Asymmetrical Information

Odd. Since the seventies are antediluvian you wonder why Hitler is still with us every day.

Heh, as someone else would say...

At least in the case of Hitler - wow, I can tell already that there's no good way to say this - his offenses against humanity were so egregious and, as far as I know, unique in their horrible scale and "scientific" execution up to that point, that invoking his name ought to connote something truly important. It usually doesn't, but it ought to. When Vietnam is invoked, it isn't generally along the lines of "The partisan spirit in this or that troubled nation is reminiscent of the revolutionary zeal of the Viet Cong..." but rather, "Quagmire! Quagmire! [For the US, not for those Vietnamese people who didn't WANT the VC and the North to take over.] Atrocities committed by US soldiers! Babykillers! Fragging! Nineteen! N-n-n-n-nineteen!" (OK, now I'm dating myself.) I've always thought the Vietnam "card" was a weak one - maybe as much as an eight or so, not something to stand pat on.

Of course, that's easy for me to say; I was born during the conflict but have no personal memory of seeing it unfold on TV every night in front of me. That's possibly something to remember: the nightly news was, I understand, something like a blood-spattered reality show, which could make an impression on one, particularly happening as it did at a time when many grown men still wore hats on the street and no one had yet seen a cop show in which someone's head got blown off.

You just said "Dude"!! Is that how they talk in London? Too funny. Jane, I would bet that everyone our age (I was born in 1970) has a family member who was in the Vietnam theatre or died there. I was named after a cousin who didn't make it back, and my Dad spent a year in Thailand doing the Air Force thing at the end of the war.

Gulf I, maybe some of us have friends that were there, not many died there to touch the entire population. The current Iraq war... still comparatively few families touched by death or deployment, but I know a few people who know people who have had loved ones die. If there is one advantage of keeping Vietnam as a collective reference point, it's to ensure that the draft will never, ever, ever happen again and that we maintain a ready, professional military. The dubious Casualties of War -esque stories of Vietnam vets are a small hardship to endure for that reminder.

On another note though... I worked at a dot-com with a Vietnam vet, and he once told me that all the BS and pressure and back-stabbing and incompetence and egos and tribal behavior and all that which we experienced in our little dot-com pressure cooker was a walk in the park for him compared to his war days. The perspective really helped to laugh at the whole thing and keep it in perspective.

Long, pointless digression? I think not. A very well argued, very cogent argument about the morally bankrupt politics of activist groups. Nothing lies like the statistics used by a group to further its own aims.

"[Hitler's] offenses against humanity were so egregious and, as far as I know, unique in their horrible scale and "scientific" execution up to that point..." Half-true. Stalin killed far more people than Hitler and started earlier, so "unique in their horrible scale" is wrong. (Mao may have topped both of them, but that was later.) OTOH, the organization and precise execution of the Nazi genocides was unique. The vast majority of Stalin's victims did not die by plan, bur rather by being put into conditions where survival was unlikely or impossible. When a trainload of Soviet arrestees were dead of thirst upon arrival at the labor camp, the immediate cause was either bad planning, or simply that the guards were too lazy to hand out water. A Nazi functionary would make sure to pass out just enough water that the expected number of fit workers reached the camp. In both the Nazi and Soviet systems, those that made it to the camp would slowly starve to death on an inadequate diet while being overworked. In a Nazi camp, the death rate was calculated and ultimately no one was supposed to survive; in Soviet camps it likely reflected corruption and theft of food before it reached the camp, as well as such incompetency that many Russians outside the camps were starving as well. OTOH, Stalin's officials quite clearly didn't care whether or not anyone survived the GULAG.

Which is more evil? The only way I an choose is by the numbers - Stalin's tally was clearly much higher. The only reason mass deaths make you think of Hitler before Stalin is that Hitler got much more bad press. Too many "liberal" journalists traveled around Russia and managed to ignore what was going on around them.

"Jane, I would bet that everyone our age (I was born in 1970) has a family member who was in the Vietnam theatre or died there."

Not in my family, aside possibly from one career Navy doctor who'd been in since the Korean War. If he served over there, he might have been managing a hospital.

I was born in 1953, so I could have been one of the last draftees killed over there, but I drew a safely high draft number. And I waited until the bungle in the jungle was over before I enlisted. An uncle, 10 years older, flunked his intake physical; I gather he was a bit too much of a "wild and crazy guy" for the Army shrinks. (They had a lot more potential draftees than they needed, so they took no chances.) Every other male in my family out to second cousins was too old or too young for Vietnam. A couple of my high school friends got draft notices but flunked the physical. I did have older friends who were back from Vietnam, but I never met anyone who seemed psychologically traumatized by the experience. (And that includes the guys at the DAV with missing legs, etc.)

The basic thing to remember is that a lot more of my generation died in car crashes than in combat.

To get back on topic, the main part of the Watergate show was the Congrssional hearings. Possibly they wouldn't have happened without the publicity generated by Woodward and Bernstein, but it now looks like they were the conduit for the FBI's #2 man to blow the scandal open. Jane's comment about the government cleaning itself is very much on point - but sometimes press leaks are the only way to accomplish this, and that requires a free press that isn't afraid to publish the story.

OTOH, W&B; did use up a lot of shoe leather getting confirmation before they published the story. THAT is responsible journalism, in distinction to Newsweek's "we don't know it's untrue" BS about the flushed Koran tale.

"Baby boomers, many of whom seem to have trouble accepting the fact that time has passed, often seem incredulous that the major formulating events of their lives simply aren't that interesting to everyone else."

That's the truth. JFK (actually, the Kennedys in general), Princess Di, Watergate and Vietnam: they just don't matter to anyone I know. But they sure do glue the Boomers to the tube when they come on.

I'm not so sure, though, that this is a purely Boomer thing. As with other qualities, the Boomers perhaps take it to an extreme, but I can imagine watching video from Challenger or 9/11 thirty years from now and feeling the same sort of things -- and I'm sure that my kids will be yawning and asking, "so what"?

We all have our formative events, and we all like to hold onto our younger years. It's just that there are so many Boomers, and so many of them in positions of power right now, that the media can't help but go on multi-day Boomer extravaganzas anytime one of those watersheds of yore is slightly relevant.

And I don't know, to the best of my knowledge, anyone who was in Vietnam. My dad was drafted while the war was on, but he was sent to a MASH unit in Korea along the DMZ.

Keep in mind that Hitler rose to half of Stalin's total in only, really, about six years of effort. Stalin had decades to out do Hitler. I think in a more appropriate comparison of something like "attrocities per year" Hitler clearly is the worse of the pair.

However, I think they both come as close as humanly possible to absolute evil, so it's sort of pointless to try to decide which is eviler.

I think the phenomena of the 70's (late 60's, early 70's really) of which you write in this post is explained by the emotion of nostalgia. These folks are vicariously reliving their youth, or attempting to anyway. They see every modern day problem as some sort of variant of those they experienced in their formative years.

Being born in 1957 I am on the lagging cusp of the baby boom generation. Thus I am nostalgic for sex, drugs, rock n' roll, odd/even gas fillup days, nuclear proliferation, and national malaise. Oh, and those are my happy youthful memories.

Some events age better than others. Vietnam still matters, although much less than many Boomers think - less than WW1 or 2. Watergate really doesn't matter anymore today than the Teapot Dome scandal does, except maybe as a minor background point on a few public officials who are still active. Likewise, the Clinton scandals will be a big yawn to my kids (born in 1997 & 99), and should be (though they may matter quite a lot in 2008).

