07.18.09

Walter Cronkite, R.I.P.

Posted in Culture, My Other Thrill-Packed Site at 2:32 pm by Administrator

I may have some observations and reflections to fold into various streams of thought as time goes on, but for now, I think Ed Driscoll at Pajamas Media, and the various people he quotes, sums up my initial response.

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5 Comments »

  1. Mr. Dings said,

    July 19, 2009 at 1:11 am

    Kennedy planned to withdraw from ‘Nam 5 years before Cronkite’s broadcast. I could watch the news with the sound turned off to know, in ‘68, that this was no country for young men to go to, at least believing that they were defending our freedom here (that was the task of the boot camp brainwashing). We were a Huntley-Brinkley family anyway. Why didn’t they just drop more bombs, defoliate more forests while they had the chance? So we should simply listen to military reportage and forget the fourth estate then?

    http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/1963_Vietnam_Withdrawal_Plans

    “The controversy surrounds the fact that military reporting of the war effort in 1963 was decidedly rosy, and Kennedy made statements indicating that the positive outlook made withdrawal possible…. John Newman’s landmark 1991 book JFK & Vietnam argues that Kennedy knew that the military reporting was skewed, and intended to withdraw anyway. Other analyses by Peter Dale Scott and James Galbraith (son of Kennedy advisor John Kenneth Galbraith), and recent books including one by no less than Robert McNamara himself, support this view. On the other side are many Vietnam historians and also social critic Noam Chomsky, whose Rethinking Camelot is largely a rebuttal of this view.

  2. Mr. Dings said,

    July 19, 2009 at 1:15 am

    Blaming the likes of Cronkite and Jane Fonda for the failure of the Viet Nam war is actually rather pitiable. Don’t forget that they were drafting our asses out of high school to go over there to kill gooks for freedom.

  3. Bentnotesmanhisself said,

    July 19, 2009 at 3:40 am

    And that has what to do with what? Millions of young American men got drafted in World War II as well.

    Jane Fonda went over there and put a lot of those draftees’ asses in mortal danger. No less a figure than General Giap himself said the media and popular culture influence on American public sentiment was an immense help to the Communist cause.

  4. Mr. Dings said,

    July 19, 2009 at 11:51 am

    http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks24aug24,1,7610339.column

    For most Americans, the lessons of Vietnam were reasonably clear before we invaded Iraq and have been painfully reinforced by the ongoing disaster there: Don’t fight needless wars; don’t go blundering around in countries where you don’t know the language, history or culture; don’t underestimate the power of nationalism, ethnicity and religion to bind together — or tear apart — people whose interests otherwise seem to diverge or converge; and, most of all, don’t imagine that military force can solve fundamentally political problems.

  5. Mr. Dings said,

    July 19, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    Think about how much more powerful than bombs two boobies were.

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