins offend you, Chas Cornweller?

   Should Halberstam have been more circumspect, do you think, so as to not destroy our confidence in the ability of our government and military to protect us and keep us safe?

   Was Halberstam an enemy of democracy back then as you say Trump is today?

   Getting back to Halberstam’s less than flattering characterization of Harkins, we have:

   He (Harkins) had mastered one thing, which was how to play the Army game, how not to make a superior uncomfortable.

   It would be hard to think of a man who had fewer credentials for running a guerilla war in which Asian political injustices were at stake.

   To understand best what Harkins was like, it is important to understand what he was not.

   He was not, above all, a Joe Stilwell.

   If Stilwell was classically the commander and the old-fashioned kind of officer, then Harkins was just as much the other kind of general, the staffman who responded to superiors rather than to the field, and who was a good new modern man, there to soothe things over, to get along, not to make ripples but to iron out the ripples.

   end quotes

   Incidentally, Chas Cornweller, Henry Luce’s Time magazine in May 1962 found Harkins “tall, trim, with grey hair, steely blue eyes and a strong nose and chin . . . looks every inch the professional soldier.”

   Does that make you feel all warm and squishy inside, Chas Cornweller?

   Getting back to Halberstam and Harkins:

   Like almost all Americans who arrived in Vietnam, Harkins was ignorant of the past, and ignorant of the special kind of war he was fighting.

   To him, like so many Americans, the war had begun the moment he arrived there; the past had never happened and need not be taken seriously.

   end quotes

   How about that, Chas Cornweller?

   Is that characterization of Harkins a danger to our democracy?

   Or are incompetent political hack generals like Paul Harkins the real danger to our democracy, keeping in mind, of course, that pursuant to our Constitution and 10 U.S. Code § 531 – Original appointments of commissioned officers, incompetent officers like Paul Harkins are a creation of the democracy you praise, Chas Corneller, as they are appointed by the president, in the case of Harkins, that being Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy himself, a Democrat, as you will recall.

   Getting back to Halberstam and Harkins and fake news, Chas Cornweller, we have:

   When Harkins first arrived in Saigon to head the U.S. Military Advisory Command, Vietnam (MACV), he had told reporters that he was an optimist and that he was going to have optimists on his staff.

   He kept his word.

   The Saigon command soon reflected Harkin’s views, with a flabby, foolish confidence; a staff can be no better than the man it serves, and Harkins was a pleasant, social-minded officer, a polo player.

   His intelligence was not without its limits.

   “He wasn’t worth a damn, so he was removed,” McNamara would say of him later; “you need intelligent people.”

   end quotes

   Now, Chas Cornweller, how is that any different from what Trump is saying of the generals Obama left him with today?

   The candid world and myself would truly like to know.

   Reply

8. Paul Plante says

   April 16, 2018 at 7:02 pm

   Dear friend and fellow American patriot, Chas Cornweller, as you know, here in the United States of America under our Republican form of government, as citizens, you and I are supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law, even though we might in fact not be due to the pernicious effects of faction and democracy in this country, which has rendered us unequal in this country, in fact, and thus, in these public debates in here, that your voice gets to be heard, is guaranteed.

   You, of all people in here, Chas Cornweller, must remember the definition of a Republican Government from your grade school civics classes, you know, a republican government is one in which the political authority comes from the people.

   My working premise in these debates is that in the United States, power is given to the government by its citizens as written in the U.S. Constitution and through its elected representatives.

   Do you dispute that premise, Chas Cornweller?

   If so, on what grounds would that be?

   And what of this question, Chas Cornweller, because I think it is quite an important factor in what divides America today, so that in many ways, you and I meet in here as representatives of warring states – What is meant by republican system of government?

   My answer, Chas Cornweller, what I was taught as a child, and have clung to ever since, is that it is a form of government in which power is explicitly vested in the people, who in turn exercise their power through elected representatives.

   When the loyalty of those people is to faction, and raising money for the faction, the Republican form of government is dead, Chas Cornweller, or would you disagree?

   And with respect to that, here is an important distinction, to me, anyway: Today, the terms republic and democracy are virtually interchangeable, but historically the two differed.

   They differed when I was young, Chas Cornweller, and now, you never hear the word Republic mentioned anymore – it is all about faction and democracy now, which is the subject I glean from your essay above.

   And you wish to test our political science savvy by seeing if anyone in here is intelligent enough to see through your subterfuge above here with your claim that up until Trump, both government and the media in this country have been pure and holy, which is pure hogwash, dear friend Chas Cornweller, and you know it.

   But, yes, I can understand you wanting to know if any of the rest of us can tell the difference, so hence this test.

   Which raises a side question, Chas Cornweller, of whether people who know nothing of the country they are a citizen of should be allowed to have a vote in its affairs.

   Is that something you would be for, Chas Cornweller?

   But we are talking about how Democrat presidential administrations manipulate and deceive the public, to our detriment as a nation, and this long before there was a Trump to continue the practice, using the pliable media as their vehicle of propaganda reported as factual news, let’s go to p. 205 of David Halberstam’s “The Best and The Brightest,” where we find this bit of American history from the time of Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to wit:

   Since mid-1962 the American military had been turning to the handful of American journalists in Saigon, using them as an outlet for their complaints.

   end quotes

   Those military officers were colonels Wilbur Wilson, Dan Porter, and lieutenant colonels John Paul Vann and Fred Ladd, who had his career destroyed for turning in realistic field reports critical of the ARVN.

   As Halberstam tells us at p. 203 of “The Best and The Brightest”:

   Before he (Colonel Dan Porter) went home after two long years, he had to turn in a final report, and it was brutally frank.

   Aides suggested he sweeten it by putting in a few positive notes, but he refused.

   He was angry and bitter over the way his subordinates were being treated, and after consulting with Ladd, Vann and Wilson, he handed in the most pessimistic report on the war so far, on the nature of the peasant, the enemy and the ally.

   Harkins went into a rage over it; normally final reports of senior advisors were circulated for all other top advisors, but Harkins had Porter’s report collected.

   He told other officers that it would be sanitized and that if it contained anything of interest, he might then make it available.

   It was never seen again, which did not surprise Porter, but enough was enough, he was leaving the Army.

   end quotes

   You are a highly indoctrinated liberal ideologue, Chas Cornweller, so perfectly indoctrinated that you think you are a free thinker, so the resignation of someone like Dan Porter from the United States Army because he would not be a liar, probably means little to you, but to me, who was alive at that time, and whose life would be affected greatly by the lies of general Paul Harkins in Saigon back then, that resignation was a factor among factors that served to greatly diminish this nation and set it on the path to where we are today, where lies are the only version of truth that exists anymore.

   As Halberstam tells us at p.200 of “The Best and The Brightest”:

   The question was no longer one of Diem’s popularity or effectiveness (the answer to that question was that he was not popular, but he was respected); the real question now was the war, whether it was being won.

   And the answer was yes, it was being won, it was going very well, all the indices were very good.

   General Harkins was optimistic; he headed what was now a powerful institutional force for optimism.

   He had been told by his superior, Maxwell Taylor, to be optimistic, to downgrade pessimism, and he would do exactly that.

   end quotes

   And you know what, Chas Cornweller?

   He did.

   And over 50,000 young Americans dies as a result.

   Trump is doing nothing new, Chas Cornweller, with all the lies.

   He’s emulating the Democrats who came before him.

   Whether or not he should be is an entirely different question which we will perhaps one day get to engage on.

   But right now, where we have no control just as we had none when Kennedy was president and Paul Harkins was falsifying the facts in Viet Nam, it is what it is, and until the American people finally rebel against the ignorance that pervades in this country and change things, it will remain that way.

   Reply

9. David Cowan says

   April 16, 2018 at 7:47 pm

   Other good books about war.

   A Bright Shining Lie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bright_Shining_Lie

   The First Casualty https://www.amazon.com/First-Casualty-Correspondent-Myth-Maker-Crimea/dp/080186951X

   Reply

   • Paul Plante says

     April 17, 2018 at 10:40 am

     I look at them, David, and I have read “The Bright Shining Lie,” as a series of books not on war, per se, but instead, as a series that show how politics in this country as practiced by arrogant idiots in Washington, D.C., who are essentially weak egotists, gets us into wars that really are no different than the wars the English and French kings and nobles used to get into during the Hundred Years’ Wars in Europe back when.

     Our history of getting into wars since the end of WWII goes back, in essence, to the question of “who lost China,” as if China had been a U.S. possession, like a cat’s-eye shooter marble, and it suddenly fell out of a whole in somebody’s pocket and got lost somewhere.

     That series of books has to include Bernard Fall’s “Street Without Joy,” and his “Hell in a Small Place,” which are about the French experience in Viet Nam that led to us being mired down there after the French got kicked out.

     We gave the French Viet Nam “back” because they were one of our oldest “allies,” and because the poor French had been “humiliated” during WWII by their miserable performance as a nation and military force during WWII, and so, to make them feel good about themselves, we handed them the people of Viet Nam for them to essentially enslave all over again after they, the Vietnamese, had given us assistance during the war against the Japanese.

     To really understand the politics and interconnections over time, all of which go back to George Frost Kennan, an American diplomat and historian best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War, and the mistaken belief on the part of our shallow-thinking politicians that Communism was a monolithic political structure, so that Communism in Asia was the same as Communism in Europe, when it was in reality apples and oranges.

     And the question of who lost China, which then became a kind of political mantra in this country, led to Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunts, and the labeling of the Democrats as being soft on Communism, and weak on national defense, and that label has effected our national politics essentially right up to this day, as we see in the ABC News article “Obama: I’ve Proven Democrats Not ‘Weak on Defense'” by Devin Dwyer on 2 March 2012, as follows:

     MANHATTAN – President Obama says his administration’s foreign policy over the past three years effectively neutralizes longstanding Republican criticism that Democratic presidents are “weak on defense.”

     end quotes

     Without an awareness of our history, that statement sort of sails right by peoples’ heads, if it was even noticed, but that “longstanding Republican criticism” goes all the way back to 1949, and the so-called loss of China, which led to McCarthyism, the Korean War, the Viet Nam war, and every bush-league war we have been in since then – all related to weak politicians in this country trying to show the world how strong they really are.

     And that understanding of our history then gives us the insight we need to understand what LBJ was saying about not losing Viet Nam after Kennedy was assassinated, which story is told in the New York Times article “How Not to End Another President’s War (L.B.J. Edition)” by Robert Dallek on March 12, 2009, as follows:

     Since Kennedy had left no clear indication of what he would do in response to worsening conditions in Vietnam, Johnson was free to put his own stamp on American policy.

     And he did not hesitate to say what he planned.

     He chose to interpret Kennedy’s past actions as a commitment not to allow a Communist conquest.

     When his ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, told Johnson that Vietnam “would go under any day if we don’t do something,” Johnson answered: “I am not going to lose Vietnam.”

     “I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

     end quotes

     If one doesn’t know how China went, then that is another statement that sails right by our consciousnesses, as it did back then.