Clearly, there are a disproportionate number of Vietnam vets on the streets.

The same people without the financial and family resources to get treatment for mental illness/substance abuse problems, are probably the same ones who didn't have the financial and family resources to avoid Vietnam in the first place!

I just wanted to add my voice (sorry, Jaimie!) to the those pointing out that global Communism made Hitler look like a rank amateur: if you consider the entirety of the 20th century, Communism resulted in the deaths of approximately 80 million people (no, I don't have the source handy) vs. Nazi Germany's approximately 8 million, which is to say, roughly an order of magnitude more, with the per-capita bloodletting award going not to Stalin, nor to Mao, but rather to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

In the end, this is why leftist philosophy bothers me so much: it's because we already know that leftist economic philosophy tends toward the centralization of power that facilitates the most murderous regimes the world has ever known. Communism is just Socialism plus Totalitarianism. There are, of course, "mostly harmless" Socialist societies, but they need keeping an eye on precisely due to Lord Acton's observation that "power tend to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." The connection to Islamist Fascism is that leftist philosophy finds it easy to identify Islamist Fascists with the "proletariat" of dialectical Marxism: the Islamist Fascist is the one who, finally, will usher in the revolution that leads to the workers' paradise.

This is why unassimilated, uneducated Muslims joining the social welfare rolls of "mostly harmless" Socialist nations like Sweden is problematic: the Socialists are likely to be sympathetic to them and allow them to stay on those rolls and remain unassimilated in the name of cultural diversity, but as the demographic trends continue on that path there's likely to be greater and greater tension, with the Muslim population wondering why they aren't any more successful in Sweden than they were at home, and with economically and culturally conservative elements becoming more and more disillusioned with supporting them. If the Muslim populace believes they would prosper if only their hosts became Islamic and adopted Sharia, or at least accepted being a dhimmi society, while the conservative elements struggled to hold onto their cultural identity, the likely result would be civil war.

All because Socialists tend not to see the connection to Totalitarianism in their own governing philosophy.

Watergate really isn't part of "the Seventies" so much as the last gasp of "The Sixties"; two hip dudes take on The Establishment, with the help of some groovy oldsters. At least, that's the myth. It's interesting that libruls used to get all worked up about too much independence at FBI (that was the main rap against Hoover, along with secret files), but when we find out that the #2 FBI guy used his secret powers to bring down a President...well, that's just different, because it was Nixon.

Funny how libruls don't seem to see Kathleen Willey in the same light, isn't it?

Watching journalists croon over Watergate reminds me of watching some aging, bald, fat former frat-boys standing around recalling "the good old days", and parties long past. Note that Dan Rather and his "secret" source of forged documents seems to have worked a whole lot less effectively than Ben Bradlee and his front page lies, much to the chagrin of libruls...So far as I can tell, what's going on is reveling in glory days, back when a handful of libruls in NYC and DC press rooms could decide what is and is not truth, lie blatantly if need be in the process, and negate an election.

I feel their pain, really I do.

Clearly, there are a disproportionate number of Vietnam vets on the streets.

The same people without the financial and family resources to get treatment for mental illness/substance abuse problems, are probably the same ones who didn't have the financial and family resources to avoid Vietnam in the first place!

As someone who comments here occasionally and who is frequently at odds with the proprietress, I strongly suspect that JG has it right on this one. During Vietnam, if you didn't have a high school diploma, the Army wouldn't take you (let alone if you had obvious mental illness or substance abuse problems). It's true that Vietnam-era draftees were disproportionately not-rich, but they were also disproportionately not-poor.

Many homeless people claim Vietnam veteran status to get access to medical care, shelters and job programs: I don't fault them for doing it, but it does create an erroneous image of Vietnam veterans.

There is a good book called Stolen Valor that unpacks a lot of the mythology surrounding Vietnam-era veterans. I highly recommend it.

Fake 'Nam Vets are rampant

I talk to the guys with the Will Work For Food signs. First of all, very few really want to work, they want a cash handout. Sadly, I suspect that a lot of them are alcoholics or have other chemicals they lean on. Up thread someone who was born in 1953 noted he could have been one of the last draftees: when we see someone who is 45 years old with a 'Nam Vet' sign, he's lying. Men who actually saw combat in 'Nam are now in their upper 50's, and some are eligible for Social Security. Remember that a heck of a lot of 'Nam era vets were in Germany, Japan, Korea and other places, or in submarines, etc. There are surely some Viet Nam era guys on the street, and some of them saw combat. But not a lot of them, not anymore.

Quote "As someone who comments here occasionally and who is frequently at odds with the proprietress, I strongly suspect that JG has it right on this one. During Vietnam, if you didn't have a high school diploma, the Army wouldn't take you (let alone if you had obvious mental illness or substance abuse problems). It's true that Vietnam-era draftees were disproportionately not-rich, but they were also disproportionately not-poor."

I made the assumption that the **Non-volenteers** serving in Vietnam were disproportionatly from the lower classes. Part of this is from all the brouhaha we heard in the 1st Clinton campaign and again with W about people pulling strings to get deferments or Nat Guard billets. Unless someone can cite me a statistic, I stand by the position that most people in Vietnam who didn't want to be there were poor.

The comment about mental illness/substance abuse refers to problems that developed later, not those present at the time of induction. Sorry for the imprecision.

Finally, the US Army was accepting troops with GED's, not HS diplomas, into the 1980s. I know this because I considered it. Do you really expect me to beleive that they required a diploma in the middle of Vietnam? Cite it and I'll buy it.

I'm a mid-bulge boomer, lived through the Vietnam era, Watergate, Nixon, etc., and couldn't care less about Deep Throat, or indeed any of the above now. That was then, this is now. Period.

I think the whole era is kept on life support by aging leftists, who long for the days when they had full heads of hair, got laid a lot, and generally thought that they mattered. (Come to think of it, now I'm getting nostalgic too!)

The "crazed Vietnam vet" meme can be traced directly back to the lugubrious junior Senator from Massachusetts, whose scurrilous testimony before Congress scandalized the nation by giving rise to that canard, which was propagated by innumerable cheesy TV dramas of the 70s that invariably featured one or more CVVs as villains. And to think Kerry tried to parlay his dishonorable actions into the Presidency...Good God.

Some of my personal observations about the military at the time. First, everyone was subject to the draft. Deferment status depended on what other category you might be in. My II-S (student) changed overnight to I-A as soon as I dropped out of college. I wrote a very nice letter to my draft board saying too bad, I had already enlisted. Being married with children used get you a draft deferment (until they changed the rules), and I knew some people who did that, but that always seemed to me to be a drastic action to take just to avoid going into the army.

Believe it or not, a lot of draftees were college graduates, roughly in the same proportion as college graduates bore to the draft-age population at large. Why didn't they become officers? Because the draft meant a 2-year tour in the military, while officers served for a minimum of three years. Most people wanted to minimize the disruption to their lives. BTW, I never saw any large amount of obviously poor people among the draftees. The pool of draftees spanned the spectrum of young people aged 18-26 in a very equal democratic fashion. Blue collar workers were more likely to help their kids avoid the
draft by helping them join the National Guard, while white collar workers helped their kids avoid the draft by sending them to college. (I didn't know of any kids who went to college to avoid the draft, but I knew a lot who STAYED in college to avoid the draft.)

