Good old' bomb 'em into the Stone Age Curtis LeMay or presumed Republican nominee John McCain. Most always flyboys are volunteer officers, with cool leather jackets and silk scarves, who fly 30,000 above the death and destruction they deal out to the poor humans unlucky enough to fall under Rolling Thunder, then jetting back to the carrier for a rare steak and some aged single malt in the Officer's mess. So what's a little bit of torture . . . they look like ants to the Air Force.

Back to McCain: McCain volunteered to participate in the coordinated bombing of civilian targets in Vietnam. The US dropped more ordnance on 'Nam than we dropped on Germany and Japan combined in WWII. There were 21,000,000 bomb craters left in South Vietnam, breeding malaria and destroying rice paddies.

And the Vietnamese sin . . . to call such havoc upon themselves . . . they had the nerve to get upset when John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles convinced Eisenhower to cancel the scheduled elections in Nam in 1956, because the knew that Ho Chi Minh would get 80% of the vote.

The Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh, were our allies during WWII fighting the Japanese, while their French colonial overlords didn't fight against Japan after their surrender to Germany.

After Japan's defeat, the Vietnamese thought they had gained their freedom. Instead, we let the French back in to assume colonial occupation of "French Indo-China".

The Viet Minh went to war against their occupiers, just as the Untied States did against George III, and soundly defeated the French forces at Dien Ben Phu in 1954. The peace talks at Geneva resulted in a treaty that Vietnam would be temporarily partitioned until a full, free election in 1956.

The government of South Vietnam was Catholic, in spite of the fact that Catholics represented 3% of the population (Buddhist were the other 97%). The government of South Vietnam was never more than a puppet of the former French colonialists and the later American puppetmasters, the Dulles boys: John Foster, Sec. of State and Allen, head of the CIA.

In 1956, John Foster and Allen Dulles convinced Eisenhower to cancel the elections in Vietnam, because Ho Chi Minh would have received 80+% of the votes. Sound familiar? It should.

In 1953, the same Dulles boys engineered the overthrow of the popularly elected Mossadegh government, replacing a moderate secular government with a monarch on a Peacock Throne, complete with secret police (SAVAK) trained by Norm Schwartzkopf senior.

Which is, of course, why Iran still doesn't trust the United States. And who can blame them.

If you asked John McCain why he was fighting in Viet Nam, the stupid old fool STILL couldn't explain how the US got there, and why the Vietnamese would have never stopped fighting for their freedom. They fought China for 1,000 years before driving them out.

The only reason Vietnam was at war was because we refused to allow a free election in 1956. Because, according to Dwight D. Eisenhower, we KNEW that Ho Chi Minh would get 80% of the vote. So we canceled the election we had promised to allow in a peace treaty.

Earth to Idiots: We were the BAD GUYS in Vietnam. We were the guys supporting a colonialist-created puppet government.

Eisenhower was personally an okay guy. The Dulles boys were not. They were Standard Oil lawyers who represented Standard agaisnt the US government when assets were seized because Standard allowed the Luftwaffe to use their tetraethyl lead all during WWII. Ditto for the Nazi-supporting Bush/Walker clan. They were up to their waists in Nazis.

And they convinced or conned Eisenhower into allowing our meddling in Central America, Iran and Vietnam.

The "government" you talk about in Vietnam was Catholic from the top down. Catholics never represented more than 3% of the population. To assert that the S. Vietnamese government was anything but a colonial puppet is absurd.

The other abused canard was the Domino theory, but in order to buy into that you had to ignore the 1,000 year history the Vietnamese had of resisting Chinese hegemony.

Finally, in 1954, when the French were losing, VP Nixon offered them nuclear weapons to use in Vietnam. The French looked at him as if he were a madman. Probably true. SUre, at any time we could have nuked Vietnam and "won". So fucking what. We dropped twice as much ordnance on Vietnam as we did on Germany and Japan combined.

And had we NOT made a major war, there is no way to predict the loss of life that happened when we left would have happened. In other words, the US was a rogue nation and the entire war was a war crime.

They're BOTH DOA. Can't we just cut to the chase and get this over with.

and go to some foreign shithole like Russia or China, where the State will protect you from the terrorists. Only gutless chickenshits depend upon the State to protect them.

Patrick Henry said it best: Give me liberty, or give me Death.

You, and Bush, and McCain, and Rumsfeld and Cheney and all the other cowardly thugs have a totally different motto: Don't let them hurt me, please, I'll do anything, just don't let them hurt me.

I understand they have been donating heavily to representatives and senators to pass retroactive CISA (Carjacker Into Stealing Autos) immunity for carjacking Lincoln Navigators and Cadillac Escalades, since insurance companies actually wind up pay for them anyway.

Otherwise, do you think Richard Nixon would have needed Gerald Ford to do his dirty work for him?