     The rest of that series of what I consider political must-reads to understand how our “foreign” policy is mired in a power struggle between the worthless Democrats and their equally worthless adversaries, the Republicans, that goes back to when FDR handed Korea to the Russians during WWII, a political move which then started that ball rolling through history to our times has to include “This Kind Of War” by T.R. Fehrenbach with its excellent political background of that period, and David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War,” along with “Ho” by Halberstam.

     We think of Korea and Viet Nam as two separate wars, when in fact, they were all part of a continuing power struggle in this country between the Republicans and the Democrats stretching across time from WWII to our present.

     Should we know these things as voting members of this society?

     There, David, is what I consider as an older American to be a vital question for our times, but it won’t get answered, because there is no way for us to reduce these conversations in here to a 180-character TWEET which is the most information a modern American can now assimilate at one time, so it appears that we are doomed as a nation to keep repeating that same history over and over, as Trump is now doing in Syria, as he tries to show the world just how tough he really is, like Obama was doing when he was in office, and small Bush before him, and on and on back in time to FDR giving Joe Stalin Korea, and Harry Truman losing China to the Communists.

     What bull****, is my thought, but hey, that is just me, I guess.

     Reply

10. Paul Plante says

    April 17, 2018 at 7:10 pm

    With respect, David Cowan, to the polar divide we seem to see, even in here, and out there, as well, between those who would label themselves liberals, and/or progressives, versus those of us who self-identify as neither, the liberal side of it, and while he does a good job of portraying a liberal in the long-running Cyber-drama called the Cape Charles Mirror, I do not include our protagonist in here, the esteemed Chas Cornweller, in that grouping, is perhaps best exemplified by the star of the Military.com article “Teacher Who Called Military ‘Lowest of the Low’ Is Fired” by Benjamin Brown in February of this year, where was stated as follows:

    A Southern California teacher who was recorded bashing the U.S. military in a profane classroom rant was fired Tuesday evening.

    Board of Education President Aurora Villon said the El Rancho Unified School District reached a unanimous decision to fire Gregory Salcido, a history teacher at El Rancho High School and elected Pico Rivera city councilman, the Los Angeles Times reported.

    “His comments do not reflect what we stand for, who we are,” Villon said, adding that “the classroom should never be a place where students feel that they are picked at, bullied, intimidated.”

    Salcido faced a severe backlash after a student secretly recorded him asking his government class why they would want to serve in the military, calling those who serve “dumbs‑‑‑s.”

    “Think about the people who you know who are over there.”

    “Your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever.”

    “They’re dumbs‑‑‑s,” Salcido can be heard saying in the Jan. 25 tirade.

    “They’re not like high-level thinkers, they’re not academic people, they’re not intellectual people.”

    “They’re the lowest of our low.”

    end quotes

    That, of course, David Cowan, is you and me the dude was talking about there, you know, dumbs‑‑‑s, like your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever, not like high-level thinkers, not academic people, not intellectual people, the lowest of our low.

    That is how roughly half of the population of the United States of America views people like you and me – dumb oxen who joined the military because we were losers with no other possible career path open to us.

    Look at how the history teacher puts it, and so eloquently, yet with a touch of poignance, as follows:

    “I don’t think it’s all a revelation to anybody that those who aren’t stellar students usually find the military a better option.”

    “… That’s not a criticism of anybody.”

    “Anything I said had nothing to do with their moral character,” he said, the paper reported.

    end quotes

    Of course it has nothing to do with our moral character – it is about our lack of brains and oaf-like, knuckle-dragging state of being, with our low brows and small brain-pans, and all that.

    That’s why I became an engineer – because I couldn’t cut it as a high school history teacher, and my life circumstances force me to admit that in here.

    As to the high school student who blew the whistle on the dude, this is what he had to say:

    “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion but at the same time they shouldn’t be disrespecting the veterans who have fought for our rights, who give up their lives and do stuff that other people are not willing to do,” Quinonez, who says he wants to be a Marine, told Fox News.

    The rant even prompted a strong reaction from White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who said Salcido “ought to go to hell.”

    “I just hope he enjoys the liberties and the lifestyle that we have fought for,” Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.

    Reply

11. Paul Plante says

    April 17, 2018 at 8:28 pm

    As to the difference between debating an opponent in here like our dear friend and fellow American patriot Chas Cornweller, versus an opponent like tkenny, himself a fierce competitor of note, being possessed of a visual sort of imagination, debating Chas Cornweller would be much like encountering this opponent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiY0gTPJtV4 , while a verbal sparring match against the very agile tkenny would be more like the one portrayed here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxRKGiXoMb4

    Reply

12. David Cowan says

    April 17, 2018 at 11:15 pm

    Paul,
    I am impressed with your grasp of history.

    I don’t disagree with any of your statements.

    It was known by 1963 that the war in Viet Nam could not be won by military means. And yet Johnson, and then Nixon, pressed on.

    Reply

    • Mike Kuzma, Jr. says

      April 18, 2018 at 1:18 pm

      Johnson, yes Nixon no.

      Nixon was elected in January of 1969, and by MAY of the same year had proposed a total withdrawal of US troops from SE Asia.

      As is ever the case in America, it was DEMOCRATS who started the wars, and REPUBLICANS who end them.

      Reply

      • Tim Parks says

        April 18, 2018 at 4:28 pm

        The greatest threat to this nation, it’s people, and it’s future is a Liberal Democrat.

        Reply

      • Paul Plante says

        April 18, 2018 at 6:38 pm

        Yes, they do, Mike, and don’t forget the Mexican War, which was started by Democrats.

        And because he was afraid of being red-baited himself in foreign policy, JFK was hiring Republicans like McGeorge Bundy to surround him, not Democrats.

        And no offense intended to the dude, or to any of his acolytes that might still be walking the earth (whoever does really know, afterall, and these days, we shouldn’t be offending people just because of their poor judgment in choosing their leaders), but I always thought of LBJ as this dopey, none-too-bright-but-cunning-as-hell, thuggish, drawling politician dude up from Texas who became president quite by accident.

        On his own, he never inspired any confidence in me, and he was actually one of the reasons I enlisted – to go over there to try to salvage the dog’s dinner he was quite obviously making of things over there, according to what I was seeing on TV.

        God help the troops who have an ignorant horse’s-*** for a commander-in-chief, because that is then reflected right on down the line through the officer’s corps to the lowest level troops in the field.

        At p.198 of “The Making of a Quagmire,” author David Halberstam summed up that miserable, stupid period of our American political history, as follows:

        The failure of the West in Indochina has been unnecessary, expensive and bloody; in Vietnam, Caucasians have staked their prestige, and then showed only their worst and clumsiest side, as if anxious to confirm a Marxist caricature.

        end quotes

        That short statement contains a lot of truth that America has never heard, nor accepted.

        We are a SUPERPOWER, afterall, and a SUPERPOWER never makes mistakes, nor does a SUPERPOWER ever cry.

        End of story.

        Except it never is, as subsequent history has revealed.

        As to the donkey-eared, horse’s-*** Johnson, himself, at p.654 of “The Coldest Winter,” author David Halberstam gives us this background on him as president after JFK was gone, to wit:

        In 1964, as Johnson edged closer to the final decision on the war, there were three factors that tended to make him hawkish.

        The first was the nature of the man himself, his own image of himself, the need to stand tall, not to back off when he was challenged, and to personalize all confrontations and to see them as a test of manhood.

        Pierre Salinger’s job, Johnson told the principal Kennedy press officer when he first became president, was to sell Johnson as a big Texan who was both tall and tough in the saddle.

        The second factor was an innate, almost unconscious American racism, the kind that had bedeviled so many officers in the field at the beginning of the Korean War, the notion that because Asians were smaller and from a lesser part of the world with lesser industrial and technological accomplishments, they were a lesser people and could not stand up to American technology and American troops.

        Vietnam, when Johnson spoke about it at NSC meetings, was often “a raggedy ass little forth rate country.”

        On occasion, like Ned Almond (in Korea referring to the Chinese), he used the word “laundrymen” to describe the combatants.

        Sometimes too, as he came close to the final decision on whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, Johnson’s racism showed in the way he spoke of the Vietnamese as being like Mexicans, the kind of lesser people you had to show some strength to before they got the message and gave you the respect you deserved.

        The Vietnamese, he would say, were not going to push Lyndon Johnson around, because he knew something about people like this, because back home he had dealt with people just like them, the Mexicans.

        Now, Mexicans were alright if you let them know who was boss, but “if you didn’t watch they’ll come right into your yard and take it over if you let them.”

        “And the next day they’ll be right there on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds, and they’ll take that too.”

        “But if you say to ’em right at the start, ‘Hold on, just wait a minute,’ they’ll know they were dealing with someone who’ll stand up.”

        “And after that you can get along fine.”

        end quotes

        What a stupid, egotistical, ***hole, he thought we were fighting Mexicans in VEET NAM, and yet, he was the commander-in-chief of a goodly portion of those troops he ran through the meatgrinder trying to put some Texas WHUP-*** on all those Mexicans over there in VEET NAM.

        People in this country are naïve enough to believe that Godly people like Lyndon Baines Johnson never do wrong, because they are for civil rights, and yet, the reality behind the illusion is that they seldom do right.

        That’s why Johnson didn’t run again.

        In the preface to “The Best and The Brightest” at p.xvi, Halberstam gives us this to chew on:

        Because I saw him (JFK) as cool and skeptical it always struck me that he would not have sent combat troops into Vietnam.

        He was too skeptical, I think, for that: I believe that, in the last few months of his life, he had come to dislike the war, it was messy and our policy there was flawed and going nowhere, and he was wary of the optimism of his generals.

        In 1964 I think he wanted to put it on the back burner, run against Goldwater, beat him handily (which I think he expected to do) and then negotiate his way out.

        His first term had been burdened by his narrow victory over Nixon and the ghosts of the McCarthy period; with luck he would be free of both these burdens in his second term and I do not believe he intended to lose in the rice paddies of Indochina what he considered this most precious chance for historic accomplishment.

        But that having been said, it should be noted that he significantly escalated the number of Americans there, and the number of American deaths; that his public rhetoric was often considerably more aggressive than his more private doubts; and that he gave over to Lyndon Johnson that famous can-do aggressive team of top advisers.

        The other thing I learned about the Kennedy-Johnson team was that for all their considerable reputations as brilliant, rational managers they were in fact very poor managers.

        They thought they were very good, and they were always talking about keeping their options open, even as, day by day and week by week, events closed off those options.

        The truth was that history – and in Indochina we were on the wrong side of it – was a hard taskmaster and from the early to the middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left.

        Our options had been steadily closing down since 1946, when the French Indochina War began.

        That was when we had the most options, and the greatest element of choice.

        But we had granted, however reluctantly, the French the right to return and impose their will on the Vietnamese by force; and by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial-anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs.

        end quotes

        Again there is that reference to “the ghosts of the McCarthy period,” which was between 1950, and 1954, a period when I was not only alive, but aware of the tumultuous events going on in the world around me, which included the Korean War in that period, and Dien Bien Phu in Viet Nam, as well.