While the Army and Marines preferred high school graduates, waivers were very common. The Marines had around 85% HS graduates, but kept trying to raise the percentages. DOD didn't help any when they mandated Project 100,000. That particular social experiment required the armed forces to accept 100,000 of the people who had low scores on the initial screening test that everyone entering the armed forces had to take. In practice, it meant people who had an average IQ of 90. These people caused a hell of a lot of problems for the Marines and Army, and a lot of us will always distrust the DOD because of it.

Vietnam/McNamara caused a lot of problems for the military in a lot of other ways. The up or out promotion system instituted by McNamara (which was implemented first for officers and then for enlisted) still causes problems in today's armed forces. No one really pays much attention to it because they all came up through the system and it'll probably never change, but here are some of the effects:
(1) it ensures a young force
(2) this young force needs constant training, because new youngsters are entering the service all the time
(3) promotions are a negative sum game, causing a lot of people to put their career ahead of their service or country
(4) there are very few wise old heads around any more in any of the ranks except for warrant officers
(5) there are certain key billets that used to be filled by experienced enlisted folk who knew they were never going to be promoted, but they just did their job until they could retire. During the draft days, smart people could be funnelled into these billets (the tails on the IQ bell curve had longer ranges, so more smart people were in the armed services simply because of the draft; the All Volunteer Force (AVF) compressed the curve. This is well documented, with articles in the NYT about the increased training time required, etc. for the AVF), but with the AVF, these key billets started to be filled by females, because the women recruited ALL had high school diplomas and because women weren't being recruited in the same numbers as men, the services could pick the cream of the crop. Filling these key billets with women was not at all a problem UNTIL THE UNIT DEPLOYED ABOARD SHIP OR TO WAR IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY. Because the women couldn't go with their deployed units, these key billets were assumed by guys who (1) didn't have the experience the women did and (2) weren't in the same IQ range. The gears still turned, but they turned more slowly than before.
(6) backstabbing became more common, because if you knew that you were being compared to your compadres for promotion, you could increase your chances by making sure that others had their chances decreased.

Whoo boy! Sorry for the mini-rant. Obviously some of the comments struck a chord with me.

Rex: Thank you for educating me. #6 is still common, BTW, according to my best friend from High School who is now a Major in the US Army. Robert Coram wrote a REALLY GOOD biography of a guy named William Boyd who is responsible for many of Rumsfield's ideas about transforming the military into a flexible force that has more in common with guerillas (Or the Continental Army under Washington) than it does with the WWII military that goes into that back-stabbing detail..

Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters.

Of course, it's all John Kerry's fault, right? Right.

"Part of this is from all the brouhaha we heard in the 1st Clinton campaign and again with W about people pulling strings to get deferments or Nat Guard billets."

When you talk about pulling strings, you aren't talking about the typical middle class. Aside from a few super-manipulators (e.g., Bill Clinton), those that could pull strings this way were in the top 10% or fewer. So what all the brouhaha proves is how much of our current leadership got their position by inheritance. So much for democracy...

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that a higher percentage of working class than lower middle class entered the Army, and more lower middle than upper middle class, because college gave you 4 years to find a more permanent dodge, because money could be used to find a doctor who would describe a minor medical problem as a disability, and because the kind of patriotism that leads young men to volunteer whether or not they were subject to the draft was more common lower in the economic scale. But all that doesn't mean that veterans stayed poor after they got out of the service. The services tried to instill a strong work ethic and self-discipline, and for the most part they succeeded. Most vets could do quite well in the job marketplace, considering their educational level - and they could get college money, if they wanted.

purple,

No - of course not.

But for those who weren't around at the time, it's important to recognize the bombshell that the allegations in Congressional hearings of American atrocities constituted. Up until Kerry's Congressional testimony everyone (except the most hard left types, and probably even them) viewed such allegations in the same way we viewed those of "germ warfare" made by the Communists during the Korean War - viz., as transparent propaganda. Kerry's allegations before Congress changed all that.

Nowadays we take this kind of rubbish (the allegations) for granted, but back then - in an era when living together was still scandalous in most of the US, and illegitimacy was taboo - it rocked the country, and appeared to validate the most outrageous claims made in Marxist agitprop. (I was at Berkeley at the time, and hence am all too familiar with the latter.) It was hard to believe, but I did; after all, it was testimony before Congress, right?

Further, I'd always just presumed that there had been a whole series of witnesses testifying before those hearings. Only during this last Presidential campaign was I stunned to learn that it was Kerry who had made the allegations (previously, I'd had no idea who'd testified), and moreover, Kerry had been the only person to do so. No one else ever testified to any such thing. And still further, he'd never supplied any proof or substantive evidence, but merely unattributed (just "some say") second- and third-hand anecdotes, aka "bullshit." There was no way to assess the veracity of such anonymous second-hand statements, no way to question those making them. I'd had no idea the charges were so flimsy, and unsubstantiated. I'm angry now, because I'd been conned then.

Thirty-five years later there is still no evidence - none - corroborating Kerry's allegations of systemically encouraged atrocities. Furthermore, if he had had any, he would have been obliged by the UCMJ to report it, so at a minimum he was derelict in his duty as an officer - a court martial offense in itself.

Therefore, he made the gravest allegations possible without any evidence, much less proof. An honorable man would not besmirch others' reputations without a rock solid basis for doing so, but John Kerry is not an honorable man. It is hard to overestimate the damage he did to this country unless you knew how his allegations changed the attitudes toward the military in this country. (For example, watch a WWII movie, then watch a post-Vietnam one.)

As another small example, those allegations are the reason for all the yellow ribbons and expressions of support for the troops you see on cars today. They were unheard of pre-Kerry; they were unnecessary. Kerry popularized and validated the brutal baby-killer image that the military is trying to live down to this day. The Koran "abuse" nonsense is just the latest metastasis of this Kerry-induced phenomenon, this eagerness to find malfeasance that some are convinced must exist.

So I ask you which comports better with the facts to hand:

1. Kerry's allegations were true, but no one has come forward in the last 35 years to corroborate them, no reporter has bothered to look for such corroboration among the thousands of Vietnam veterans, or

2. Kerry's allegations represent the cynical triangulation of a narcissitic opportunist who,
on his return to the US as a newly minted "war hero," found his PT 109.5 remake didn't play well in Massachusetts (the only state to go for McGovern in 1972), so, wet finger to the breeze, he changed tack?

Simple solution: now that he's signed form 180, have him goad his staff to finish their "review" (those one page forms take a lot of reviewing) and send it off to DoD, releasing all his records giving him a flying start on his next Presidential campaign.

Or, alternatively, revealing the less than honorable discharge that is such a good bet to be there, so we can be rid of him and all this Vietnam rubbish once and for all.

Ask yourself this: if he really were the great war hero, why is he so reluctant to release his records? Why?

Purple, any article which claims "Nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, and almost half served during the Vietnam era, according to the Homeless Veterans coalition," is at least partly full of shit - there's no way that 1 person in 1000 in the United States is a homeless veteran, and there aren't 150,000 homeless men over the age of 50. Including that line, and later in the article "But Boone's group says that nearly 500,000 veterans are homeless at some point in any given year, so the VA is only serving 20 percent of them.", inclines me to think that the entire article is full of shit.

Wow - its amazing that the genXers or whatever do not recognize the continuum from Duranty to Deep Throat to Rather to Blair to the forged CBS memos during the Kerry campaign.

