Originally posted by: winnar111
Originally posted by: Craig234
Originally posted by: seemingly random
:laugh:
It's 99% unimportant except in the extremely rare case where it's 100% important.
It's not 1% - 10% of presidents are assassinated in office, more are disabled.
Funny you bring that up. Palin, at least, wouldn't lead us into another Vietnam the way Lyndon Johnson did after Kennedy was shot.
That's idiotic. The Republicans were at least as in favor of Vietnam as LBJ. It was his inability to resist right-wing pressure as JFK had, with great effort, that was a major factor.
Palin is Bush, and she would do the same thing on the next Vietnam that he did on Iraq. It's not about them, it's about how they serve the powerful interests behind them.
Both parties were gung ho on Vietnam when it started, but the democrats were the party to recognize the mistake and admit it and work to reverse it.
The Republicans, as they got power - with some evidence they treasonously sabotaged the LBJ peace talks in 1968 to help win the presidency - were the party who lied about a 'secret plan to end the war' and talked peace while secretly expanding the war, delaying its end for years, with Machiavellian game-playing about a 'plausible deniability time period' allowing them to blame the fall of South Vietnam on the Vietnamese people and deny they lost, and worried about slogans like 'Peace with Honor'.
Vietnam was a big blot against the democrats - but an exception to their long history of avoiding wrong wars. The Republicans' long history is of all kinds of wrong wars.
One of the reasons leaders start unnecessary wars is when they are weak, because war builds support for them. Who would be weaker than Palin, in need of such support?
It worked great for Margaret Thatcher who was broadly seen as a disaster who would be voted out, until the Falkland Islands came along - a war, interestingly enough, started by the Argentian generals ruling the country because of *their* political weakness, as the public was pushing to overthrow them. That, too worked great for them in the short term, while the war was going on the public ralled for them.
Of all the candidates, Palin is the *most* likely to get us into the next Vietnam, just as Bush was malleable on Iraq and bought in 'whole hog' to the point of lying us into war.
It's tragic - the injustice of millions of Vietnamese killed had little effect on our policy which was more worried about 'winning the war'.