        In an article in April 2017 edition of The Atlantic entitled “Who Stopped McCarthy?” by Sam Tanenhaus, we have this on how Senator Joe McCarthy comes into this story, and why JFK and LBJ were still afraid of him long after he had departed this earthly plane, leaving Dick Nixxon behind to carry his spirit of calling out the Democrats as being weak on national security into our times today, where Obama himself was still afraid of being called weak, which, of course, he was, to wit:

        David A. Nichols’s “Ike and McCarthy” is a well-researched and sturdily written account of what may be the most important such conflict in modern history: the two years, 1953 and 1954, when Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president elected since Herbert Hoover, found himself under assault from the demagogic senator who perfected the politics of ideological slander.

        end quotes

        Our dear friend and fellow American patriot Chas Cornweller thinks that all started with Trump, and there, he is quite wrong.

        Getting back to The Atlantic:

        Joseph McCarthy had begun his rampage against “subversives” in the federal government, some real but most of them imagined, during the Truman years, amid the high anxieties of the Cold War.

        end quotes

        There is where the label of the Democrats being weak on Communism and national security began.

        Getting back to that history as outlined in The Atlantic:

        Hostilities had broken out in Korea, and threatened to draw in “Red China” (which had been “lost” to the Communists in 1949) or escalate into a doomsday showdown with the Soviets, newly armed with the atomic bomb.

        Meanwhile, billions were being doled out in foreign aid to left-wing governments in Western Europe, and homegrown spies like Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg had been uncovered and exposed.

        McCarthy was dangerous—“no bolder seditionist ever moved among us,” Richard H. Rovere wrote in his classic Senator Joe McCarthy—but much of the country was with him because he embodied, however boorishly, the forces of change.

        end quotes

        Now, we have Donald Trump embodying, however boorishly, the forces of change, and as Hillary Clinton and her pack of Democrats learned, and our dear friend Chas Cornweller, as well in this essay, those who fail to understand the forces of history get over-run by them and trampled.

        Getting back to the rise of Joe McCarthy and any possible political parallels to today, we have:

        The Democrats had won every presidential election since 1932, and for much of that time had also enjoyed lopsided majorities in Congress.

        One party alone seemed responsible for the new postwar order, its failures as well as its successes, at a time of grand transformation for the country—from hemispheric giant to global superpower with commitments on every continent, and from land of rugged individualists to welfare state.

        end quotes

        Focus on and ponder that last sentence for a moment before we move on – the part about “from land of rugged individualists to welfare state.”

        I was one of the former who could never bring himself to adapt to the latter and so, have been left behind by the world of today, cast aside as a relic of a time gone by that no one wants to remember.

        As to manipulation of the American people and fake news, which has existed since the time of Adam and Eve, let’s go back to The Atlantic to see it in real life, as follows:

        At first McCarthy, who had cleverly sidestepped Taft’s plea for an endorsement, said he was finished with his hunt for Communists in the government.

        In Eisenhower, “we now have a President who doesn’t want party-line thinkers or fellow travelers,” he told reporters.

        Henceforth his mission would be to root out “graft and corruption.”

        But this cause didn’t promise the attention he craved, the excitement and headlines that came with Red-hunting, the “permanent floating press conference,” as one writer has put it.

        end quotes

        As he talks about the sanctity of the American press and all this truth it supposedly feeds us, which I think is a delusion in the mind of our dear fellow American patriot Chas Cornweller caused by intensive and extensive indoctrination of him by the Democrats to make him one of their mindless ideologues who has been conditioned to think he is a free thinker, I would ask our dear friend Chas Cornweller to focus on that part about the “permanent floating press conference,” as one writer has put it.

        Was that to print truth?

        Or was that to print hype?

        Getting back to the McCarthy Era which spawned Viet Nam, we have:

        In fact, 10 other Senate Republicans had backed him (McCarthy).

        Eisenhower’s tight circle of advisers got the message.

        “The crowd that supported Senator Taft at the convention in 1952 are all now revolving around Joe,” said one of them, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

        Taft was quick to praise McCarthy’s “very helpful and constructive” attack on the Voice of America; soon McCarthy’s snarling adjutant, Roy Cohn, and Cohn’s sidekick, G. David Schine, went on a madcap European junket.

        The mission involved, among other things, inspecting America’s overseas libraries for subversive material, and the triumphant yield included work by Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville.

        Visits to countries on their route typically culminated in a Marx Brothers–style press conference, the babbling pair’s literary and cultural ignorance on display.

        end quotes

        Chas Cornweller, dear friend, how can you read that and think to yourself that Trump started anything new in politics here in America?

        Getting back to Joe McCarthy and fake news:

        McCarthy had a second constituency—the media.

        To Eisenhower it seemed that the press, at once credulous and cynical, was building up McCarthy.

        In a speech to newspaper publishers, he accused journalists of cheap sensationalism, of presenting “clichés and slogans” instead of facts.

        Walter Lippmann, the most respected columnist of the time, was indignant: How could a responsible press not report what McCarthy said?

        The same quandary attends the media today, as they figure out how to handle “fake news” and the president’s intemperate tweets.

        Now, as then, no good solution exists.

        Implying that actual news is synonymous with truth is bound to be erroneous: In reality, journalism is the first, not final, draft of history—provisional, revisable, susceptible to mistakes and at times falsehoods, despite the efforts of even the most scrupulous reporters.

        The problems don’t end there.

        Those who covered McCarthy’s every move inevitably became his “co-conspirators,” as one of them Murray Kempton, later said.

        “In the end, I did not feel any cleaner than he was … I pretended once again now and then that McCarthy was not a serious man; but I always knew that the devil in me and the larger devil in him were very consequential figures indeed.”

        It is a mistake journalists repeated in 2016.

        end quotes

        And it is a mistake our dear friend Chas Cornweller is making in April of 2918, or asking us to make, anyway – asking us to believe the fairytale that the newspapers and television news shows print anything close to the truth, or even facts.

        Believe none of what you hear, Chas Cornweller, and half of what you think you see.

        Weren’t you ever given that advice when young?

        Ah, but you couldn’t have been, because if you, like me, had been, then you would be, like me, immune to Democrat party indoctrination.

        Sorry, I forgot.

        Reply

      • David Muir says

        April 19, 2018 at 1:14 pm

        “As is ever the case in America, it was DEMOCRATS who started the wars, and REPUBLICANS who end them.”

        Let’s try to stick to the facts, shall we? Otherwise, you’ve got nothing but hot air. Democrats and Republicans alike have started wars, big and small. But let’s also remember that the Republican and Democratic parties of the 19th century, for example, were nothing like their counterparts today. In some respects, they’ve flipped the playbook. To get a sense of the parties now, it’s more instructive to look at their recent history, so let’s consider the wars America has fought since Vietnam:
        1) Grenada (Republican)
        2) Panama (Republican)
        3) Gulf War (Republican)
        4) Yugoslavia (Democrat)
        5) Iraq (Republican)

        I left Afghanistan (Republican) off the list, since the US was responding to an attack (just as a Democrat took us into WWII after Pearl Harbor), but we lost our way there as well because of Bush’s nation-building policies. I have also omitted small engagements involving American foot soldiers, including Lebanon (Republican), Somalia (Republican), as well as the messy aftermath of our invasion of Iraq that has now spilled over into Syria.

        Given the evidence before you, how exactly do you justify your assertion that Republicans don’t start wars? And how can anyone have a sane discussion of these matters if the facts don’t matter to one side?

        Reply

        • Mike Kuzma, Jr. says

          April 19, 2018 at 1:45 pm

          1. Grenada- a limited force to protect American lives. Sorry they don’t matter to you.
          2. Panama- a war necessary because that peanut farming MORON Jimmuh Carter gave the freaking Canal away. SO GLAD China basically controls that now. Democrat all the way.
          3. On 29 November 1990, the Security Council passed Resolution 678 which gave Iraq until 15 January 1991 to withdraw from Kuwait and empowered states to use “all necessary means” to force Iraq out of Kuwait after the deadline. Erp, NOT an R war.
          4. Yugoslavia…..ooh, baby wag that dog. Shame Clinton couldn’t NOT lie in a deposition. D all the way.
          5. Iraq. “The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 is a United States Congressional statement of policy stating that “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq…”[1][2] It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, and states that it is the policy of the United States to support democratic movements within Iraq. The Act was cited in October 2002 to argue for the authorization of military force against the Iraqi government.”
          %100 DEMOCRAT baby.

          When you add in your support of Stalin, Marx, Pol Pot, Mao, Guevarra, Castro et al, and the blood of slavery that rests SOLELY upon the hands of the D’s you guys and gals have EARNED the title…….

          Bloodiest hands in history.

          Reply

          • Chas Cornweller says

            April 19, 2018 at 3:24 pm

            “Uneasy lies the head that wears the tin hat”. With all apologies to the Bard. Seriously, Mike, someone needs to get ahold of your history professor and have their teaching certification revoked. Either that, or you were sleeping that period. Talk about a Spin Zone! Whew!

          • Mike Kuzma, Jr. says

            April 19, 2018 at 5:05 pm

            Ad hominem, the first refuge of a fact lacking mope.

            Rebuttal? No, didn’t think you would, just sling your liberal crap.

            TWANLOC.

          • Chas Cornweler says

            April 20, 2018 at 11:50 am

            TWANLOC. Spoken from the mouths of blind sycophants and strict nationalists. Mike, I do believe in an earlier lifetime you must have goose-stepped your way east toward a wintery grave. My rebuttal lies just below, if you care to read it. I’d addressed it to Paul Plante, but I believe it covers most everything I have to say. You are welcome to read it as well. It IS a free country still, is it not? And to accuse me of no longer being an American is not your right nor your place. I could very well stand up to you and accuse you of not living for the best interest of this country. But I won’t. Why? Because I believe, once born on this soil, one becomes a part of this nation, never severed nor unchained, but bound by duty and honor and truth. Anything short of that, is treason to this nation. America is not GREAT because of its actions, America is great because of its founding ideals. That to me, IS the difference between you and me. Some have strayed far afield of those ideals. And those that fail to see this, will fail this country.

        • Paul Plante says

          April 19, 2018 at 6:33 pm

          David, who is denying anything you have said, prey tell?

          And David, really, dude, Grenada was not a “war,” nor was Panama.

          Those were variations on the theme of traditional American “gunboat diplomacy” in action as was practiced by such American presidents as Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921 and a member of the Democratic Party who practiced conventional gunboat diplomacy most notably in the case of the U.S. Army’s occupation of Veracruz in 1914, during the Mexican Revolution.

          As to the “Gulf War,” one assumes you are talking about Big Bush’s military adventure over there, which you can call a war if you wish, and since I hold the Republicans in at least as much contempt as I do the Democrats, I have no issues right now with you hanging that on the Republicans.

          As to Yugoslavia, that is considered more gunboat diplomacy on the part of Clinton, although you can call that a war, too, if you want to.