The same MSM that Nixon fought against and that his VP Agnew fought against are the same ones that got a Pulitzer for the coverup of the Ukrainian Holocaust in 1932. It is the same MSM that kept the Swift Boat vets from getting the truth out about Kerry's fraudulent record.

This is not ancient history - it is the same leftist journalist obfuscs that did everything it could to thwart the battle against an Evil Empire that wound up liquidating 100 million in the last century.

And the Commies had to wait till we got rid of Nixon to knock off the last 3 million or so - that under Jimmy "I Never Lied To You" Carter.

WE WOULD HAVE WON NAM IF MSM DIDN'T SABOTAGE OUR EFFORT, BECAUSE OF THEM WE COULDN'T KILL ALL THE GOOKS.

Hmmm, yes, it's easy to forget that some people missed quite a bit of excitement, by virtue of not being there yet.

I remember the 1960s pretty well. I didn't think much of those days - a notoriously brainless, anti-intellectual, and self-indulgent era.

As a bit of nostalgia, though, I do have a draft number, a cherished memento of the times. But I was a tad too young for VN - I was in fact the first in a long line whose initial job out of school was not the military. My father spent the Korean War era hunting Soviet subs in the Mediterranean. His father spent World War One on the Western Front, in a trench filled with ice water and detached body parts. And his father was, I think, a veteran of the Second Afghan War (no relation to the recent one). So I suppose we could say that things in general have gotten duller since the good old days. Which is not a bad thing.

Trip Down Memory Lane, over and out.

"Richard Nixon was president when I was born..."

Jeez, you're old. One foot and a cane in the grave already.

"Richard Nixon was president when I was born..."

Jeez, you're old. One foot and a cane in the grave already.

Hey! Hey! Easy on that stuff!

By that standard, I've got one foot, four toes, and a bunion in the grave.

By chance, I've still got my draft card. Don't know why. I came across it during our last move.

Interesting article. In particular, I had never done the math with the supposed Vietnam vet homeless. Next time I am hit up by one, I will ask him his birthdate. And if he was born after, say, 1953, it is highly unlikely that he would be a Vietnam vet.

But realistically, John Kerry got the end of the heavy combat in Vietnam. The highest year, by far, for casualties, was 1967. That means that most of those seeing the stiffest combat were born before 1950. And, thus, many of the Vietnam vets were not really true Baby Boomers. Bush (43) is probably not. Clinton and Kerry definately were not. They were rather the end of the tween generation, born between the "Greatest" generation and the Baby Boomers.

I was lucky. Born in 1950, I was old enough to get a II-S through college. My draft number was low enough (#138) that I would have been drafted upon graduation, if I had graduated a year or two earlier. And if I had been a year or two younger, I wouldn't have had the II-S. But I (should have) graduated in June, 1972. Went I-A shortly thereafter. But Nixon essentially froze the draft in fall of 1972 in the run up to the election. And then, they quit drafting at all. So, I sat out about four months of I-A elgibility, before it became moot.

It was defining in that few of us in college at the time really wanted to die in some rice paddy half way around the world (never mind that that was unlikely, given that the war had already peaked by then). Mostly, we were ambivalent. A lot of us really didn't oppose the war, but didn't personally want to serve. Sure, the Domino Theory was nice, but was it worth dying over? Esp. if we had to give up Sex, Drugs, and Rock n Roll?

I do remember internally fighting over whether to join ROTC half way through. The question was, if I really was going to have to go into the military, as we all expected to, wouldn't it be better to go as an officer? Sometimes I regret letting procrastination make the decision for me - because by the time I could have completed my training after graduation, they weren't shipping to Vietnam at all. One fraternity brother, a year older, bought himself a Porsche, and spent his active duty service in Germany, driving fast, and having a lot of sex. It turns out that Germany was much more likely than Vietnam for my graduation class.

And I have to say, that most of the alleged CO (conscientious objectors) I knew were suspect. It was quite cool to be a CO - similar to the catchet of panhandling downtown, even when on a full ride scholorship (as one roomate did).

Practices that were comonplace before and after Watergate were, for a short while, threatening to bring down civilization as we knew it. The media gave up all pretense of impartiality - When Journalism instructor Kay Boyle admitted to downgrading students who did not paricipate in demonstrations and MSM raised no objection I knew we were lost. Ask your grandpa who Dick Tuck was.

Well, we will try this again.

Yes, the Baby Boom Generation is self indulgent. But what about the "Greatest Generation". Those who fought in WWII? Or at least many of the men did. The women, of course, mostly did not. But that is always the way of things. One of the things that I resented the most during Vietnam was that I faced being shot in the rice paddys of Vietnam, and the women of my generation did not. They also did not face the draft hanging over them throughout college, as it did for all of us guys. Why the difference? And yet, they demanded, and got, equal rights and benefits. Equal pay. Etc.

But back to the Greatest Generation. A couple of years ago, I saw a statistic that some 80% of the wealth in this country was owned or controlled by those elgible for Social Security. And most of them gladly take SS and Medicare, and, indeed, ask for more. Prescription drug benefit? Come on. Why should all these millionaires get one, and those who need it the worst, end up paying for it?

Add to this, there are senior discounts for practically everything. The Rec Center next door. Busses. Ski area lift tickets. Property taxes. Income taxes. You name it, the seniors get a discount. Why? Because they are in the Greatest Generation that went to war 60+ years ago, and some of them didn't come back. But note, those who are collecting did, if they went at all - because, as usual, the women didn't. And those retiring right now were just entering school on V-J day. So, maybe we should only provide these "senior" benefits for those who actually served in the military during war time?

So, you say to my (Baby Boom) generation, Get Over It. I say to the "Greatest" Generation, the same. Get over it. Start paying your fair share. Stop whining about how Social Security isn't going up fast enough to pay for your new Mercedes, and you will have to dip into savings. Boo Hoo.

And be aware that you have bequethed our children's generation a retirement system that will not be there for them, but that they have to pay for. They are the ones paying for your Social Security and Medicare. Your property tax and income tax discounts. Your bus discounts. And they aren't driving Mercedes or Cadillacs, etc. They aren't living in the million dollar houses that you paid a fraction of that for. And they won't get a fraction of the benefits you are getting when they retire.

The casual dismissal of the value of recent history, and the value of the perspective of those who lived through it, and who we are fortunate enough to still have around to learn from, is pathetic. But not surprising; we live in a culture of disposable artifacts, and our history seems to have joined that category. You won't understand perhaps, until you are 50 or 60, and watch in frustration as all the frauds and scams you were so familiar with in your youth are practiced again on unwitting fools who could learn better if only they paid attention to the lessons of the past.

It seems Saddam Hussein is the only one who took in all of the lessons of Vietnam.

In our present war, many of the same organizations, even many of the same players, are whipping up the same anti-American stereotypes on flimsy or non-existant "evidence" to demoralize and discourage the American people, who are the only ones who can lose this new war for us.

There's even talk about impeaching Bush now - promoted by guess who? Talk about reliving the triumphs of one's youth!

The reason there's so much hype about this Deep Throat is that it's all about the MSM's favorite topic, or second fave after hating RSA, themselves. Media circle jerk?

Re: pulling strings

It's a common assumption that ability to pull strings is largely a function of high socioeconomic standing.
It's not so simple.

