Getting Obama elected required completing retooling our perceptual process, such that we no longer judge pedophiles, and think that there is no limit to the number appropriate to an orphanage. Up is down, black is white, good is bad, and truth telling is lying. I am not exaggerating. What Obama has gotten away with is staggering. What the Left in general has gotten away with is staggering.
Consider the arrest and release of Bill Ayers. He not only worked for the overthrow of our government, but actively dreamed of turning the American people over to Cuba and Vietnam and North Korea, and allowing for mass reeducation (euphemism for psychological and physical torture) and mass murder. In what historical period other than our own would he not have been shot, or at least put in jail for the rest of his life for treason? In what historical period other than our own could he go from aspiring Hitler to teaching the teachers of our young?
Now we read John Kerry is to be made Secretary of State. At this point, some history is in order.
The Vietnam War, as we know it, began when Ho Chi Minh became a Communist around 1919-1920, and cofounded the French Communist Party. He spent the 1920’s and 1930’s as a Communist organizer, mainly in Vietnam, but if memory serves he traveled, and met Stalin several times. I believe he even lived in Russia for some years in the 1930’s.
Since French rule was odious, many revolutionary groups emerged in the 20’s and 30’s. Ho Chi Minh issued consistent orders to kill the leaders of opposing groups, particularly when others were focused on resisting the Japanese, and just after the revolution began in 1946. Let me quote to you from a pamphlet any serious student of the war in Vietnam should read, “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”. It was a summary prepared for Congress in the period (1972) when we were still deciding whether or not to betray both the valiant efforts of our soldiers, and our ally South Vietnam. But I get ahead of myself:
The elimination of their opponents was one of the most common means the Communists used to establish Vietminh control over the entire nationalist movement. Against people whose interests or political convictions made them incorrigible enemies of the Vietminh, the Communists practiced a policy of physical extermination from the very beginning of the revolution. [a few names: Bui Quang Chien, Vo Van Nga, Nguyen van Sam, Pham Quynh; the list goes on]
So what happened is that all TRUE nationalists, all true Vietnamese patriots, all true pure anti-colonialists were simply butchered by the Communists, from the very start.
In 1954, if memory serves, France quit. In 1956, Vietnam was split in two. One sees the argument that there should have been a vote, but this ignores the fact that the North was already a Fascist State, and had already killed at least 50,000 people considered ideological deviants. No election in such a condition can mean anything.
During the partition, the North left many partisans behind, and began nearly immediately to infiltrate dogmatic Communists into the south to sow terror. They used both force and lies. Force was they come into a village in the middle of the night, have the only guns to be seen, and demand both food and soldiers. If denied they rape the women and shoot a few men. Then they come back the next night with the same demand. Faced with this choice, it is not surprising many eventually consented. Lies: they tell you everything will be golden sunshine if they can just get the Americans and their Vietnamese running dogs out of the country.
America, facing a global battle for perceptual positioning, sees this gradual invasion of the South by the North and decides to take action. The war eventually becomes a proxy battlefield between the Soviet Union–which bankrolls the North (and to a lesser extent China, which provides massive amounts of manpower to the North, so they can field more soldiers)–and America.
While not vital militarily, Vietnam is seen as a proving ground as to the resolution of America in the face of constant Communist efforts to win allies. Put another way: the world was watching, to see who the better ally was. If we had lost this perceptual battle, we would have become more isolated diplomatically, and eventually militarily.
Around 1965, the battle of the Ia Drang River Valley is fought. In it, American soldiers faced conventional NVA regulars, and the deaths of some 100 Americans caused the deaths of some 1,000 NVA. General Westmoreland, in my view, concludes from this that if we can engineer enough battles like this, that through attrition our eventual victory is assured. So he basically replicates the initial “patrol” of Hal Moore across the country. Obviously, though, “once bitten twice shy”. The NVA figure it out, and we never achieve a death toll like that again, until Tet.
Tet we win. Tet is a CATASTROPHE for the North. They think about quitting. Peace talks are on-going. There, they are claiming they want no more war, while at the same time they had just launched an offensive that was designed to win converts and facilitate a full-blown revolution. The result is a massive increase in SOUTH Vietnamese patriotism, and a large scale, generalized increase in support for America and for winning the war. The South Vietnamese begin to realize what failure will mean. Let me quote you again from “The Human Cost”:
During the Tet Offensive of 1968, the communists occupied a portion of the city of Hue for 26 days. When they were driven out on February 24th, some thousands of civilians were missing., In 1969, a series of mass graves containing the bodies of missing civilians were discovered. Some of the victims had been shot, some had been clubbed to death, some had been buried alive [as Diem’s brother had been, decades before]. Counting those still missing–who must be presumed abducted or executed–the estimated civilian toll. . . comes to 5,700.
It was established that the killings were in no sense random, but were carried out on the basis of explicit directives and from prepared lists of names, the Communists moving through the streets methodically with their clip boards and pulling the victims from their houses.
I’m getting long. Net, net: we get new leadership in the form of Creighton Abrams, who realizes that the base of the NVA is the countryside, and who enables the rural Vietnamese to protect themselves, as well as providing them support needed. They figure out who the bad guys are, and in most cases put them in jail (some of the bastards we just shoot). With the losses in Tet 1968 and 1969, the Vietcong (who are always in some form ultimately NVA) disappear. By 1972 they are gone. The whole South is safe.
The war is won by 1972. I want to repeat that: the counterinsurgency, that of people mortaring Saigon, pulling priests out of churches and shooting them, of executing mayors and police chiefs, of ambushing American patrols is done. South Vietnam is as safe as the American countryside.