          Afterall, isn’t that where Hillary was engaged by machinegun fire or tank fire, or mortars, so that she had to sprint while under fire from her airplane down the runway and finally, into cover in the terminal building, where people were cheering her courage and the exhibition of broken-field running she had just displayed?

          This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

          Gunboat diplomacy in the post-Cold War world is still largely based on naval forces, owing to the U.S. Navy’s overwhelming sea power.

          U.S. administrations have frequently changed the disposition of their major naval fleets to influence opinion in foreign capitals.

          More urgent diplomatic points were made by the Clinton administration in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (in alliance with the United Kingdom’s Blair government) and elsewhere, using sea-launched Tomahawk missiles, and E-3 AWACS airborne surveillance aircraft in a more passive display of military presence.

          end quotes

          The question isn’t what they are doing, David Muir.

          The question is WHY are they doing what they are doing.

          And in the case of Korea and Vietnam, it is because Democrats did not want to look weak.

          That is history, David Muir.

          You may not like it, but you can’t change it.

          As to Iraq, yes, that was technically Small Bush’s fiasco of a “war,” and yes, Small Bush was and probably still is a Republican, lacking the spine as he is to stand on his own two feet without a crowd around him to prop him up, just as was the case with Obama, as you will recall, but that fiasco never could have happened but for the Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and the “Fighting Bulldog” Joe Biden.

          Check it out, David Muir, at pp. 87,88 of “FIASCO – The American Military Adventure in Iraq” by Thomas E. Ricks, under the heading “THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS January-March 2003,” to wit:

          As one national security official in the Bush administration put it, the passivity of Congress during this period made it far easier to go to war: “Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are saying, ‘We can’t tell you how long it will take, or what it will cost, that’s unknowable.'”

          “Why did Congress accept that?”

          Sen. Byrd took to the Senate floor five weeks before the war began and puzzled over why Congress had gone AWOL.

          “This chamber is, for the most part, silent – ominously, dreadfully silent,” he admonished his colleagues.

          “There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war.”

          “There is nothing.”

          “We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events.”

          It was just one in a series of speeches Byrd gave on the prospect of war in Iraq, and like the others it had no perceptible effect on his colleagues.

          “What is happening to this country?” he would ask in a plaintive speech the day before war began.

          “War appears inevitable.”

          Congress as a whole became unusually unimportant during this period, especially the Senate and House Armed Services committees, the two panels that oversee the military establishment and so held the keys to airing Pentagon dissent and other concerns about going to war in Iraq.

          The Republicans didn’t want to question the Bush administration.

          The Democrats couldn’t or wouldn’t, so Congress didn’t produce the witnesses who in hearings would give voice and structure to opposition.

          Lacking hearings to write about, and the data such sessions would yield, the media didn’t delve deeply enough into the issues surrounding the war, most notably whether the administration was correctly assessing the threat presented by Iraq and the cost of occupying and remaking the country.

          end quotes

          I’m not a Republican, David Muir, nor am I a conservative, and I am not a Democrat, nor am I a flaming liberal, so being unencumbered by all that ideological claptrap, I can see that for what it was – a complete and total failure of government at the federal level, because We, The People put incompetent idiots into positions of power over us.

          The question is WHY?

          As to Hillary, here is her position on that fiasco:

          On October 11, 2002, Clinton voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, commonly known as the Iraq War Resolution, to give President Bush authority for the Iraq War.

          By February 2007, Clinton made a point of refusing to admit that her October 2002 Iraq War Resolution vote was a mistake, or to apologize for it, as anti-war Democrats demanded.

          “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Clinton told an audience in Dover, New Hampshire.

          end quotes

          And here is Joe Biden’s role in the fiasco:

          In 1998, Biden expressed support for the use of force against Iraq, and urged a sustained effort to “dethrone” Saddam Hussein over the long haul.

          In 2002, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he stated that Saddam Hussein was “a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security” and that United States has “no choice but to eliminate the threat”.

          He also said, “I think Saddam either has to be separated from his weapons or taken out of power.”

          Biden also supported a failed resolution authorizing military action in Iraq only after the exhaustion of diplomatic efforts, Biden argued that Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons; he subsequently voted in favor of authorizing the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

          Biden has since said that he believes it was a mistake to support the Iraq War because it has been mismanaged by the Bush Administration.

          end quotes

          And Afghanistan never attacked us, David Muir.

          Where did you get that crazy idea from?

          As to Syria, David Muir, that responsibility belongs solely to Democrat Barack Hussein Obama and his Cleopatra, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

          Consider this excerpt from an Associated Press article on 15 September 2012:

          Most of the CIA’s clandestine and paramilitary team that had worked with Libyan rebels to bring about the fall of Gadhafi is now arrayed at the Syrian border, working with rebels there to try to hasten the fall of Syrian president Bashar Assad, the officials said.

          end quotes

          The CIA was there, David Muir, to hasten the fall of Assad because that is what Hillary Clinton wanted, and what Hillary wanted was in turn what Hussein Obama wanted.

          We know that Hussein Obama ordered the CIA into Syria from a Reuters article by Mark Hosenball on 2 August 2012, as follows:

          President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, sources familiar with the matter said.

          Obama’s order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence “finding,” broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

          Precisely when Obama signed the secret intelligence authorization, an action not previously reported, could not be determined.

          The full extent of clandestine support that agencies like the CIA might be providing also is unclear.

          end quotes

          Syria is not an extension of Iraq, David Muir.

          That is a myth easily dispelled.

          Syria is a product of the combination of the arrogance of Barack Hussein Obama, who did not want to appear weak, coupled with the ignorance of Hillary Clinton, which action was then given the Democrat seal of approval by Nancy Pelosi, a very notorious Democrat if there ever was one.

          Hillary’s role in that fiasco comes to us from the Washington Post article “Paper: Documents show US funding Syrian opposition” on April 18, 2011, as follows:

          WASHINGTON – The State Department has been secretly financing opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad, The Washington Post reported, citing previously undisclosed diplomatic documents provided to the newspaper by the WikiLeaks website.

          One of the outfits funded by the U.S. is Barada TV, a London-based satellite channel that broadcasts anti-government news into Syria, the Post reported Sunday.

          Barada’s chief editor, Malik al-Abdeh, is a cofounder of the Syrian exile group Movement for Justice and Development.

          The leaked documents show that the U.S. has provided at least $6 million to Barada TV and other opposition groups inside Syria, the newspaper said.

          end quotes

          But as to rising above being seen as being weak, Obama failed, as we see in this Reuters article from 3 September 2013, to wit:

          Jerusalem resident Jay Shapiro, his white hair covered by a red baseball cap, recalled a century-old adage about it being U.S. foreign policy to speak softly and carry a big stick:

          “President Obama has the opposite policy.”

          “He speaks loudly and carries no stick,” Shapiro said.

          “He doesn’t have our back.”

          “He doesn’t even have America’s back.”

          end quotes

          Or this from that same Reuters article:

          Mohammed Yassin, a 45-year-old Palestinian in Gaza said Obama did not look like the “tough guy Bush was”.

          Employing an Arab nickname for Obama, derived from his Kenyan father’s name, Yassin said, smiling: “Abu Hussein has no balls.”‘

          end quotes

          Some of us old boys out here in the countryside thought that maybe Obama was being cagey and was practicing this one of the famous Thirty-Six Stratagems, but we never really were sure:

          Feign madness but keep your balance

          Hide behind the mask of a fool, a drunk, or a madman to create confusion about your intentions and motivations.

          Lure your opponent into underestimating your ability until, overconfident, he drops his guard.

          Then you may attack.

          end quotes

          And anyway, David Muir, you have come in late and you have totally missed the point of this exercise.

          It is not to prove that Democrats are any more inept or incompetent or untrustworthy than a Republican.

          The purpose of the exercise was to help cure our dear friend and fellow American patriot of his delusion that any of this crap being done by Trump is either new or original.

          Reply

13. Chas Cornweller says

    April 19, 2018 at 1:25 pm

    Paul, I read with interest your view(s) as written to David Cowan. I always find it refreshing to see someone else’s interest in books. Unfortunately, one in four of all American citizens hardly see fit to read books anymore. Much less read books that pertain to the history or “slant” of history as written about America since the second world war.

    However, your take on “Giving” Vietnam back to the French because of their miserable performance during that last “Great” war was laughably wrong. It’s a “little bit” more complicated than that. In fact, the movie “The Ugly American” a fictional account of a fictional country, Siam and a fictional ambassador and his connections to an old war “buddy” is closer to facts than, the French were “awarded” Vietnam. The French failed miserably. And we followed behind in their same tracks. Vietnam was a myriad of pure American Imperialistic interest. France’s humiliation was the least of our motivations. But, I don’t want to debate this issue with you, because I just don’t have the time. I would like to address comments you made to me as of the other day and the questions you asked of me, such as…the premise is that in the United States, power is given to the government by its citizens (We the People) as written in the U.S. Constitution and through its elected representatives: Do I dispute that? One-word answer. No. Why should I? It is the one true premise that this nation was wholly founded on. Do we, as a nation still function as such? Again, one-word…no.

    And so, to continue; I never claimed that up until Trump, both government and media have been pure and holy (your words, sir…not mine). I would NOT by any stretch give our government or our media props on having done the American public any favors during the past thirty-forty years. In fact, the government you and I and the rest of the world have experienced during our lifetimes, is NOT the government portrayed in the media, or history books or even in the American consciousness. We have been lied to, mislead, miss-directed, bullied, subjugated, terrorized, drugged, stolen from (shall I go on?), these past seventy-three years. Since the end of the nine-teen forties, America has been on a tear wreaking havoc in third world nations around the globe. The period should be or will be come to be known as the “Imperialistic Years” by future historians. Kind of like we attribute Rome’s massive expansion prior to the Pax Romana to the Imperial Roman Republic period. America has been no different. The smoke screen of cloak and dagger shenanigans between East and West (Both Communist and Western Cultural nations and their respective colonies) was the perfect foil through which dirty deeds (from both sides) could be actively employed and if exposed, spun into the perfect history bending moment to either further our expansions or show our enemies as the cold, ruthless, dictators they have always been portrayed to be. The hogwash you speak of, is to the depth to which the crimes, this nation and its past and present leaders (in ALL three branches of government and the military) have participated in and committed over the years and then sold to the American public as Situation Normal i.e.; Evening News Pablum. The biggest casualty of War is truth. It appears to me, truth never came home from the second World War.

    Then, you speak of those that do not know the history. Those that know nothing of our country. Who would that be? The millennials? Poor dirt farmers in the Mississippi Delta? Professors at M.I.T? Are you asking should folks take a test before voting? And are you asking me if it is something I would be for? Seriously? Hell no! No matter how bad this country gets in choosing its leadership (and it has gotten pretty darn bad!) I still believe each citizen has a say and a vote…no matter what policies or belief systems they follow. It is the core essence of who we are as (Free?) Americans.

