To Hold Bush Accountable for the Iraq War, the Democrats Should Listen to Richard Nixon

[babylonsister]

Thom Hartmann sent this clip to Buzzflash; please go to this link to listen. Every Congress critter should be required to hear this and learn from the past. Just click on the 'play' arrow:

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/282

To Hold Bush Accountable for the Iraq War, the Democrats Should Listen to Richard Nixon
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sun, 09/09/2007 - 8:02pm.

* Play:
* Artist: Richard Nixon
* Title: Lyndon Johnson Has Been a Failed War Leader
* Length: 1:04 minutes (501.47 KB)
* Format: MP3 Mono 44kHz 64Kbps (CBR)

We were listening to the Thom Hartmann Show on Air America on Friday, September 7, and were blown away when he played this tape of Richard Nixon at the 1968 Republican Convention speaking about Lyndon Johnson's failed Vietnam War.

It was a mind-boggling moment as we listened to the excerpt, because Nixon defined Johnson's losing effort in the way that the Democrats should be doing with Bush.

Do the Democratic leaders on the Hill have anything to learn from Richard Nixon? We'd be the last to think so, until we heard this tape.

We asked Thom Hartmann to write us a note setting up the short clip:

"An unpopular president was prosecuting an unpopular war, which was despised by more than half the American people. His political opponent knew that the best way to take him down - and ultimately to take down his entire Party - was to simply say out loud what everybody knew to be true. To call out the President. To declare him and his war a failure. To call on the American people for truth and honesty in government, and an end to war. Here's a quick clip composite, sent along to us by a listener (I'm sorry, I don't remember whom) a year or so ago, of Richard Nixon at the 1968 Republican National Convention..."

-- Thom Hartmann in an e-mail to BuzzFlash

You must take a listen to this Nixon 1968 GOP Convention statement on Johnson's failure as a war leader. You simply must.

(Click play -- the arrow -- at the top of this page, make sure your volume is turned on and up, and wait a few seconds. Of course, Nixon lied about his "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War and expanded it into even more of a debacle, including precipitating the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia as a result of Kissenger's rogue bombing of that nation. But that's another story.)

[Dr.Phool]

1. You just beat me to it. I'll delete my post.

[babylonsister]

2. We posted at 'exactly' the same time! Sorry, Doc!

:hi: Great minds... That little speech gave me goosebumps. Never thought Nixon could do that.

[stillcool]

3. how does that saying go?

the more things change..the more they stay the same...

excerpts from the book
War Made Easy
How presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death
by Norman Solomon
John Wiley and Sons, 2005, paper
p39
On April 25, 1972, the White House taping recorded this noontime dialogue among President Nixon, White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, and Henry Kissinger
President: "How many did we kill in Laos?"
Ziegler: "Maybe ten thousand-fifteen?"
Kissinger: "In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen. . .
President: "See, the attack in the North that we have in mind... power plants, whatever's left-POL , the docks .... And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?"
Kissinger: "About two hundred thousand people."
President: "No, no, no... I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have ' you got that, Henry?"
Kissinger: "That, I think, would just be too much."
President: "The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? ... I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes."

Nine days later, while conferring with Kissinger, Al Haig, and John Connally, the president said:
"I'll see that the United States does not lose. I'm putting it quite bluntly. I'll be quite precise. South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose. Which means, basically, I have made the decision. Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam .... For once, we've got to use the maximum power of this country ... against this shit-ass little country: to win the war...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Norman_Solomon/War_Made_Easy.html

excerpted from the book
Intervention and Revolution
The United States in the Third World
by Richard J. Barnet
World Publishing, 1968, paperback edition

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Insurgency_Revolution...
p205
In Vietnam the U.S. intervention steadily deepened in the 1950s as U.S. officials tried to protect their earlier investments. These investments included not only the vast sums of prior years but also their personal reputations. Men had begun to build careers on a series of claims. Academic advisers had written in journals about the success of the Land Reform or the Education Projects. The volunteer propagandists had gone far out on several limbs in predicting the coming triumph of Diem's democracy. The military had filled the pages of the military journals with extravagant promises of the successes of "counterinsurgency." Thus they pressed continually for more effort, more commitment, to make these promises come true. They kept demanding just a few more men, just a few more months, in order to postpone the accounting which would measure performance against promise.

[msongs]

4. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - email it to all the dems in congress!

wonder if there is a way to get this video with pictures on youtube?

msongs

[babylonsister]

5. .