Agreed.

"Chimpy and Blossom at Glans Penis."

"... would the Democrats actually be so submissively lame as to actually allow BushCo. to start hearings on that particular date?"

Yes. Next question?

That letter from Churchill regarding Iraq should be friggin' stapled to every Neocons forehead and when they say something stupid like 'they'll follow us home' or 'the surge is working' we need to smack 'em upside the head and make them read that letter.

Che's Lounge @ 6:

Bush really didn't compare Iraq to Vietnam so much as attempting to compare his imagined consequences of leaving Iraq to his completely innaccurate description of the events that followed our withdrawal from Southeast Asia. He truly screwed up the entire point, as he is want to do regularly. It was another incompetent attempt to scare us again into staying.

Yet the VFW crowd cheered.

On talk radio, the neocons have already forgotten it.

Next year, we'll be the only ones that remember it.

Unfortunately there is a lot of truth in that. I taught American History for almost 20 years and we rarely got to the Vietnam War by the end of the year. So there are a lot of people out there who, if they didn't experience it, never learned about it.

AF_Comm_Guy @ 12:

diane @ 11:

Unfortunately there is a lot of truth in that. I taught American History for almost 20 years and we rarely got to the Vietnam War by the end of the year. So there are a lot of people out there who, if they didn't experience it, never learned about it.

That's actually kind of funny to me. I had one year of world history and one year of U.S. History in high school. In world history we spent six weeks studying Vietnam. U.S. History was post Civil War only. The only thing I know about U.S. History from colonization to the Civil War is what I've read on my own. Imagine that. I went from K-12 in the same school district and we never once studied the Revolution.

Well, revolutionaries are essentially terrorists. They resist the 'legal' government's right to govern. Studying the Revolutionary War would've exposed you to such dangerous people as Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin and of course, the indomitable Thomas Paine.

The early history of the US would lead one to believe that our government is not our God and that we are to expect it to govern at our pleasure, and not it's own.

These are dangerous ways of thinking in this time. They are heretical and treasonous ideas, in the eye's of our neocon owners.

actually the history of Nazi Germany is mangled too since very few people actually draw on the comparisons of the hitler did as it relates to what bush is doing now.

The establishment have always misrepresented history.

Bonzo and the Gipper at the Lebannon.

So Ya wanna hear what the real Churchill thought about Iraq?

Meddling in Mesopotamia was always risky

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 18/03/2003

'I hate Iraq. I wish we had never gone to the place," said Winston Churchill in 1926 when, as Chancellor, he was asked to sink yet more millions into Britain's "Mesopotamian entanglement".

Churchill had always advocated withdrawing from Iraq, a country that he, more than anyone else, created. He lamented that its "ferocious" people had a habit of rising against British rule and rendering the country an "ungrateful volcano".

Iraq may have been a British creation, from the ruins of the Ottoman empire, but Churchill remembered all too well how Britain's involvement had begun with a disaster.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/18/widip218...

Too bad Bush and the Neocons never looked at what the real Churchill thought about Iraq.

In 1938 Theodore Abel wrote Why Hitler Came to Power which was a thorough and objective pre-war examination of Hitler.

It's very interesting to read because all of the post-war treatises on Hitler and the National Socialists have looked through the lens of 20-20 hindsight.

What is mostly forgotten is that prior to the start of WWII, there were many politicians in this country (including Grandpa Bush) that were pro-Hitler.

Unfortunately, the denizens of Wingnuttia either can't read or fail to comprehend what the do read. Not only that, but "truth," past or present, is a concept foreign to them. Since they make up reality as they go along, why not make up the past too?

If the President's misuse of the lessons of Vietnam sounds familiar, it should. After all, just last week 2008 Republican White House frontrunner Rudy Giuliani said virtually the same thing.

"America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South...The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse."

For the details, see:
"Bush, Giuliani Agree on Iraq-Vietnam Parallels."

Too true...
It is interesting how the right have adopted Churchill as their token feel good war man and Chamberlain is vaguely painted as some sort of wishy washy leftist.

It is a very cherry picked version of Churchill - if he were alive today the American right would brand a lot his ideology as far left .

To his credit Churchill saw the Spanish civil war, the second republic and the Franco regime for what it was -interesting that here is where Orwell and Churchill have pretty much the same interpretation of events.

While the majority of Churchill's aristocratic peers did not and behaved out of self interest.

It was the left that opposed Franco and Hitler initially - many giving their lives on principle without the mandate of their government.

While this sort of thing is fun to think about, how useful is it in terms of solving the horrendous problems these aliens in government are causing? I'm not copping an attitude. I'm desperate for any of us clever liberals to start propounding real solutions to horrifyingly actual realities.

nemo @ 30:

Would righties be so quick to idolize Churchill if they knew he supported the use of chemical warfare? Winston Churchill's Secret Poison Gas Memo

you might not want an answer to that...

i think it would only increase their idolization of churchill, and might even spark an idea or two.

note: the same group of "people" that want to develop battlefield nukes and use nuclear strikes as a preemptive tactic have NO problem with chemical weapons: so long as we are the ones using them

also, consider that we use 'dirty bombs' everyday in the form of depleted uranium shells.