    You then ruminate on some incident in which some truths were covered up in Vietnam before tearing back into me. Seriously? Truths covered up, huh? Hmmm. From American journalist and the military, are you sure? Doesn’t sound like America I know…wait a minute. Oh yeah. Now I know why The Pentagon Papers just flashed in front of my eyes? Hmmm….

    And you say that I am a “Highly Indoctrinated Liberal Ideologue” so highly indoctrinated, such that, this reporter’s resignation would not mean a thing to me. Well, just goes to show, just how little you know about me. And what the hell does “Liberal Ideologue” have to do with this story anyway. And do you even have a “grasp” on that statement. Of course, a Liberal Ideologue would “LOVE” this story! It took seven years for the Pentagon Papers to see the light of day, exposed by, yep, you guessed it! A LIBERAL IDEOLOGUE! Who do you think was trying to suppress the truth? Who is ALWAYS trying to suppress truth? DO you really want to get on that “Sit and Spin”. Because we can!

    Yes sir, Paul…you really know how to impress and collect the good will! You know, you and I are more on the same page than you realize. I would bet my bottom dollar that if you and I were ever to sit over beers someday and discussed our “Ideologies”, within a few hours (and several beers later) we’d be slapping each other’s backs and saying “where have you been all my life?” But, you feel the need to paint with a broad brush and accuse me of Liberal Bias. Dude, I have no prejudices. Just one of the many reasons I am taking time out of my busy day to respond to your ludicrous comment about me. Am I liberal? Well, if caring about my fellow human beings and seeing that justice is the foremost driver in the world, than, yes…I will accept that moniker. But, I also believe that our governments should be fiscally responsible “With Our Money!” Why I think that makes me a conservative, don’t you? Do I feel our military budget is WAY over blown? Why, yes I do. I also feel/think/believe/have read enough to gather information that shows me that, America today is the most dangerous and unforgiving nation on the planet. We supply the weapons by which all others fight. We sell the technologies by which many people die! Believing this…does this make me an ideologue? Hardly, it makes me a realist. It makes me an aware, intelligent, non-conforming human being. That makes me a thinking man and a caring human being. And as a believing Christian, that makes me a voice crying in the Wilderness.

    And lastly, I am sorry Paul Harkins falsified documents. But, honestly, I am not surprised. Just as I was not too surprised to find out that Richard Nixon had the Paris Peace talks sabotaged to ensure a Republican victory for Presidency in 1968. How many voters knew then that was happening? And how many men died in Vietnam from January 1968 to April, 1975? Do I think our country has been on course these past seventy odd years? Hardly. Am I ashamed to be an American? Hardly…I was born here and will probably die here. There are many, many facets of America I truly love. But the path and leadership of our government is not one of them. The history trail we blazed is awash in blood, pain and horror. However, we are also blessed with some of the best and brightest this world has ever seen. Bravery and sacrifice have gone hand in hand to build this nation. But, know this…some of that bravery has been in vain and that sacrifice has been wasted. Think on that. Who gives…and who takes. Who goes to do the fighting and who stays home? Who creates the wars and who sacrifices? And why is this? Why Paul? Why, indeed.

    Still think I am a perfectly indoctrinated Liberal Ideologue Paul? Too bad if you still think so. But, here’s the difference between you and me. I would never call you an Indoctrinated Neo-Conservative of the Right-Wing persuasion. I would never call you any name, except for erudite. You see, I see ideologies where you see political parties. Politics is the entertainment section of the Military Industrial Complex. So, in truth, I am not easily entertained by their shenanigans. And, I am not patient when it comes to either putting words in my mouth, or assuming I think a certain way based on a one-dimensional assement of my knowledge. Be careful, my friend, lest I see through you and discover what really trips your wire.

    Reply

    • Paul Plante says

      April 19, 2018 at 6:45 pm

      Chas Cornweller, you are the DUDE par excellence, even more so than the Big Lebowski, and that is something!

      Did you see that video I posted above of what it is like to be in a debate with you – those swords flashing all over the place like a whirlwind, just like your words fly in here.

      That is what your piece above was like!

      WHEW!

      And as to you seeing through me to discover what really trips my wire, I can honestly say, Chas Cornweller, that if I had any wires you could possibly trip, I likely wouldn’t be in here in the first place to let them get tripped.

      But I like the idea that you think you can.

      It keeps me sharp.

      Reply

    • Paul Plante says

      April 20, 2018 at 10:51 am

      Ah, dear friend Chas Cornweller, the art of reading in this country has suffered greatly since the inception of the television in this sick society which prevails today in America, once the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free, now the land of the eternal victim.

      If you are not a victim of something in America today, you are a nobody.

      Look at poor Khloe Kardashian for proof of that.

      Isn’t is a shame what she is being put through?

      The poor thing is now having second thoughts about staying with cheating Tristan Thompson and she is struggling to decide if baby True should have cheating Tristan Thompson’s last name.

      Isn’t that just horrible, Chas?

      Why can’t people treat each other better?

      Some genetic defect, maybe?

      Or is it upbringing?

      As to my take on “Giving” Vietnam back to the French because of their miserable performance during that last “Great” war, it was hardly laughably wrong, because that is exactly what happened, so it is not a “little bit” more complicated than that.

      In fact, it is quite simple.

      At p. 96 of “The Coldest Winter,” author David Halberstam gives us this insight into the issue:

      Circa 1950

      Then (Dean) Acheson began to outline his recommendations not just for Korea, but for all of Asia.

      The United States would step up aid to the government in the Philippines, now embroiled in a guerilla war with the Communist-led Huk guerillas, and do the same for the French, who were fighting the Communist-Nationalist Vietminh in a colonial war in Vietnam.

      In Indochina, that was a critical escalation; the United States had originally opposed the idea of the French resuming their colonial rule there, had gone along with it reluctantly under pressure from Paris, and now, four years into that war, just as the French public was beginning to show signs of tiring, the United States was prepared to take on a major share of the financing.

      end quotes

      FDR wanted to set up a trusteeship for Viet Nam, Chas Cornweller, but then, he died, and Harry S. took over and he gave the French Viet Nam back, as if it were a baseball card or a trinket from a Cracker-Jacks box.

      That, my dear friend Chas Cornweller, is history.

      A colonial war is what the British were fighting here back in 1776, one they lost, just as the French lost in Viet Nam.

      And on that note, Chas Cornweller, consider this from p.81 of “Ho” by author David Halberstam, as follows:

      On September 2 (1945, close of WWII), Ho made his declaration of independence speech, blending the American Declaration of Independence with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

      The French, he said,. had systematically violated those rights in Vietnam.

      Then he said that the Vietminh, representing the downtrodden Vietnamese people, had seized power not from the French but from the Japanese.

      “Since the autumn of 1940 our country has ceased to be a colony and had become a Japanese outpost . . .”

      “We have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French.”

      “The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated, our people have broken down the fetters which for over a century have tied us down; our people have at the same time overthrown the monarchic constitution that had reigned supreme for so many centuries and instead have established the present Republican government.”

      end quotes

      The French had fled, Chas Cornweller!

      And then, Harry S. “The Buck Stops Here” Truman let them back in.

      He gave them Viet Nam on a platter, and by doing so, betrayed them as a people.

      At p.73 of “Ho,” the author helps us to perhaps better understand that sense of betrayal, as follows:

      Circa 1944, during WWII

      The Americans were a puzzle: they were at once imperialistic and anticolonialist, a potential counterforce to the French.

      So Ho would make himself useful to the Americans.

      He would help return their downed fliers and speed them useful intelligence about the Japanese.

      In return, they would give him arms.

      This would be doubly significant.

      Not only were the arms themselves crucial, but the fact that Vietnamese peasants would know that powerful Westerners were backing Ho would be a great aid in gaining legitimacy.

      And that was exactly what happened.

      end quotes

      The Vietnamese were fighting the Japanese during WWII, Chas Cornweller, not the French.

      end quotes

      As to your claim that the movie “The Ugly American,” which you say was a fictional account of a fictional country, Siam, (Siam, by the way, was not a fictional country, that is another name for Thailand) and a fictional ambassador and his connections to an old war “buddy” is closer to facts than the French were “awarded” Vietnam. I don’t see how you work that math, Chas Cornweller, to come to that conclusion.

      The “Ugly American” was a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer which depicted the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia.

      By then, the French were long gone.

      “The Ugly American” depicted the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps, whose insensitivity to local language, culture, customs and refusal to integrate was in marked contrast to the polished abilities of Eastern Bloc (primarily Soviet) diplomacy and led to Communist diplomatic success overseas.

      Nothing to do with the French, at all, Chas Cornweller.

      As to William Lederer, he was an American author and captain in the U.S. Navy who served as special assistant to the commander in chief of US forces in the Pacific and Asian theater, while Eugene Burdick was an American political scientist, novelist, and non-fiction writer, and served in the Navy during World War II.

      The two met in the buildup to the War in Vietnam, which occurred in the time of JFK, although the commitment there had begun with Truman.

      The authors were disillusioned with the style and substance of U.S. diplomatic efforts in Southeast Asia.

      They sought to demonstrate through their writings their belief that American officials and civilians could make a substantial difference in Southeast Asian politics if they were willing to learn local languages, follow local customs and employ regional military tactics.

      The book was very much a product of its times and historical context.

      In 1958 the Cold War was in full force, pitting the two geopolitical giants, the United States and the Soviet Union, against each other for military and geopolitical influence and dominance.

      NATO and the Warsaw Pact divided Europe into two competing visions of the world, with the Western world viewing countries in the Eastern Bloc as behind an Iron Curtain with the failed Hungarian Revolution in 1956 confirming this.

      The nuclear arms race was underway with the US well ahead initially, but by 1955, the Soviets had exploded a hydrogen bomb and were beginning to catch up, sparking fears of nuclear armageddon.

      The Soviet launching of Sputnik into orbit in 1957 gave the Soviets a huge technological and propaganda victory and sparked a crisis of confidence in the United States and worries about falling behind technologically and militarily and concerns whether its education system was up to the job of competing with the Soviets.

      In Asia, the French had left Indochina in 1954 after their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and this marked the beginning of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

      As Wikipedia tells us, it was in this atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and uncertainty in the United States about Soviet military and technological might, and Communist Cold War political success in unaligned nations of the Third World that the novel was published in 1958, with immediate impact.

      end quotes

      That is history as I understand it, anyway, Chas Cornweller.

      The French, being French, failed miserably, and yes, we followed behind in their same tracks.

      As Forrest Gump said, “stupid is as stupid does,” and boy, that is us, isn’t it, Chas Cornweller?

      At least that is what I gout out of your essay above.

      Was I wrong?

      Reply

    • Paul Plante says

      April 20, 2018 at 7:05 pm

      And here, my dear friend Chas Cornweller, you didn’t want to debate this issue with me, because you just don’t have the time; you wanted to address comments I made to you as of the other day and the questions I asked of you, such as…the premise is that in the United States, power is given to the government by its citizens (We the People) as written in the U.S. Constitution and through its elected representatives.

      You chose to not dispute that, and why should you have, Chas Cornweller?