Not everyone who is well-off necessarily has access to power; not everyone in the working class is cut off. High-earning professionals, for example, are not always the best or widest networkers. Blue-collar communities can be very tightly networked, though family, religion, ethnic grouping, union membership, etc. Politicians with working-class constituencies often have to be much more solicitous of their communities' everyday demands than do those who represent white-collar neighborhoods.

"The casual dismissal of the value of recent history, and the value of the perspective of those who lived through it, and who we are fortunate enough to still have around to learn from, is pathetic."

I think you're misreading. A lot of us Gen Xers *know* the history, and we've taken the lessons from it that we think valuable, we just don't care to endlessly discuss it, as if there's something intrinsically valuable about learning exactly which Washington insider betrayed which other Washington insider thirty years ago and gave the MSM its hardon for bringing down presidents.

Why do you think MSM's "approval ratings" and readership drop every year? It's not because those of us under 40 are forgetting the lessons of the past.

Furthermore, that comment displays exactly the type of self-centered, useless Baby Boomer-centrism that annoys the living shit out of Gen-Xers. As if the whole world had stopped changing in the 70's and all we "stupid kids" needed to do was listen to our betters. The fact of the matter is, we'll be cleaning up your messes as surely as you tried (and mostly failed) to clean up the messes wrought by the Greatest Generation, and doing so will entail trying things that Boomers never tried.

Experience only goes so far. Creativity and a willingness to learn from the present as well as the past, and to discard the past when its lessons are obviously not working, are also useful skills.

Some other events that happened before Megan was born or old enough so they "just don't matter that much:" the Cuban missile crisis; the Kennedy assassination; the peak years of the Cold War; Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin; Stalin's death; the Korean War; the first and second Berlin crises; the Chinese Communist triumph; all three Arab-Israeli wars; the Marshall Plan; World War II, the Great Depression...I might go on but it gets almost pianful to imagine that Megan completely misses the fact the "Watergate" was a big deal and will remain a prominent event in US history because it's the only time a President was forced from office by the adoption of articles of impeachment.

Gee, you could be Nixon's closest pal and understand why that's not something that will quickly fade from public consciousness.

Besies, in the 1970s, when I was in my 30s, people in the 50s, 60s and up almost never said anything without relating it to either "the War" or "the Depression." Those were, indeed, the defining experiences of their lives. And for those my roughly my age, the Cold War, the civil rights revolution, the urban riots of the 60s, the emergence of the counter-culture, the Vietnam War and Watergate, among other events and changes, were defining experiences for us as we moved through our teens, 20s and 30s.

Be that as it may, the importance of all these events to people Megan's age is not diminished. She lives in a world shaped by the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam and, yes, the toppling of Nixon and the profound changes in American politics that continue to evolve from the events of 1965-1975. Sure, she can ignore this as an obsession of "geezers," but is that really wise? When I was her age in the 70s, the people I knew who were interested in politics and policy did not airily dismiss what happened in the 1940s; we studied it; we referred to it; we learned from it.

Altho I was born in 1950, I have never in my life boomed a baby. I never paid enough attention to the details of Watergate to care who Deep Throat was, and lost all interest when I learned that the same apositional White House team had helped Johnson take down Goldwater.

As for the lifestyle of the time, I have no doubt that I am not the only one for whom (until some time after I met the woman I married) it could be described more accurately as Masturbation, Drugs and Rock & Roll.

JG: If they'd bothered looking at actual research, I believe they would have found that the percentage of veterans on the street is roughly the same as the percentage of veterans in the general population. But why check?

Non-rhetorical question: Have you bothered looking at actual research? Or are you just saying your gut feeling beats their unsupported statistic?

According to Stolen Valor, a book on Vietnam veterans which I've found to be pretty well researched, the number of Vietnam vets among the homeless population pretty well mirrors the number among the general population. However, I am in London, and the book is in my apartment in New York, so I am not able to directly check the source. But the Stolen Valor relied on actual, y'know, data, not asking some interest group advocate if the number of people in their inetrest group was gigantic, or merely huge. Given that the book on the uninsured is written by two academics, that's pretty amazingly shoddy sourcing.

-- During the Vietnam War, seven million men volunteered for the military; only two million were drafted. Research indicates that 75 percent of those who served in Vietnam itself were volunteers. They were the best educated and most egalitarian military force in America's history. In WWII, only 45 percent of the troops had a high school diploma. During the Vietnam War, almost 80 percent of those who enlisted had high school diplomas, and the percentage was higher for draftees--even though, at the time, only 65 percent of military-age youths had a high school degree. Throughout the Vietnam era, the median education level of the enlisted man was about 13 years. Proportionately, three times as many college graduates served in Vietnam than in WWII. They were hardly teenagers, despite the common belief that youngsters were sent to Vietnam as cannon fodder. An analysis of data from the Department of Defense shows that the average age of the more than 58,000 men killed in Vietnam was almost 23 years old

-- The stereotype holds that those who died in Vietnam were disproportionately black and Hispanic. About five percent of those killed in action were identified as Hispanic and 12.5 percent were black--making both minorities slightly under-represented in their proportion of draft-age males in the national population. (only seven of the killed-in-action were 18-year-old black draftees.)

--Another common negative image of the soldier in Vietnam is that he smoked pot and shot up with heroin to dull the horrors of combat. However, except for the last couple of years of the war, drug usage among American troops in Vietnam was lower than for American troops stationed outside the war zone. And when drug abuse rates started to rise in 1971 and 1972, almost 90 percent of the men who fought in Vietnam had already come and gone. A study after the war showed the use of illegal drugs among those who went to war and those who stayed at home to be about the same.

--There is a common belief that substantial numbers of Vietnam veterans are unemployed. But a study by the Labor Department in 1994 showed that the unemployment rate for Vietnam veterans was 3.9 percent, significantly lower for male veterans of all eras (4.9 percent) and the overall unemployment rate for males (6 percent). Since the war, the stereotype of the homeless Vietnam vet has been buttressed by panhandlers with signs like "Vietnam Vet: Will Work for Food." But the few studies using military records show that the percentage of Vietnam veterans among the homeless is very small.

-- The same is true for the belief that Vietnam vets have high rates of suicide. More Vietnam veterans, it is often reported, have died by their own hand than did in combat. Not true. A 1988 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that the suicide rates of Vietnam veterans aren't any different than those of the general population.

http://www.stolenvalor.com/

Of course Watergate is an important historical moment. But why does it matter who Deep Throat is? I mean, it's interesting, but no more interesting than knowing who broke Teapot Dome.

Eric:
My experience of my history is not some discrete thing in a box in your attic, of only passing curosity on yard-sale days. As Eugene O'Neill wrote: "There is no present or future; only the past, happening over and over again - now."

The lesson of the Vietnam era, which is what I am really concerned about (not so much its step-child, Watergate) is that the agenda of the refugees from The Frankfurt School, who infested Columbia and other universities in the generations before and following World War II, and the disciples of Antonio Gramsci (the most influential Marxist thinker of the 20th Century) - their agenda says that they can prevail over Western Civilization. Gramsci's THEORY was that the West could be overthrown by capturing the culture, not by harnessing economic unrest among the workers, nor by armed revolution. He saw that that would not work in Europe and North America. The Frankfurt School provided the strategy and tactics. Their mastery of the Vietnam era PROVED their ideas would work. THAT'S the unlearned lesson. That's what happened 1965 - 1975, and ever after until today.

