47 years later, it is impossible for anyone who cares NOT to know about what a devastating blow it was to them. Senior NVA leaders have written about it. They have talked about how they thought about quitting, and suing for peace under nearly any conditions. They have talked about how much moral support traitors–and I use the word clinically and precisely–people like Jane Fonda gave them. They have talked about how they watched our news nightly, and took great courage from the growth of the “anti-war” (losing a war with Communists does not end war, it merely moves it into the next phase of a war by the State against the people; and in this particular case, it facilitated mass slaughter in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) movements.
This is the world we live in, in which all the congenial lies told over a half century are accepted at face value, with enthusiasm. Leftists are always the Good Guys, and the task of news is not just to report it, but to INFLUENCE it. This is all Goebbels did. The task was always both to report the news, and to report it as accurately as possible. They would even report defeats. They simply spun everything in a positive way. You can report failures with absolute fidelity, if you nest that report within an overall narrative or context of progress. Likewise, the successes of your enemies can be made failures.
I look around me, and I remember. Do you remember Ross Perot, who made our national debt a major priority, who galvanized everyone to care? Watching our news, one would think illegal aliens and gay marriage opponents are the greatest existential threats facing us. Clearly, Obama and his cronies have provided shelter and open support to murderers, rapists and thieves, and that is very simply indefensible on any level, and it is impossible for any sane person to look into the eyes of their victims and claim any good has been done for humanity.
At the same time, the interest payments on our national debt will very soon be higher than our Department of Defense allocations. The interest on the debt is becoming a cancer on our economy.
And Obama is doing all the things Socialists do, that he can get away with. This always causes economic decay and rot. Not sometimes: ALWAYS. There are no exceptions. Obamacare will cause de facto monopolies in health insurance to form, will cause rationing of actual healthcare, will continue to put stress on small businesses–we have had dozens of restaurants close around here in the past year–and will put stress on the budgets of the middle classes who have to pay for everyone, themselves, and the new welfare recipients Obama is trying to buy with middle class money.
All the Fed needs to do to cause a crash is stop buying our debt, or stop pumping $50 billion or something a month into massive Wall Street banks, or raise interest rates. I am seeing they want higher Reserve requirements, which is inherently deflationary, at least in good economic times. Deflation right now would cause a crash.
All the signs are on the table of a massive disruption of our system, even absent something like a major terrorist attack.
And the people who make their livings, and hang their professional hats on, telling us truths we need to hear, are completely absent from their posts. Quite the contrary: they have sided with the lies.