      It is the one true premise that this nation was wholly founded on.

      And then, in answer to the question “Do we, as a nation still function as such,” your answer was no.

      My question, which remains unanswered, perhaps because it is unanswerable, is WHY, Chas Cornweller?

      And so, to continue, you say that you never claimed that up until Trump, both government and media have been pure and holy (my words, sir…not yours), and you know what, Chas Cornweller?

      I am entirely cool with that, and why wouldn’t I be?

      Afterall, you follow that up by saying that you would NOT by any stretch give our government or our media props on having done the American public any favors during the past thirty-forty years.

      Given that I too believe that, then why pick an argument with you about something we both agree on?

      But you are losing me here when you say, Chas Cornweller, that in fact, the government you and I and the rest of the world have experienced during our lifetimes, is NOT the government portrayed in the media, or history books or even in the American consciousness.

      That is far too nebulous (of a concept or idea unclear, vague, or ill-defined) for me to respond to, Chas Cornweller, beyond saying that the government portrayed in the media is largely incompetent and inept and untruthful; the government portrayed in history books is cruel, rapacious, unjust, as well as inept and incompetent, and the government portrayed in the American consciousness is all of those things, which is why we now have Donald Trump in power, and not Hillary Clinton.

      Yes, Chas Cornweller, we have been lied to, mislead, miss-directed, bullied, subjugated, terrorized, drugged, stolen from (shall I go on?), these past seventy-three years.

      Since the end of the nine-teen forties, Chas Cornweller, America has been on a tear wreaking havoc in third world nations around the globe.

      You say the period should be or will come to be known as the “Imperialistic Years” by future historians, but it is already known instead as the “Age of Folly.”

      Kind of like we attribute Rome’s massive expansion prior to the Pax Romana to the Imperial Roman Republic period and America has been no different, Chas Cornweller, because the people of America are no different than those Romans.

      And as you so cogently note, Chas Cornweller, the smoke screen of cloak and dagger shenanigans between East and West (Both Communist and Western Cultural nations and their respective colonies) was the perfect foil through which dirty deeds (from both sides) could be actively employed and if exposed, spun into the perfect history bending moment to either further our expansions or show our enemies as the cold, ruthless, dictators they have always been portrayed to be.

      The hogwash you speak of, Chas Cornweller, is to the depth to which the crimes, this nation and its past and present leaders (in ALL three branches of government and the military) have participated in and committed over the years and then sold to the American public as Situation Normal i.e.; Evening News Pablum.

      The reason for that, of course, is that they could, so they did.

      And that is not new, Chas Cornweller, the manipulation of pliable people.

      I mean, who can possibly forget this classic dissertation on that subject of being constantly manipulated by the political philosopher Mick Jagger, to wit:

      I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no satisfaction
      ‘Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
      I can’t get no, I can’t get no

      When I’m drivin’ in my car, and the man come on the radio
      He’s tellin’ me more and more about some useless information
      Supposed to fire my imagination

      I can’t get no, oh, no, no, no, hey, hey, hey
      That’s what I say
      I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no satisfaction
      ‘Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
      I can’t get no, I can’t get no

      When I’m watchin’ my tv and a man comes on and tell me
      How white my shirts can be
      But, he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke
      The same cigarettes as me

      end quotes

      Yo see what I am saying, Chas Cornweller?

      Nothing has changed because people don’t change.

      They know the Democrats are as worthless as the Republicans, and yet it is pretty much guaranteed that they will still vote for one or the other.

      Why is that, Chas Cornweller?

      The world turns to you for an answer to that, because it just does not know itself.

      And then you say, with some emotion, which I am cool with, that the biggest casualty of War is truth, and of course it is, Chas Cornweller.

      That goes back at least 2500 years to Sun Tzu and the Art of War, and it is found in Von Clausewitz, as well – the art of deception, Chas Cornweller.

      Look at this one of the famous Thirty-six Stratagems that Barack Obama was particularly adept at, for example:

      Feign madness but keep your balance

      Hide behind the mask of a fool, a drunk, or a madman to create confusion about your intentions and motivations.

      Lure your opponent into underestimating your ability until, overconfident, he drops his guard.

      Then you may attack.

      end quotes

      Or how about “Cross the sea without the emperor’s knowledge” – Mask your real goals, by using the ruse of a fake goal, until the real goal is achieved.

      Tactically, this is known as an ‘open feint’: in front of everyone, you point west, when your goal is actually in the east.

      end quotes

      Or how about “Create something from nothing”:

      A plain lie.

      Make somebody believe there was something when there is in fact nothing.

      One method of using this strategy is to create an illusion of something’s existence, while it does not exist.

      Another method is to create an illusion that something does not exist, while it does.

      end quotes

      You say, dear friend Chas Cornweller, that it appears to you truth never came home from the second World War, and I ask you in return, did it ever exist before that?

      Then, you spoke of me speaking of those that do not know the history, those that know nothing of our country, and they are many, Chas Cornweller.

      And you ask me, who would that be?

      The millennials?

      Poor dirt farmers in the Mississippi Delta?

      Professors at M.I.T?

      Probably the millennials for sure, but for some better answers, Chas Cornweller, I would refer you to these two Jay Leno videos on the subject, as they are quire informative:

      JayWalking Citizenship Test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJlY9C7YWzI

      Leno: Jaywalking – Questions about US Government 2000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGNIcdfveko

      Are was I asking should folks take a test before voting?

      And was I asking you if it is something you would be for?

      Seems that I did do that, yes, Chas Cornweller, to which you answer, Hell no, because no matter how bad this country gets in choosing its leadership (and it has gotten pretty darn bad!) you still believe each citizen has a say and a vote…no matter what policies or belief systems they follow, because in your belief system it is the core essence of who we are as (Free?) Americans.

      To which I reply, okay.

      And then you said that I ruminated (think deeply about something) on some incident in which some truths were covered up in Vietnam before tearing back into you.

      I’m not exactly sure where it was that I tore into you, so I am equally unsure as to where the ruminating took place, but Viet Nam was lies from front to back, Chas, Cornweller.

      Look at what H.R. McMaster had to say on that subject at p.37 of “Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and The Lies That Led to Viet Nam,” to wit:

      Although U.S. advisors were fighting with South Vietnamese units and U.S. pilots were flying combat missions in South Vietnam, Kennedy denied that Americans were involved in combat, and Vietnam attracted little public or congressional attention.

      Vietnam was far from front-page news and Americans still believed that their government told them the truth.

      end quotes

      Yes, we did, Chas Cornweller, and now, we know better.

      But you are the sceptic, Chas Cornweller, the doubter, and so you say:

      Truths covered up, huh?

      Hmmm.

      From American journalist and the military, are you sure?

      Doesn’t sound like America I know…wait a minute.

      Oh yeah.

      Now I know why The Pentagon Papers just flashed in front of my eyes?

      Hmmm….

      end quotes

      Yes, Daniel Ellsberg, Chas Cornweller.

      Did you know he was one of McNamara’s famous Whiz Kids?

      Born in Chicago in 1931, military strategist Daniel Ellsberg helped strengthen public opposition to the Vietnam War in 1971 by leaking secret documents known as the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

      The documents contained evidence that the U.S. government had misled the public regarding U.S. involvement in the war.

      end quotes

      To “mislead”, Chas Cornweller, means to cause someone, in this case, the American people, including myself, to have a wrong idea or impression about someone or something, as in “the government misled the public about the progress of the war in Viet Nam,” which translates as the government and the media lied to us, plain and simple.

      It wasn’t until at least 1968, Chas Cornweller, that we gegan to get a glimmer of the truth from Walter Cronkite, and by then, for many, including me, the die had already been cast, to wit:

      “For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

      “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.”

      – Walter Cronkite, 1968

      end quotes

      As to Ellsberg, in 1964, he went to work for the Department of Defense as a Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John T. McNaughton, and in a fateful coincidence, his first day of work at the Pentagon, August 4, 1964, was the day of the alleged second attack (which in fact did not occur) on the USS Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of Vietnam—an incident that provided much of the public justification for full-scale American intervention in the Vietnam War.

      There is one of the many Bright Shining Lies told about Viet Nam.

      Ellsberg’s primary responsibility for the Defense Department was to craft secret plans to escalate the war in Vietnam—plans he says he personally regarded as “wrongheaded and dangerous” and hoped would never be carried out.

      Nevertheless, when President Lyndon Johnson chose to ramp up American involvement in the conflict in 1965, Ellsberg moved to Vietnam to work out of the American Embassy in Saigon evaluating pacification efforts along the front lines.

      He eventually left Vietnam in June 1967 after contracting hepatitis.

      Returning to the RAND Corporation later that year, Ellsberg worked on a top-secret report ordered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara entitled U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-1968.

      Better known as “The Pentagon Papers,” the final product was a 7,000-page, 47-volume study that Ellsberg called “evidence of a quarter century of aggression, broken treaties, deceptions, stolen elections, lies and murder.”

      end quotes

      Ellsberg makes my case for me in spades, Chas Cornweller – yes, we were lied to.

      And you say that I said you were a “Highly Indoctrinated Liberal Ideologue” so highly indoctrinated, such that, this reporter’s resignation would not mean a thing to me.

      Actually. I said you were so well indoctrinated that you wouldn’t know it, and would instead think you were a free thinker, but what the hey, why quibble over small details like that.

      And then you say, “Well, just goes to show, just how little you know about me.”

      Okay, I’m cool with that, Chas Cornweller.

      And then you ask the existential question of what the hell does “Liberal Ideologue” have to do with this story anyway?

      Which story, Chas Cornweller?

      And you ask me do I even have a “grasp” on that statement, saying, “Of course, a Liberal Ideologue would “LOVE” this story!”

      “It took seven years for the Pentagon Papers to see the light of day, exposed by, yep, you guessed it!”

      “A LIBERAL IDEOLOGUE!”

      “Who do you think was trying to suppress the truth?”

      “Who is ALWAYS trying to suppress truth?”

      “DO you really want to get on that ‘Sit and Spin’”.

      “Because we can!”

      end quotes

      Okay.

      And then you say, “Yes sir, Paul…you really know how to impress and collect the good will!”

      “You know, you and I are more on the same page than you realize.”

      “I would bet my bottom dollar that if you and I were ever to sit over beers someday and discussed our ‘Ideologies’, within a few hours (and several beers later) we’d be slapping each other’s backs and saying ‘where have you been all my life?’”

      end quotes

      Where have you been, anyway, Chas Cornweller?

      And then you say, “But, you feel the need to paint with a broad brush and accuse me of Liberal Bias,” to which you reply, “Dude, I have no prejudices,” which was just one of the many reasons you were taking time out of your busy day to respond to what you perceived to be a ludicrous comment about you, asking me, are you liberal, to which you reply that if caring about your fellow human beings and seeing that justice is the foremost driver in the world, than, yes…you would accept that moniker.

      But that is not something limited to self-described “liberals,” Chas Cornweller, and it is exceedingly arrogant of those people to claim otherwise.