Even the greatest of military powers can be defeated from within, they taught, with enough patience and persistence - their "slow march through the culture." And the masses can be conditioned to embrace and promote their own enslavement. THAT'S the lesson.

Everything that the left has succeeded in accomplishing in this country in the last 40 years started with the organized opposition to the Vietnam War - the delegitimization of all of our basic institutions, starting with the military. Don't you wonder why the slightest infraction by the military of trumped-up standards of conduct can get such enormous, disproportianate traction among opinion makers? What once was the "atrocity industry" of the Vietnam era is now the "torture and abuse" industry of the war on terror. Why opinion leaders' knee-jerk reaction to anything military is distrust and contempt? Why the military itself is so cowed and timid and defensive about any allegation of "political incorrectness?" And what annoys me is that most people in all generations don't even know what is happening to them. They think it is narrow, parochial, political partisanship, or adolescent, mindless anti-Bush hatred. Something small and temporary and relatively trivial and easily overcome.

It is hardly self-centered to be so concerned about what is happening to your generation and our mutual posterity. Us old geezers are not the ones dying on the battlefields any longer. But it is our own dear children who will be living in (are living in?) a numbing moral wasteland.

Do Internet searches on "Gramsci" and "The Frankfurt School." Read just a little. Think if you can find anything that they preached anywhere in our institutions today. It might change your understanding of the world we live in. It is the Rosetta Stone of political understanding for NOW - and we lived through its birth, implementation and inaugural successes. We remember when it was not like it is now, and we know why and how it changed. But only you can do something about it after we are gone. But first you have to know what really happened. What is happening. They are the same thing.

When you discover that, you won't be so tired of hearing about all this any longer.

I second Eric's comments! Just because some of us younger folks are sick and tired of hearing the same rechewing of old vomit from our elders doesn't mean we didn't listen and learn the first half dozen times.

One of the (many) things that pissed me off about John Kerry was his pandering to the Boomers while ignoring my generation (I was born in '77). Call me a selfish, whiny little brat, but I didn't give a damn what either candidate did 30 years ago - people can change a lot in 30 years. I didn't give a damn who served or didn't serve where nor did I care what he did during that service; I wanted to hear about the men and women serving NOW. I didn't want to hear MORE about Vietnam, I wanted to hear about Iraq.

I wanted to hear about things that directly concerned ME in the HERE and NOW. I wasn't interested in hearing about then. Like I said - I'd already heard it before. Unlike my father who hated Kerry for his testimony before Congress, I don't have deep personal attachment to or feelings for the things that happened before my parents even met. Kerry was trying to push buttons that I don't have. He wasn't reaching me with any of his carrying on over his service.

I felt like all Kerry did was talk to the Boomers. To me it looked like he totally forgot that the Boomer's kids could now vote just like their parents.

In the end, Kerry didn't get my vote because he wouldn't talk about the things that directly touch me.

As to all this crap about Deep Throat and who he is... I don't care about that very much either. Yes, Nixon's resignation from office was a big deal and it matters. But it isn't the ultimate defining moment in the history of our nation. There ARE other things in the world that matter a whole lot besides Vietnam and Watergate.

There is ignoring the past and there is being obsessed with the past. Some of us who are sick of hearing about Vietnam and Watergate have been accused of ignoring the past, but I'd like to suggest that what we're sick of is this obsession with the past of far too many of our elders. Far too many in the MSM look like they are aching to relive the past - they're determined to force the war in Iraq into the shape of Vietnam; they're struggling painfully to force Bush's term in office to mirror Nixon's. But Iraq is not Vietnam, and Bush is not Nixon, and wishing won't make it so. What I want to see is some people letting go of their obsessions.

I have not forgotten the events of the past thirty years. I recall what I've read about the history of the 20th century quite well. Perhaps it is because I am not hung up on the events of my own (relatively short) lifetime that I can look back to things that happened during my grandparents' time and learn from some of the mistakes of their era - for example: I've learned that appeasement doesn't work.

There are more lessons to be learned from history than the ones of the last 30 years. History did not begin afresh with Vietnam. Too many Boomers have, for whatever reason, forgotten that the world didn't begin with them.

Well, John Boyle, I am glad you are not one of those hung in the endless loop of self-congratulation that some of your generation are.

I assure you that when I hear talk of the destruction of our nation from the forces on the inside, my ears perk up. That's worth talking about. It's the beating of the Vietnam=evil=Iraq drum that puts me to sleep.

Amelia,

I wrote: "And the masses can be conditioned to embrace and promote their own enslavement."

You and Eric seem to be examples of their success, perhaps? Now not only dismissive of the events and facts of the past, but of the processes - the tedious and annoying processes -of history itself?

One of the ways the Gramscians intended to subvert our abilty to defend ourselves, or to even care to, was to detach Americans from their past; to "deconstruct" our history, and to create a new one in its place - an ugly one: racist, imperialist, exploitative and oppressive. Almost every kid in grade and high school is treated to the "idea of America" created by the likes of "eminent" historian, Howard Zinn. Did you know he was an expert "witness" at Kerry's "Winter Soldier Investigation" in 1971 - the kangaroo court which propagated the "atrocity" stories Kerry and the Left depended on to subvert public support for the war, the government and our nation's image? Just a footnote to history, not worth knowing? Would that we had consumer warning labels about content on textbooks.

When you say, "History did not begin afresh with Vietnam" I am here to tell you, "Yes, it did. That was an important part of their larger package."

Try that Internet search I suggested. Read just a little of what you find.

"Wow - its amazing that the genXers or whatever do not recognize the continuum from Duranty to Deep Throat to Rather to Blair to the forged CBS memos during the Kerry campaign." In what respect does Deep Throat belong in this list with reporters that carefully avoided the main story (Duranty) or went public with documents that were not just unverifiable but obviously forged?

I don't know what sort of Nixon apologists or conspiracy theories you've been listening to, but among Nixon's staffers there really was a group that sought to steal the 1972 election - I don't know what else to call it when someone commits crimes to spy on the other party and other critics. (Aside from "insane", because the Democrats were doing their utmost to lose that election.) Whether these men were acting under orders or came up with their bad ideas on their own is not clear, but it is clear that this plotting went on a few floors below where Nixon was living and working, and that they were funded by bags of $100 bills out of Nixon's campaign fund. They got caught red-handed, and the proper authorities (FBI, etc.) somehow failed to follow this up with an investigation that tried to go beyond the lowest-level culprits. Not much surprise there, since the FBI reported to Attorney General Mitchell, who was also the man in charge of the safe full of $100 bills... If Nixon didn't know what was going on, he wasn't competent to hold the Presidency, and if he did, he was both a criminal

Now, it's my opinion that there have been at least three sociopaths in the Presidency in my lifetime - Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton - and that the other two were probably worse than Nixon. E.g., Johnson ruthlessly cut all ties when associates of his got caught, while Nixon apparently tried to protect his men and eventually went down with them. Clinton at the least was a master manipulator, and a hypocrite who for political imposed unfair definitions of sexual harassment on other men while continuing to engage in harassment himself, and might have been much, much worse. But in terms of what can be proven, you've got a plot to steal an election versus lies about a blowjob.

o_O
I have no idea where you pulled that out of. Nor do I have any idea where you got the idea that I buy the BS of American textbooks that claims America is the source of all nastiness in the world since Rome began. It is precisely that concept of an evil America, the imperialistic bossy poo-hole of a nation that delighted in bullyingly beating up on the poor widdle Vietnamese that I reject. And when that's what I hear, I tune it out. Because it's crap and I already know that. And it's that CRAP that gets repeated ad nauseum. Really it's a good thing that history texts are so boring they are therefore seldom read by students.