The Power of (Right Wing) Myth

http://www.godhatesfags.com/

Annoyed Canuck @ 26:

" On a different note, is the curriculum for history classes in some American states restricted to learning about Hitler and the Nazis and 1938 and Hitler and Germany? It must be, because there are many right-wing fanatics whose entire understanding of the world is reduced in every instance to that sole historical event — as though the world began in 1937, ended in 1945, and we just re-live that moment in time over and over and over:

Love war? You are Churchill, a noble warrior. Oppose war? You’re Chamberlain, a vile appeaser. And everyone else is Hitler. That, more or less, composes the full scope of “thought” among this strain on the right. "

The Neocon enthusiasm for Churchill is the WEAKEST argument for the war in Iraq.

A full understanding of Churchill and his policy in the Middle East and Asia over a period of 50 years or more, demonstrates that he was NOT a democrat and that he was OPPOSED to the autonomy of emerging nations.

Churchill was a great parliamentarian, but he was above all else an Imperialist. He hated and worked against democratic movements in Ireland, India, South Asia, and the Middle East. The whole point of Churchill's long career was to preserve the British empire. In the end, he failed. His reputation now rests on his brilliance as a war leader between 1940 and 1945.

Before the first world war, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, converted the British Navy from coal power to oil in order to compete with the threat of German naval power. Britain had lots of coal, but no oil. Getting access to oil became a vital element of British foreign policy.

After the war, Churchill, as a negotiator at the Versailles peace negotiations, and as Colonial Secretary, worked to secure a British oil concession in Mesopotamia (formerly part of the Ottoman empire, now Iraq). Until the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, Mesopotamia had the largest undeveloped reserves in the world. Iraq's borders were drawn up by a small group of British diplomats who worked in the Colonial office, under Churchill. The country was made up of three ethnic groups who hated and distrusted each other. The country was inherently unstable and was governed by a British puppet king. The British government created an oil company, Anglo-Persian, now known as British Petroleum (BP), to operate Britain's oil concession. Iraq was created to provide wealth for England, and fuel for the Royal Navy.

Holding up Churchill as a champion of democracy and model of policy in the Middle East, is a fraud.

Some analysts have also noted that the support that the UK gave us in Iraq coincides with the North Sea oil field's dwindling supply and Britain once again finding itself as an oil importer. At the time there was a new field off Scotland that was found but had not been developed or fully explored at the time that the war broke out.

Someone more observant and sublimely succinct than I am recently remarked something about the neocons to the effect that; "Wherever the neocons are it is Weimar Germany".

This posture is at the core of Neocon ideology and dovetails exactly with what Barbara O'Brien is talking about here. The Neoconservative zealots blame the 'democratic' nature, even the "liberal democratic" nature of Weimar Germany for allowing the rise of Hitler. And so they very comprehensively wind up demonizing 'Democracy' and democratic principles at every opportunity, even while paying lip-service to those principles in the most hypocritical way possible.

Obviously the author's piece here covers more ground than what I'm speaking of, but it is this sort of simpleminded thinking advanced by the neocons, (combined of course with the relentless fear-mongering), that is so effective in weaponizing the ignorance of the hoi polloi.

And this is the overarching theme of the right-wing machine; democracy is a weakness, not a strength. This is why they're authoritarian in every respect, and disparaging of and undermining the mechanics of Democracy right here in the US as much as they can.

nemo @ 30:

Would righties be so quick to idolize Churchill if they knew he supported the use of chemical warfare? Winston Churchill's Secret Poison Gas Memo

On the whole, I think Churchill's record is- on the merit of his WWII leadership alone- an outstandin' one. That leadership outweighs all of the negatives (poor plannin' at Gallipoli, poor record at home against the labor movement in the '30's, slow economic recovery durin' his second stint as PM in the '50's, and I'm sure ya can find more to add) combined. Add to his WWII record his fight against Stalin's authoritarianism, Churchill done real good.

And, yes, he authored that memo on the use of poison gas. However, he heeded the advice of his cabinet and military leadership and never did use gas.

And think about this: Hitler, havin' suffered through the consequences of poison gas, decided that his forces would never use gas on the battlefield. Does this make Hitler a good man, or at least better man than history has portayed him until now?

Andy K @ 39:

Not really. Hitler seemed to have no problems authorizing the use of gas to commit genocide.

This probably ties in to where a single mention of a word or phrase carries a deeper meaning which a liberal like me fails to understand. "Hillary Clinton" said with smugness and condesencion communicates an entire host of negatives, for example, that I've never seen or heard explained.

AF_Comm_Guy @ 8:

Personally, one of my favorite episodes of TNG was "The Hunted" about a special ops soldier trying to free his fellow soldiers who have been imprisoned by their own government because their training had made them dangerous to society. All they wanted was to go home.

Good call.
What episode has the Vietnam speech?