      People who don’t self-identify as liberals also care about their fellow human beings, just as we care about you in here, dear friend Chas Cornweller, and seeing that justice is the foremost driver in the world.

      And like you, we also believe that our governments should be fiscally responsible “With Our Money,” which seems to make you a conservative, Chas Cornweller, doesn’t it?

      You have said much more that deserves a response, but time presses, Chas Cornweller, so here for the moment I will rest.

      Reply

14. Paul Plante says

    April 21, 2018 at 5:12 pm

    Dear friend Chas Cornweller, let me say to you here and now that by the mere act of being born here, you are just as American as is anyone else who was born here, and at the same time, you are no less an American than anyone else who was born here, nor are you any more of an American, which also applies to me, as well.

    You say, as is your right, that you could very well stand up to Mike and accuse him of not living for the best interest of this country, which you are as entitled to do as anyone else who would wish to make the same charge, and who knows, Chas Cornweller. they could be legion, but the moment you did so, Chas Cornweller, you would have to give us the necessary contrast by pointing out to us who IS living for the best interest of this country, so we fellow Americans could see what the difference really is.

    But you haven’t done that, and so we are left to wonder – who out there in America is living for the best interest of this country?

    You say that you believe that once born on this soil, one becomes a part of this nation, never severed nor unchained, but bound by duty and honor and truth, and anything short of that, is treason to this nation.

    Do you realize that you are talking about some nearly three hundred million souls there?

    Who do you know, Chas Cornweller, outside of yourself, of course, and a mere handful of others in here, who feels themselves bound by duty and honor and truth?

    Those are names I would like to hear, and on that list, we will not find the names of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for one, nor will the names Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Charley “Chuck” Schumer and Donald Trump appear on that list.

    So whose will, besides those of a mere handful of us left in this nation who actually think and believe that way?

    You say that America is not GREAT because of its actions, but to the contrary, America is great because of its founding ideals, and then you say, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, some have strayed far afield of those ideals.

    Some, Chas Cornweller?

    How about just about everyone alive in this country today, because that would be far closer to the truth than just some.

    Who even knows those founding ideals even exist, Chas Cornweller?

    And what were those founding ideals?

    Were they these, perhaps: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness?

    Or these: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness?”

    Are those the founding ideals you are talking about when you say that those that fail to see this will fail this country?

    Let me tell you something, then, Chas Cornweller – the country was failed long ago, through factionalism, because factions cannot exist among those who truly believe that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

    If all people truly believed, Chas Cornweller, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then there wouldn’t be a Republican party in this nation, nor would there be a Democrat party.

    Those parties or factions exist because the members of those parties believe those words are nothing more than horse****.

    Elsewise, Hillary Clinton would not have been labeling Americans as a “basket of deplorables,” where “deplorable” means deserving strong condemnation.

    To draw this to a close, Chas Cornweller, being an American today in this nation really does not mean much, or anything.

    It certainly gains you nothing, except a pretty much worthless vote, and the right to pay taxes.

    Outside of that, it means nothing at all.

    Reply

15. Paul Plante says

    April 21, 2018 at 11:26 pm

    Dear friend Chas Cornweller, and I mean that sincerely, because I do enjoy our repartee in here, and yes, Chas Cornwller, you do bring up topics that are in need of serious discussion in here, which might be the only place in America these discussions happen, if you were call me an Indoctrinated Neo-Conservative of the Right-Wing persuasion, I would heartily guffaw, HAW HAW HAW, slap my knee in delight while tears of laughter streamed down my face from laughing so hard, and say, “boy, that Chas Cornwller sure does beat all!”

    And I would mean it, Chas Cornweller.

    If you want to call me an Indoctrinated Neo-Conservative of the Right-Wing persuasion, please, Chas Cornweller, feel free to do so.

    It won’t make me one. of course, no more than my saying you are a highly indoctrinated liberal ideologue so perfectly indoctrinated that you think you are a free thinker actually makes you one.

    Rather, it is how I see the public persona you present in here.

    That is why I said above that you PORTRAY (represent or play the part of someone) a liberal in here.

    You could be Roger Stone in real life, for all I know, accurately portraying liberal values for the purpose of getting them mocked.

    Or you could be Vladimere Putin, as far as that goes, for in politics, dear friend Chas Cornweller, who the hell ever really knows, especially on the internet?

    You could even be Hillary Clinton, and I wouldn’t know the difference.

    Nor would I care, since it is what you write, not who you really are, that makes the difference.

    I would enjoy you as a person, but that doesn’t mean I have to blindly accept what you write as the way things are, or the way I should think or perceive reality.

    And what I say is contextual, Chas Cornweller.

    Consider this that I said above:

    You are a highly indoctrinated liberal ideologue, Chas Cornweller, so perfectly indoctrinated that you think you are a free thinker, so the resignation of someone like Dan Porter from the United States Army because he would not be a liar, probably means little to you, but to me, who was alive at that time, and whose life would be affected greatly by the lies of general Paul Harkins in Saigon back then, that resignation was a factor among factors that served to greatly diminish this nation and set it on the path to where we are today, where lies are the only version of truth that exists anymore.

    end quotes

    What was your response?

    Was it this:

    And you say that I am a “Highly Indoctrinated Liberal Ideologue” so highly indoctrinated, such that, this reporter’s resignation would not mean a thing to me.

    end quotes

    Not to belabor the point, Chas Cornweller, but Dan Porter was not a reporter – he was an advisor to the ARVN’s in Viet Nam during the Kennedy years, and he resigned from our military because he would not tell lies for the Democrats then in power in Washington.

    Was that good for our country that an honest man would no longer serve in our American military, in effect ceding the field to the liars who remained?

    And if you go back in a moment of calmness and actually read what I wrote, in total, you would see that I gave you many options as to how to respond to what I said.

    Out of them, you chose umbrage (offense or annoyance), which is okay with me, given that it is still a somewhat free country, depending on how much money you have and your political connections or lack of them, in my case, anyway, me being neither a Democrat or a Republican, or any kind of ideologue.

    And then I said this, Chas Cornweller:

    As he talks about the sanctity of the American press and all this truth it supposedly feeds us, which I think is a delusion in the mind of our dear fellow American patriot Chas Cornweller caused by intensive and extensive indoctrination of him by the Democrats to make him one of their mindless ideologues who has been conditioned to think he is a free thinker, I would ask our dear friend Chas Cornweller to focus on that part about the “permanent floating press conference,” as one writer has put it.

    end quotes

    Again, Chas Cornweller, that is highly contextual, and again, you had many ways to respond, other than taking offense.

    But since you did take offense, Chas Cornweller, I am going to formally apologize to you in here in public for making you feel bad about yourself, as that was not my underlying intention.

    My underlying intention was to put forth the fact that many in this country, and I am one of them, are damn sick and tired of all the lies we are constantly being fed by ALL the clowns in Washington, D.C., and the main stream media that empowers them.

    Reply

16. Paul Plante says

    April 22, 2018 at 7:46 pm

    Bottom line, Chas Cornweller, keep writing.

    Say what you feel needs to be said, and then take your lumps for it, as I do.

    And don’t let what anyone else thinks of you trouble you.

    The important thing is to know yourself and then be true to the self you know.

    If you see a hypocrite, Chas Cornweller, call them out on it.

    Jesus did.

    So, so can you.

    Reply

17. Paul Plante says

    April 23, 2018 at 9:01 pm

    And yes, Chas Cornweller, Daniel Ellsberg is a true American patriot, perhaps one of the few to emerge from that period of time, but no way was he the liberal ideologue you would wish us to believe.

    Daniel Ellsberg shows up with some degree of frequency in David Halberstam’s “The Best and The Brightest.”

    The first reference to him is at p.22, as follows:

    Actually, there was precious little chance (with Kennedy administration) for (Chester) Bowles (an American diplomat and ambassador, Governor of Connecticut, Congressman and co-founder of a major advertising agency, Benton & Bowles), anyway, for it was on thing to use a liberal name to woo back the eggheads (Adlai Stevenson crowd), but it was quite another to reassure the financial establishment, and the Democratic party was bitterly divided on questions of foreign policy, with two main chords running through it.

    One followed a harder line on foreign affairs, with a certain amount of cool acceptance of the New Deal issues.

    It was exemplified in foreign policy by the traditionalists like Dean Acheson, who had broken with Roosevelt in the New Deal over financial questions, whose entourage included the Alsop brothers as columnists, and to a degree, William Fulbright in the Senate.

    These men were committed to a view of manifest U.S. destiny in the world, where America replaced the British throughout the world as the guarantor of the existing order.

    It was a group linked to the Eastern establishment, that nebulous, but very real conglomerate of businessmen, lawyers and financiers who had largely been determining American foreign policy in this century.

    They believed that the great threat to the world was Communist, an enemy at once totalitarian, antidemocratic and antibusiness, that the Communists must be stopped and that the Communists understood only one thing, force.

    This group was above all realistic.

    It understood power; it was, in a favorite word of the era, hard-nosed.

    Some of its principal members had, for all their anti-Communism, been badly burned during the McCarthy years and they would never want to look soft again.

    The Cold War had not surprised them and they had rallied gladly to its banner.

    This wing had called for greater defense spending, and in the fifties and in general, the Democratic party espoused that cause, with only Hubert Humphrey of its congressional leaders speaking for disarmament.

    In fact, the Democratic party had been more committed to military spending than the Republicans.

    It was the Democrats who wanted a larger and larger defense establishment, and although Kennedy was not one of the great leaders at the time, he had been part of it.

    (In 1960, at the start of the campaign, slightly worried about Kennedy’s lack of credentials in this area, a young Kennedy staff member named Deirdre Henderson had called one of the Defense intellectuals to summon his help on the problem.

    Kennedy, she said, needed a weapon.

    Everyone else had a weapon: Scoop Jackson had the Polaris, and Lyndon had Space, and Symington had the B-52.

    What could they get for a weapon for Kennedy?

    Well, said the young Defense intellectual, whose name was Daniel Ellsberg, “What about the infantryman?”)

    end quotes

    From that, Chas Cornweller, especially that last, we can clearly see that Daniel Ellsberg is a patriot, but not a liberal ideologue, at all.

    If he had really been a liberal ideologue, Chas Cornweller, he wouldn’t have a clue as to what an infantryman even was.

    Infantrymen is the mud are far outside the ken of the liberal ideologue, who wishes to live in a world with infantrymen in it.

    And if he had been a liberal ideologue, he would be against guns, and thus, he would have been against arming infantrymen with them.

    But he clearly wasn’t, so that is the first indication we have that while he was a patriot, he was not a liberal ideologue.

    Far from it, in fact, as we will continue to see.

    Reply

18. Paul Plante says

    April 24, 2018 at 7:35 pm

    To really understand Daniel Ellsberg and the Pax Americana as it was envisioned to be back then, versus what it might actually have been in real life, it is necessary to understand the times that spawned an American patriot like Daniel Ellsberg, and to understand those times, you need to understand history as it developed between Josef Stalin and Frank Roosevelt during WWII, since those two, pretty much by themselves, set in motion everything that finally led a patriot like Daniel Ellsberg to release the so-called Pentagon Papers when he did.