Am I speaking a different version of English than you, because you're not getting what I'm saying.

markm wrote, regarding Nixon vs. Clinton:

But in terms of what can be proven, you've got a plot to steal an election versus lies about a blowjob.

I'm sure the Branch Davidians will be glad to know the worst of the lies told during the Clinton years were "about a blowjob"...

Although I wager there are some FBI agents who wish that there was a statute of limitations on murder charges...

And to tie this back to the top: Clinton is in many ways the emblematic Boomer, and it is no coincidence he's lionized by the same press that is still celebrating Watergate.

Ellipsis: As for blood on their hands, LBJ's far in the lead for running the Vietnam War like he didn't intend to win. His total of dead Americans utterly dwarfs Clinton's, and I suspect LBJ killed more Vietnamese than all the Somalians, Serbs, and Kosovars Clinton failed to save.

Waco was a bipartisan foul-up. Not that I want to defend Witchhunter-General Reno, but she wasn't yet in office when the Waco mess started. The Justice Department approval to stage a paramilitary raid instead of, say, knocking on the door and showing Koresh the search warrant, was made by some Bush41 holdover. The FBI and BATF were run by Bush41 or Reagan appointees. The doctrine under which that raid was conducted and a firefight started was developed in the Reagan-Bush administrations, and had not been changed after the Ruby Ridge fiasco. If Clinton had focused more on just finding a good Attorney General than on meeting gender and color quotas in his cabinet, a competent Clinton appointee might have been in Reno's spot for a month or two before the mess started - and probably not made a damned bit of difference, because that was too short a time to reform the agencies, and I very much doubt anyone would have told the top dog the whole truth about their plans for that raid...

Once federal agents were killed in the initial raid, Reno's options were pretty limited. (I might have backed the forces down and charged the idiots who planned that raid with obtaining a no-knock search warrant under false pretenses, conspiracy to violate civil rights, and felony murder, but that's just one of many reasons no one is ever going to appoint me Attorney General.) It might have been handled better, but there really wasn't any way to arrest the Branch Davidians that wasn't likely to end up in a bloodbath.

Now, the coverup afterwards is all Reno's responsibility. (Aside from Judge Danforth, Republican, who conducted the final whitewashing.)

Markm wrote:
LBJ killed more Vietnamese than all the Somalians, Serbs, and Kosovars Clinton failed to save.

Possibly, although I seem to recall there was someone else killing Vietnamese in the period from late November 1963 - December 1967...but the topic you brought up was 'lies' (of Nixon vs. Clinton), not "blood on the hands of LBJ", if I recall correctly.

Waco was a bipartisan foul-up.

Perhaps, but it was the Democrat party cover-up that succeeded, and therefore is relevent to the issue at hand. The Watergate coverup failed, remember?

The Justice Department approval to stage a paramilitary raid instead of, say, knocking on the door and showing Koresh the search warrant, was made by some Bush41 holdover.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (and "NIgger Hunting Licences", but that is another rotten story...) was created as part of the Treasury. BATF agent Aguilera lied under oath to obtain the search warrant in question; it was a "knock and announce, daylight only" warrant. BATF's heroes of North Texas then chose to misuse that warrant in the "scores of agents piling/falling out of cattle trailers and blindly shooting a wooden building containing old ladies and children" mode. Support for this action came from Texas National Guard helicopters, obtained under the "drug nexus" laws; Aguilera had also lied under oath to the effect that the Davidians had a methamphetamine lab in their building, enabling the Feds to get the choppers. Interestingly, meth labs of the scale BATF alleged are very dangerous, contain lots of toxic and flammable chemicals, and require special training and equpiment (oxygen masks, etc.) to raid. BATF never requested any of the training or special equipment...and no evidence of a meth lab was ever found, either...yet this went uninvestigated by anyone. The DOJ, the White House, the Congress, and last but not least the totally free and unbiased press showed no interest in investigating lies told before a Federal magistrate to obtain a warrant. Just another part of the Waco coverup...and there is a statute of limitations on perjury charges...

Therefore, the DOJ didn't enter the picture until after BATF had committed several crimes; of course, DOJ's mission at that point was to cover up those crimes, so the FBI promptly surrounded the Davidians and cut off all communications with the outside world. The last thing that they needed was for little old ladies to tell reporters about machineguns firing from helicopters. Even the most jaded, pro-Clinton, anti-gun-nut, religion-hating reporter might find the idea of strafing a giant shack with children inside from helicopters to be, shall we say, somewhat questionable. So there was no way FBI could allow any of the adult Davidians, especially any photogenic ones, to talk to the press. Up to this point, it didn't matter who was in the White House. Such things have happened before under various Administrations, although never on such a large scale. Of course, when such things happen, the press is generally rather incurious and takes whatever government officers tell them as the whole truth...so long as "guns" are involved, that is.

Once federal agents were killed in the initial raid, Reno's options were pretty limited.

Well, she could have taken control of the situation, instead of letting the FBI run the DOJ. Then again, perhaps she simply did what she thought best, just as John Mitchell did...or perhaps she was just following orders...

(I might have backed the forces down and charged the idiots who planned that raid with obtaining a no-knock search warrant under false pretenses, conspiracy to violate civil rights, and felony murder, but that's just one of many reasons no one is ever going to appoint me Attorney General.)

That would have been a good first step, to be sure.

It might have been handled better, but there really wasn't any way to arrest the Branch Davidians that wasn't likely to end up in a bloodbath.

On the contrary, by attacking as they did, the BATF guaranteed that some Davidians would fight back. I doubt the BATF raid leaders reasoned this out; BATF agents do not tend to be the best and brightest of the Feds. But the FBI has many experts, and their profiler/negotiator people are very erudite in applied psychology. The theology of the Branch Davidians was and is rather easy to find, and the psychology behind a group of people who are awaiting the Last Trump any day isn't hard to figure out.

The Branch Davidians lived in the expectation that "Babylon" would come for them and attack them in mulbiple ways; both BATF and later FBI did a fair imitation of Satanic forces on the march. BATF may not have intended to do this, but it boggles the mind that the FBI's profilers and psychologists didn't know what they were doing, and what message they were sending to the Davidians. For example, the Davidians expected "Babylon" to attack their religion. The FBI played Tibetan prayer chants and gongs at extremely high volume, night after night, while driving armored vehicles around the Davidian building under the glare of scores of high intensity lights...and that's just one little part of the FBI's psychological operation against the Davidians, there was much more...the message sent was clear to the Davidians, they could come out and surrender to Satanic forces, or remain inside and pray for a miracle...

