Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: Hold on a second

What planet do you live on?
Yeti — (archived)

Lyndon Johnson said that if he'd lost Cronkite, he'd lost the war.

No, what Johnson actually said was:
If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America

And beyond that, your missing the point. Its not that Cronkite 'owned' middle america- like we were all some sort of blind mindless zombies getting our daily thinking instructions from The Walter. Its that Johnson recognized that power comes from the look in peoples eyes, and the press has a job to conform to that look. They are, afterall, a business.

Your argument is something akin to saying that the weather vane makes the wind, or the rooster brings the sun. Its a style of reasoning that is equivalent to stone-age civilizations. In that much, you are eather really really reaching or are simply not thinking straight.

Do you honestly think that the only effect the Left could have had on this war would have been by trying to pass hostile legislation?

Its up to you to rise to my challenge. Let me repeat it again, just in case all that BS between your ears has displaced your memory:

name one effect that the Washington Post or the democratic Leadership has had this war its planning, its conduct, its outcomes or its possibility of success

Again, you fail miserably to identify one solic cause, and instead handwave at some sort of unidentified fifth column that has screwed the works. Okay, thats fine. Some of us have UFOs and Dragons... You have the Liberals. And you use them to cover the gaping holes in your reasoning and your incomplete world view. In essence, you are saying:

Well, I WOULD be right if only nobody disagreed with me!

"Vietnam was lost in the battlefield of public opinion, managed by those who form public opinions. North Vietnam was convinced that if they held out long enough, America would give up, forced out by its own people. Sound familiar?"

This war is not Vietnam. Vietnam may have been lost on the battlefield of public opinion, as you say. Or that may just be a sorry excuse for a bad idea.

This War however (remember? the one you interjected Vietnam as a red-herring to avoid actually arguing about?)... This War was lost on the drawing board in the white house, in apparatus of the higher reaches of the pentegon, in the self-delusional scenarios of the Office of Special Plans and in the field. You can't now come and lay our failures at the feet of the people who told you that you were full of shit and that this war was a bad idea. You can't say that the people who protested the idiocy are in fact responsible for the outcome of the idiocy

Basically, its cowardice, in the strictest sense.

DL

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