    The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, but that is not when Ellsberg first became aware of them, according to p.71 of “The Best and The Brightest” by David Halberstam, to wit:

    When in 1961 Daniel Ellsberg at Defense discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a War Plan, which told how they would go to war, and more important, that they had carefully hidden this fact from civilians, including among others, the Secretary of Defense, he was dispatched to the White House by his superiors to inform (McGeorge) Bundy (American expert in foreign and defense policy, serving as United States National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966).

    end quotes

    So it really took ten years for the Pentagon Papers to see the light of day, and if they were being in any way suppressed, it would have been by the Democrats, who controlled the executive branch back then, including the department of Defense where Ellsberg worked.

    As to understanding those times, Chas Cornweller, and the Pax America as it was then envisioned by the American people alive back then, of whom I was one, I would say that one of the best references would be the Commencement Speech given by John Fitzgerald Kennedy at American University on June 10, 1963.

    Do you recall that speech, dear friend Chas Cornweller?

    Back then, it caused quite a stir in certain American political circles and roughly five months later, on November 22, 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be dead.

    This is what Kennedy said in that speech about those times that produced an American patriot like Daniel Ellsberg, to wit:

    I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived–yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

    What kind of peace do I mean?

    What kind of peace do we seek?

    Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.

    Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.

    I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

    end quote

    That, dear friend Chas Cornweller, is the Pax Americana that I believed in, which is the Pax Americana we never got, and still do not have, and that is thanks to the worthless democrats and Republicans alike.

    Kennedy continued as follows:

    I speak of peace because of the new face of war.

    I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men.

    end quotes

    Too bad we do not have rational men in our federal government.

    Kennedy then continued as follows:

    I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war–and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears.

    But we have no more urgent task.

    But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude–as individuals and as a Nation–for our attitude is as essential as theirs.

    And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward–by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

    end quotes

    Having been alive back then, Chas cornweller, I think those words about having to look inward–to examine our attitudes toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home, were simply too much for the American people, who are not good at looking inward, to take, and perhaps it was thjose words that were the cause of Kennedy getting killed.

    Kennedy then went on as follows:

    First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself.

    Too many of us think it is impossible.

    Too many think it unreal.

    But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief.

    It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable–that mankind is doomed–that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

    We need not accept that view.

    Our problems are manmade–therefore, they can be solved by man.

    And man can be as big as he wants.

    No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

    end quotes

    Those words are why John Fitzgerald Kennedy was looked up to by people like myself.

    With respect to the differences between JFK and Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton in our times, I believe it can be seen in these following words, which are a repudiation of the liberal pablum spew of Obama and Hillary Clinton, to wit:

    I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream.

    I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

    end quotes

    There is where Obama led the nation, with his absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will which some fantasies and fanatics dream about, but which merely invite discouragement and incredulity, which is why Trump is now president, and Hillary Clinton is not.

    People simply got tired of the HOPEY-CHANGEY thingy-dingy of Obama which was never more than one of his cocaine fantasies he tried to pass on as wisdom.

    And then Kennedy the realist said this:

    World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

    end quotes

    People back then took that as objective reality – World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance.

    We are not our brother’s keeper, Chas Cornweller.

    And then Kennedy told us this, because that speech was to the nation, as well:

    But it is also a warning–a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

    No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.

    end quotes

    I don’t think anybody in our government heard him, however, nor were his words heeded.

    And then this as to those times we lived in back then, Chas Cornweller:

    As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity.

    end quotes

    Call me indoctrinated, Chas Cornweller, and perhaps I am, but I still find the thought of communism to be profoundly repugnant as a negation of freedom and dignity, and I am against it in this country.

    And then Kennedy said this:

    But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements–in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.

    Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.

    end quotes

    I ask you, Chas Cornweller, what has happened to our abhorrence of war in this country since then?

    And then Kennedy moved on the what is known as realpolitk, to wit:

    Third: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points.

    We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment.

    We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different.

    We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us.

    We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.

    Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.

    To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.

    To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use.

    Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.

    Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.

    For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard.

    And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute.

    We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded.

    end quotes

    All of that went out the window, Chas Cornweller, the died JFK died, as can be seen in this next sentence from that same speech:

    We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people–but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.

    end quotes

    Kennedy may have been unwilling to impose our system on unwilling people, but in that, he was largely alone, and the day after he died, LBJ began doing exactly that – imposing our system on the unwilling people of Viet Nam.

    That s what caused Daniel Ellsberg to finally release the Pentagon Papers.

    And Kennedy said this as well, which also caused a stir back then:

    For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.

    end quotes

    If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had refrained from interfering in the affairs of Libya and Syria, what a much different world it would be.

    Which takes us back to Kennedy, to wit:

    Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home.

    The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad.

    But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together.

    In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because the freedom is incomplete.

    It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government–local, State, and National–to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within their authority.

    It is the responsibility of the legislative branch at all levels, wherever that authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate.

    And it is the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the rights of all others and to respect the law of the land.

    And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights–the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation–the right to breathe air as nature provided it–the right of future generations to a healthy existence?

    While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests.

    And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both.

    end quotes

    I would say that a patriot like Daniel Ellsberg took those words to heart, Chas Cornweller, as did I back then.

    It is too bad for us in our times today that we have politicians and federal judges like Sonia Sotomayor who never learned that it is the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the rights of all others and to respect the law of the land.

    And then Kennedy said this, which flew right over the heads of George W. “Small” Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama, and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, among others:

    The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.

    We do not want a war.

    We do not now expect a war.

    This generation of Americans has already had enough–more than enough–of war and hate and oppression.

    end quotes

    But he was talking about people back then in America – not people such as they are today in this nation, where war and hate and oppression abound.

    And this he also said:

    But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just.

    end quotes

    When will that world come, do you think, Chas Cornweller?

    In whose lifetime will that finally happen?

    Reply

19. Paul Plante says

    April 25, 2018 at 5:47 pm

    Dear friend and fellow American patriot Chas Cornweller, I hope for the sake of the nation and the world that you are keeping up with this analysis in here, for yours is an important voice for the future,. and it doesn’t pay to be ill-informed.

    As we can clearly see from this above, it was in 1961, during the Kennedy administration when Daniel Ellsberg of the Defense Department made the existence of the Pentagon Papers known to the White House.

    And what was the response?

    Ellsberg was simply blown off.

    Why?

    Because that is what the Joint Chiefs of Staff do – they have War Plans, shelves of them, most likely, which tell how they would go to war, and yes, these are hidden from civilians, likely including among others, the Secretary of Defense.

    Ho hum, Chas Cornweller, back then, the Pentagon Papers were no big thing, as far as the Kennedy crowd was concerned, anyway.

    And that is important to understand, Chas Cornweller, to see things in their proper context here.

    As to that context, we go back to “The Best and The Brightest” by David Halberstam at p.167 as follows:

    As in China (under Chiang Kai Shek), it was a modern army (the Vietcong) versus a feudal one (the ARVNs), though this was not perceived by Western eyes, particularly Western military eyes, which saw that the ARVN was well equipped, with radios, airplanes, artillery and fighter planes, and that the Vietcong had virtually nothing, except light infantry pieces.

    Western observers believed the reverse, believed that the ARVN was a legitimate and real army, and that the Vietcong, more often than not wearing only black pajamas, not even uniformed, were the fake army, the unreal one – why, they did not even seem to have a chain of command.

    It was ironic; the United States had created an army in its own image, an army which existed primarily on paper, and which was linked to U.S. aims and ambitions and in no way reflected its own society.

    We believed in the Army, the South Vietnamese did not.

    We saw it as a real army which only needed a little prodding, an advisor or two, a few people to help the soldiers with map reading; a more vigorous leadership by the better officers, trained by Americans.

    This illusion about a dynamic new leadership would persist relentlessly through the years, so that in early 1967 Walt Rostow (Walt Whitman Rostow (an American economist and political theorist who served as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to US President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969, prominent for his role in the shaping of US foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, a staunch anti-communist, noted for a belief in the efficacy of capitalism and free enterprise, who strongly supported US involvement in the Vietnam War), still upbeat despite the darkening reports from Saigon, confronted an increasingly pessimistic Daniel Ellsberg, just back from a year and a half in Vietnam, and began to expound his new theories.

    We had to get away from our American liberal distaste for military regimes, Rostow said.

    The military was the hope in the underdeveloped world, well-educated, idealistic young officers taking over the nationalism, not those tired old civilians who were part of the colonial era, but bright (crew-cut, English-speaking, Fort Bragg-trained) men who knew the mo9dern world.

    People like (Nguyen Cao) Ky (served as the chief of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force in the 1960s, before leading the nation as the prime minister of South Vietnam in a military junta from 1965 to 1967).

    Terrific fellow.

    “Well, that may be true elsewhere in the world, Walt,” answered Ellsberg, “but there are very few countries in the world where the bright young officer class has the unique distinction of having fought against its own country’s independence and alongside the colonial army.”

    end quotes

    Ellsberg was a man of rare insight, Chas Cornweller.

    But he had no real voice in what was going on. because he wasn’t a RAH-RAH BOY, an optimist.

    As to better understanding those times, because we have never stopped using that same model, in Iraq where it failed, and in Afghanistnam, where it is failing, and Syria, and the people who populated the top levels of our government and military back then, at pp317,318 of “Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, AND THE LIES THAT LED TO VIET NAM” by H.R. McMaster, we have this:

    JULY 1965

    Harold Johnson (Army Chief) also went along with the president’s (LBJ)decision, even though he knew that the failure to mobilize was a prescription for disaster both for his service and for the war.

    Years afterward General Johnson asked, “what should my role have been?”

    “I’m a dumb soldier under civilian control.”

    “I could resign, and what am I?”

    “I’m a disgruntled general for 48 hours and then I’m out of sight.”

    “Right?”

    Appointed by the president to a position that he never expected to achieve, Johnson was willing to stay on and “try and fight and get the best posture that we can.”

    He was to preside over the disintegration of the army; a disintegration that began with the president’s decision against mobilization.

    Harold Johnson’s inaction haunted him for the rest of his life.

    end quotes

    It haunts a lot of other Americans, as well, Chas Cornweller, but soon, we all will be dead, and those times will not even be remembered in America.

    And there was this, as well, Chas Cornweller:

    “Maybe we military men were all weak.”

    “Maybe we should have stood up and pounded the table.”

    “…. I was part of it (abdicating responsibility for the troops during the Viet Nam war) and I’m sort of ashamed of myself, too.”

    “At times I wonder, ‘why did I go along with this kind of stuff?'”

    – Adm. David Lamar McDonald (Navy Chief 1965), 1976

    end quotes

    Any thoughts as to the why, Chas Cornweller?

    And more important, has anything changed since then?

    Or is it the same old tired act over and over again – same ****, different day?

    The candid world would truly like to know.

    Reply