The FBI executed extensive and stressful psy-ops against the Davidians, exploiting their psychology and theology in such a way as to keep them from coming out of the Mt. Carmel building. A radically different psychological operation would have led to different results: if the FBI's Waco siege teams had wanted most of the Davidians to come out, that could have been done, but clearly the objective for March was to keep them isolated inside a de facto prison. Killing virtually all of the Davidians, men, women and children, probably wasn't the intention on, say, March 1, 1993, but burning the building down was certainly on the "to do" list from the start, and if too many people came out of the building too soon, Vernon Howell might even have surrendered while the structure was still intact. The building had to be burned, because there were far too many bullet holes in, shall we say, "unusual" parts of the building (such as: fired DOWN into the roof) that would constitute physical evidence of crimes committed by BATF. Even with a Democrat in the White House, the BATF and FBI could not assume a totally cooperative and supine press that would ignore obvious, malicious, willful disregard for the law and human life...although they got exactly that. If the building remained intact, and someone got pictures of the bullet holes in the attic out to the press, there was a possibility that a coverup might become impossible. So the building had to be destroyed in such a way that all evidence would go away. Incidentally, when FBI removed all the Davidian automobiles from around the building, they destroyed much of the evidence relating to the gunfight between BATF and the Davidians. This was certainly no accident or "mistake"; the premier law enforcement agency in the country doesn't destroy evidence on live TV by "mistake". By mid-April, some number of people within FBI seem to have decided that not only should the building be destroyed and Vernon Howell killed, but virtually all of the adults as well. The "Hostage Rescue Team" (HRT, pronouced "Hurt") has a lot of questions to answer...not that anyone in any position of authority, least of all in the "free" press, is interested in asking them.

Now, the coverup afterwards is all Reno's responsibility. (Aside from Judge Danforth, Republican, who conducted the final whitewashing.)

This is utter nonsense. Reno indeed took the lead on the coverup, with her bogus "investigation" that essentially consisted of asking the FBI "Did you do anything wrong?", with predictable results. She clearly did what Clinton told her to do in this, as in so many other things. But there were many calls for a Congressional investigation, and eventually the Democrats in the House held their own show, following Reno's script. Again the FBI piously swore they'd done nothing wrong, and the predetermined results gave the heroic truth-seekers at the Washington Post, the NY Times , the various TV networks "news" anchors, and other press agents for the DNC the cover they needed to declare that no crimes had been committed by any Feds at Waco, nothing to see here, move along, move on, move on...

After the 1994 election, it appeared that a real investigation might occur. However, the Republicans once again showed why they are called "The Stupid Party" when they let the Democrats roll them in the House. First, with the inane time limit on questioning: just about anyone can lie well enough to survive less than 15 minutes of queries. I bet Sam Ervin knew this; certainly there was no time limit on questioning during the Watergate hearings! Then Rep. Charles Scummer, (D-NY) did his part by badgering some witnesses, harassing his fellow committee members, and generally obstructing the hearing. Also The Stupid Party agreed to have totally irrelevent people, such as Kiri Jewell, appear and take up precious time.

One interesting example of the Democrat Party's coverup machine at work involved the guns allegedly converted to machineguns. Recall that the original raid was over a $200 tax on each supposedly converted gun? Recall that during the "trial" in San Antonio, a box of guns was hauled in and never seriously examined, but assumed to be "machineguns"? During the Congressional hearings, the Democrats agreed to have these so-called machineguns examined, but only if they weren't taken apart. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to tell if they'd been altered by only looking at the outside. Some modifications might be visible, but many, or most, would not. However, people outside of The Stupid Party had hired an engineering firm, "Failure Analysis, Inc." (who had done some of the work in the Shuttle disaster) to examine the guns using X-Ray techniques. Suddenly, the Clinton Department of Justice, which had previously seen nothing wrong with a nondestructive, noninvasive examination, refused to allow anyone anywhere near these "machineguns". No reason was given, either. Now why would the Democrats get so upset about an examination that wouldn't even scratch the surface of those guns, hmm? Could it be that a properly done X-Ray examination would very likely enable the examiner to see all the parts inside the gun, and thereby determine if they were really converted to machineguns or not? No, no, no! That can't be it, why, it'd be a coverup like Watergate or something, and we all know the Democrats, party of Truth, would never do such a thing...there must have been some other reason, although Clinton's DOJ never gave one, and the press watchdogs didn't ask for one, either...and to this day, so far as I know, no one has examined the Davidians "machineguns" with X-Ray techniques. Interesting, isn't it? Well, the "unbiased" press doesn't find it interesting at all. Heck, they barely reported the incident at the time; evidently suppression of evidence in support of the Clintons wasn't "news"...nor is it news now.

The Waco coverup included top Democrats in the House, top Democrats in the Senate, the White House and all sorts of lesser Democrats who did their part by chattering away in newspapers, on TV, on radio, etc. with their DNC talking points. It was like an anthill; no two ants did exactly the same thing, and the pattern looked random, but a great purpose was set upon it: survival of the Clinton White House. And it worked, too, thanks to the media hive that took every half truth and lie from the DOJ or other approved source as gospel, and spun every legitimate question asked by a non-approved source as "conspiracy thinking".

For example, during an FBI press conference in late 1993, some FBI flak catcher said that carbon monoxide had been used to project CS into the building on April 19th. Back in the '80's, Pat Buchanan got in a lot of trouble for claiming that diesel exhaust wasn't toxic (he had been hanging around with some Holocaust-deniers). The press corps jumped on him with both feet, and rightly so, for this stupid, lying garbage. Yet when the FBI claimed to use the toxic compound in diesel exhaust, carbon monoxide, as a carrier for the irritant CS...and oh, by the way, CO is a combustible gas, it burns rather like natural gas...the oh-so-brave-and-truth-seeking press did nothing, said nothing, saw nothing. It was a lapdog moment, one of many, many examples, but it illustrates the point quite well. Other examples abound: the toxicity of CS and methylene chloride in combination with the fact that all the children appear to have been dead before the final "tank" led assault (actually Combat Engineering Vehicles on tank chassis), the fact that the only survivors of the Davidians all came out of one side of the building, the presence of military combat troops from "Delta" force...many, many such things were questioned over the Internet and in such magazines as "Soldier of Fortune", but swallowed as fact by the oh-so-rational and scientific "free" press. In fact, pretty much anything that the FBI said during the siege, and after the massacre, was accepted without a demurral by our brave, oh-so-independent-thinking press corps.

Or consider the issue of the heavily edited tape obtained by FIJA suits (eventually) of video from the Forward Looking Infra Red (FLIR) camera on an aircraft flying overhead during the April 19 assault. It shows some startling things. It apparently shows humans trying to leave a burning building and getting shot down in the process, for example. It may show bodies being bulldozed back into the rubble of the gymnasium, too. Hardly the sort of thing that a "hostage rescue" operation would indulge in. Because more and more people who actually knew something about FLIR kept asking questions, eventually the lapdogs of the press kinda sorta whined that maybe someone ought to do something...unlike their full-throated baying during Watergate over every detail, real or false, please note. And so, after some years, Charles Danforth (who was by then no longer a Senator) undertook an 'investigation'.

It is true that the Danforth "investigation" into the facts of what a FLIR system can and cannot see was part of the coverup (the oh-so-skeptical press swallowed those lies hook, line, and sinker as well). One can therefore argue that the coverup was in some sense bi-partisan. But Danforth's work came after years of coverup by the entire Democrat party apparatus...the facts are plain: Reno followed Clinton's orders, and the rest of the Democrat party from the DNC to CNN to NPR/NYT and on down rallied around the White House in a variety of ways.

The coverup of the Waco massacre towers over Watergate in size, in scope, in number and seriousness of crimes. Therefore it is simply rubbish to say that Clinton only lied "about a blowjob".

My point stands.

Was about to post about Burkett's book which debunked all those hackneyed Vietnam veteran stereotypes, but I see that "me" did it in a previous post.

I will second that "Stolen Valor" is an excellent read, and recommend it for those who prefer facts to urban legends.

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