This is why in 1972, the North launches a conventional, tank-led invasion, which is repulsed with American air power and Vietnamese ground troops. The war is won again. The invasion has been stopped.
Then a Congressional coup happens in America. Richard Nixon is forced to resign from office for the crime of not admitting soon enough just when he found out about a break-in he had not authorized. All public policy making is weakened in the aftermath of the scandal. Communist propaganda makes it look not only like the war is not won, but that it CAN’T be won, even though it is already over. We give up, the NVA army rolls in a little, sees that we won’t respond, despite desperate requests from ARVN, then rolls down the country. Mass slaughter and misery follow.
John Kerry is an important figure in all this. Let me offer some testimony from a senior NVA commander:
[the antiwar movement] was essential to our strategy. Every day our leadership would listen to world news . . to follow the growth of the antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.
Treason is “providing aid and comfort to the enemy”. We have the enemy EXPLICITLY stating that aid and comfort was being provided. The situation cannot be simpler.
Now, to John Kerry. I won’t repeat things that have been printed elsewhere. What I want to do is quote a text on him, and apply a few facts. The quote is lengthy, and taken from B.G. Burkett’s excellent book “Stolen Valor”, the thesis of which is that our soldiers performed extremely well in Vietnam, were guilty of very few of the crimes they were accused of, and that most of the stain on their reputation has come from opportunists like John Kerry, cranks, and Communist propagandists. Most of the people alleged they had commited atrocities can be shown not even to have served in Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans against War that Kerry attached himself to lied over and over and over and over. Burkett documents case after case after case of this.
The VVAW’s use of fake witnesses and the failure to cooperate with military authorities and to provide crucial details of the incidents further cast serious doubt on the professed desire to serve the causes of justice and humanity. It is more likely that this inquiry, like others earlier and later, had primarily political motives and goals.
In April 1971, the VVAW staged a demonstration it called Dewey Canyon III, “limited incursion into
Congress”. The protest was named after an operation in 1969 that sent elements of the 3rd Marine Division into Laos. About this same time, an ad appeared in the New York Times signed by forty-nine American servicemen from the 1st Air Cavalry urging support for antiwar demonstrations.. But as United Press International later reported, the men, members of a Mekong Delta-based helicopter unit, had neither read nor paid for the ad.
I want to pause for a moment and underscore this: deception was at the HEART of the anti-war movement. Virtually everything they said and did was a lie. These are the people Kerry aligned himself with.
Dewey Canyon III featured Vietnam veterans marching on Washington in a very dramatic, emotional way. Long-haired, scruffy, dressed in camoflauge and the remnants of military garb, and draped in medals, they presented the image of men who had obviously been tested in battle [most of them had not: Kerry had, but he only served six of his twelve month rotation] and had seen the horrors of war. . .
. . .At the end of the day they held a candlelit march around the White House. After a man who said his son died in Vietnam blew taps, the soldiers began flinging their war medals over a high fence in front of the Capital: Purple Hearts, Bronze Star Medals, Silver Stars–bits of ribbon and metal hurled in the face of a government that had so betrayed them. Some, after throwing away what cost them so dearly, broke down and cried.
One of them was John Kerry, Vietnam Navy veteran and aspiring politician who had been among those who had organized the protest. Kerry flung a handful of metals–he had received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star medal, and three Purple Hearts–over the fence. Kerry spoke later that week before the the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, putting a face on the anti-war movement [i.e. HELPING an anti-war movement we have already established the North Vietnamese THEMSELVES said was a major source of consolation] far different than one seen before–the scruffy hippie or wild-eyed activist. Kerry represented the All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government.
From start to finish, the public took Dewey Canyon III at face value, not understanding they were watching brilliant political theater. Kerry, a Kennedy protege with white-hot political aspirations, ascended center stage as both a war hero and as an antiwar hero throwing away his combat decorations.. His speech, apparently off the cuff, was eloquent, impassioned.
But years later, after his election to the Senate, Kerry’s medals turned up on the wall of his Capital Hill office. When a reporter noticed them, Kerry admitted that the medals he had thrown that day were not his. And Kerry’s emotional, from-the-heart speech had been carefully crafted by a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who also tutored him on how to present it. TV Reporters totally ignored another Vietnam veteran, Melville L. Stephens. . .who that same day urged the Senate not to abandon America’s allies in South Vietnam. ‘Peace for us must not come at the cost of their lives.’ Stephens said in a speech he wrote himself.
Kerry did not return from Vietnam a radical antiwar activist. Friends said that when Kerry first began talking about running for office, he was not visibly agitated about the Vietnam War. ‘I thought of him as a rather normal vet’, a friend said to a reporter, ‘glad to be out but not terribly uptight about the war.’
The people who served from John Kerry did not fault his courage. He did in fact get shot at in anger. What they fault is his fundamental character and integrity. He lied for political gain. He gave credibility to a movement that was plainly invaluable in preventing American support for South Vietnam in the final assault. At the time, if memory serves, the USSR had the largest army in terms of numbers, America was second, and North and South Vietnam were third and fourth in the world. All the South needed was money, air support, and naval transport, and it would still be free.
To make a long story short, John Kerry is an asshole. All these Democrats are. Barack Obama is an asshole. Joe Biden is an asshole. Hillary Clinton is an asshole. Bill Clinton is simply a clever asshole. These people use people, they lie, they cheat, they steal. They care NOTHING about principle or personal integrity. All they care about is power and how they look in a mirror.