It's Not Like Vietnam, Unless It Is:
Let's be clear here. As the Rude Pundit has said before, George W. Bush is a pussy, a punk. In prison, he'd be everyone's favorite bitch because of how he'd cry just before getting fucked. How do we know this for sure? Two reasons, one old and one new. The old one is this: on his application for the Air National Guard in 1968, Bush specifically checked "Do Not Volunteer" in the box asking about "overseas duty." So, coward that he was, Bush, like so many other cowards before him, supported a war he was unwilling to fight, even if he had the chance. The new reason for the punkification of George W. Bush? Because, like every bully or mob boss before him, he hides behind his lackeys. Dick Cheney and others out there attacking on the military front. Karen "I Could Not Look Any More Like a Lesbian Unless I Was Picking Muff Hair Out of My Teeth" Hughes attacking the pro-choice march on Washington, equating pro-choice Americans with al-Qaeda. And it's not to even get into the way the Bushkoviks sent out the flying monkeys against Richard Clarke. And Bush? Just hides and smirks and studies his lines for his meeting with the 9/11 Commission. And gives speeches on fuck-all he knows nothing about, like broadband taxation, acting like he's above it all when, in reality, this is a cesspool of his own shit. (Brief pause here: over a hundred Americans dead in Iraq this month over oil, and Bush is on the road talking about givin' over a billion dollars in research for hydrogen fuel? Sometimes you just gotta shake your head until your neck snaps.)

But, of all things, they had to attack Kerry on his military record and his support of defense. So Kerry and others are now busily spanking the President's ass. It's something all spoiled rich kids need to have happen every once in a while. A good yank down the knickers in front of the class bare ass-smacking. Kerry has ditched his reticence on criticizing Bush's military record now and then, saying on Hardball last night that, essentially, Bush is a duty-abandoning little liar who doesn't give a good goddamn about the people in the military. Wesley Clark takes the riding crop to Bush's lotioned cheeks in a New York Times editorial today, pimpslapping the Republican slime machine (which is a phrase that should be used copiously) and givin' props to Kerry.

Meanwhile, the retro-cool nuevo Vietnam keeps gettin' closer and closer to going over the edge into complete oblivion. The Marines are ready to flatten Fallujah. Najaf is just seconds away from being all-out chaos, and the wonderful little uprising that'll explode when that happens will make for a great movie in a couple of years. It's just super that a new generation is starting to get to understand what it's like to see dead Americans shipped back to the U.S. like so many bins of flag-covered cargo.

You wanna know why Vietnam is a campaign issue? It's because of the children. There's a wonderful line from a Simpsons episode a few years back when Lisa talks about Gen Xers and Bart says, "We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little." Now the children will know what it means to know people who were sent overseas to fight for who the fuck knows what, only to be killed. And once Najaf and Fallujah blow up, it's just a matter of time before the soldiers who have been kept there for far, far too long tours of duty begin to crack and start raping the women and cutting off the ears of the "enemy." And maybe someone will be brave enough to come back from the 'Raq (as we should start calling it) and witness to us about the horrors we perpetrated in the name of "democracy." Man, then we'll get that crazy 'Nam feeling again back in the U.S. A., and all its attendant homelessness, suicide, alcoholism, and disillusionment with a government that lied to its young people about more than intern kooz.

At least Lyndon Johnson had the good sense to walk away from the Presidency when he realized how badly he had fucked it up. From a 1998 essay by Doris Kearns Goodwin on the last real Texan in the White House: "By July 1965 it was clear that he either had to escalate our commitment or gradually withdraw. He decided, of course, to escalate, to commit hundreds of thousands of troops and millions of dollars . . . keeping from Congress and the public the very pessimistic estimates about how much time and manpower it would take to win the war. . . [H]e didn't trust the American people or the Congress to support him if the full scope of the war were understood. . . Of course, a leader cannot break trust. It's a disastrous decision in any institution, but particularly when lives are at risk. In his speeches Johnson kept promising that there was light at the end of the tunnel -- a promise that proved fatal when he was unable to keep his word. The public was not prepared for the long and difficult war that emerged, and Johnson's credibility was destroyed. . . In the end, his greatest enemy was not his political or military adversaries, but his own arrogance." No, no. We're not in a new Vietnam. We're in the eternal spiral of failing to learn from history.