GlennGreenwald:

"As he (Chomsky) has pointed out, when you have a message that is something other than conventional wisdom being said over and over, then it's impossible to express the message in a persuasive way using very few words. Those who espouse conventional wisdom need not offer evidence or articulate their premises, because it's all just assumed. Only those who challenge that wisdom are required to do so, which makes that message one that, by definition, can't be accommodated on television."

Chomsky somewhat ruefully calls his necessary style a lack of 'concision'. When one is simultaneously correcting the received historical record, based on his own painstaking (and heroic, when you think about it) study, bite-sized nuggets are really not possible. Education is the key to his content and style. Sigh...

As with your own excellent work at shaping the debate and the record.

Note To Myself. (from memory. I may be paraphrasing some. Get the gist?)

`

If it were not for the cold and bleakness of winter, the warmth and splendor of Spring would never be. Misfortunes steel and temper one, and even more so strengthen a person's resolve.

`

Read : Ho Chi Minh's 'Prison Poems' They are beautiful poems of a patriot who loved the peasant's and The Motherland.

Why remain obtuse and kill?

At the Hotel Hilton Hotel. In the prison shower, McCain gets jittery.

He senses the Spirts of the dead are watching in a disembodied form.

The departed dead may roam the Earth seeking subtle and tricky vengeance.

It's recorded that the dead spirits prowl. That's why McCain is bona fide insane.

Arne? Do you need a jail room bunk partner? Elope! Hurry Langsetmo. It's Legit. You got the scoop.

We're "eloping" as fast as we can. Trolls can expect a hiatus at the end of June through the 8th of July; they're free to roam (click my sig for what to expect).

Then I'll be back, recharged, and with a vengeance, and hopefully some great ornate ghost pipefish:

http://tinyurl.com/6hcs9w

and mandarinfish:

http://tinyurl.com/59cnov

pictures of my own for my Friday Fishblogging....

Cheers,

What a despicable, hypocritical prick McCain is to expect sympathy for the sacrifices he made during his service when he doesn't extend that to other servicemen (and women) who paid with their lives. McCain's callous, insensitive 2000 claim that 52,000 American casualties through '68 in Vietnam was not "exorbitant" shows once and for all that he is not even worthy of respect for his time as a POW. Not if he himself hasn't learned any lessons from that time.

When McCain himself could have been one of those casualties, yet regards them only in some tactical, impersonal, cavalier way as to believe the number is not exorbitant, he has no longer earned my regard for even that part of his past that seemed like a great sacrifice. It's shocking that his experience in captivity would not permanently brand empathy for fellow troops into his brain. This attitude even extends itself to today, even in the midst of the campaign, with his opposition to a new G.I. Bill. It even makes me start to wonder whether the farthest fringe of McCain's critics, who allege that he became a turncoat in captivity to save his ass, may actually be on to something.

For McCain, POW apparently now stands for Passionate, Obsessive Warmonger.

"Four score and seven years ago"?

That would be 1921.

The myth is older than that, and older than Wagner's re-telling.

The myth is eternal.

Yeah, I know, but give me some poetic license. But that is around the time of that one infamous Dolchstoßlegende. From the link at my sig:

"The legend echoed the epic poem Nibelungenlied in which the dragon-slaying hero Siegfried is stabbed in the back by Hagen von Tronje. Der Dolchstoß is cited as an important factor in Adolf Hitler's later rise to power, as the Nazi Party grew its original political base largely from embittered World War I veterans, and those who were sympathetic to the Dolchstoß interpretation of Germany's then-recent history."

http://www.ford.utexas.edu/library/exhibits/vietnam/750512b.htm

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL MEMORANDUM 3173-X

SECRET / SENSITIVE / EYES ONLY

May 12, 1975

MEMORANDUM FOR: THE PRESIDENT

FROM: HENRY A. KISSINGER

SUBJECT: Lessons of Vietnam

A frequent temptation of many commentators has been to draw conclusions regarding the tenacity of the American people and the ultimate failure of our will. But I question whether we can accept that conclusion. It was the longest war in American history, the most distant, the least obviously relevant to our nation's immediate concerns, and yet the American people supported our involvement and its general objectives to the very end. The people made enormous sacrifices. I am convinced that, even at the end, they would have been prepared to support a policy that would have saved South Vietnam if such an option had been available to use.

- - Henry Kissinger, May 12, 1975

But no one was talking about crushing the will of the North Vietnamese people. Vietnam was about defending one nation (South Vietnam) from an insurgency (the Viet Cong) being supported by the military of another nation (the North Vietnamese army).

Ummm, there was one nation: Vietnam.

There had never been any talk of invading North Vietnam or of subjugating that nation's people....

OIC. We only intended to subjugate the southernhalf of the country. I feel much better.

... The bombing campaign in the north (and in Laos) was purely military in intent; to deny military support to the Viet Cong and NVA.

You miss the point. McCain seems to be friendly to the notion that hitting the few hard targets in an agrarian country (and defoliating, napalming, and carpet-bombing ox-cart paths) was not enough; we should have been harder on them....

The stabbed-in-the-back narrative does work in a certain way, since the U.S. military was not allowed to do what they thought necessary to win the war in the south, an important distinction....

What? Nuke them?

... In fact, the U.S. and South Vietnamese didn't have to really "win" anything; all they had to do was not lose....

Nonsense. Without the U.S., Diem/Ky/Thieu or whoever was doomed. And with U.S. support, we'd just send more American kids to the meatgrinder.

... But thanks to the Congress's refusal to honor agreements for military support, particularly air support, when North Vietnam invaded in spring 1975, and President Ford's feckless giving-in to that betrayal, does indeed paint a neat stabbed-in-the-back scenario.

For historical eedjits like you. Go read Stephen Kinzer's "Overthrow" for some enlightenment.

Cheers,